The Games We Play: Poetry Composition at Early Medieval Chinese Court Banquets
In early medieval China, the third day of the third lunar month was the occasion for a springtime festival of purification that became closely associated with the activity of writing poetry. Over the course of the Six Dynasties period (220–581 CE), this festival became an important, and highly contested, court observance. Conflicting accounts of the origins of the festival appear in the Tang encyclopedia Classified Extracts from Literature (Yiwen leiju). Critically examining these accounts brings to light the organizational strategies and choices that produced a prescriptive definition of the Third Day festival as an occasion that affirmed the hierarchical relationship between courtier and ruler. In this way, engaging with medieval attempts to efface, defuse, and disavow the contradictory elements in this festival provides insight into the significance of imperial literary gatherings in this turbulent era.
Kay Duffy is Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. She is a scholar of premodern sinitic literatures whose research interests include the poetics, historiographies, and court cultures of the premodern sinographic sphere. Her current research project examines the composition and presentation of literary texts at court banquets held in observance of recurring seasonal festivals in order to explore the negotiation in poetry of the social and political instability of the early medieval period of disunion (roughly 200 CE to 600 CE). Her research has been supported by the Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowships Program, the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, and the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University.