Poetry
Bạch Đằng giang phú
Not translated into English
Trương Hán Siêu · 1340
Synopsis
A traveller who has roamed the rivers of China reaches the Bạch Đằng and finds there only reeds and empty banks, where nothing tells what happened there. Old men of the place come up and tell him of the battle: the stakes planted in the riverbed, the ebbing tide, the enemy fleet caught in the trap. He listens to them, looks differently at what he had before his eyes, and the piece ends with two songs.
Context
The genre calls for a dialogue: a traveller who has seen everything, elders who know, and two songs to close. The date is an estimate, the text bearing no year; it is placed some fifty years after the victory, in the lifetime of an author who had served the victor. The lesson is deferred to the last line: if the enemy was destroyed, it was not the river that did it, but the virtue of men, which is the expected Confucian formula and the opposite of a eulogy of the place.
Who it is for
Short, written in classical Chinese and read today in established versions. It assumes knowledge of what was played out on this river in 1288 and of the conventions of scholarly dialogue.
Prizes and reception
The most famous of the Vietnamese phú, on the lycée syllabus, and the piece through which the Bạch Đằng river entered the national memory.