Shanglin Fu

Han Fu. Written by Sima Xiangru. The biography of Sima Xiangru in "Historical Records" and "Hanshu" connected "Zixu Fu" and "Shanglin Fu" into one volume. Xiao Tong of the Liang Dynasty in the Southern Dynasty compiled "Selected Works", which was initially divided into two parts. "Zixu Fu" is included in volume 7, and "Shanglin Fu" is included in volume 8. According to "Miscellaneous Notes of Xijing", when Sima Xiangru wrote this poem, "the meaning was scattered and no longer related to foreign affairs. It controlled the heaven and earth, intertwined the past and the present, suddenly fell asleep, jumped up and became active, and it took hundreds of days to complete." You can see the pain in its conception. "Shanglin Fu" and "Zixu Fu" are both representative works of Han fu, and their content is inherited from "Zixu Fu". When Zixu and Wu You praised each other about Chu and Qi, Duke Sui, as the representative of the emperor, affirmed the principle that the princes should pay tribute and report their duties, and also tried his best to exaggerate the vastness of the emperor's Shanglin Garden and the magnificence of the emperor's hunting. Then, with a sudden change of writing, he narrates that the emperor suddenly realized the "great luxury" and ordered "to stop hunting after being drunk", which made Zixu and Wuyou "changed in surprise" and repented. Liu Xie once said: "Xiang is like "Shanglin", and the variety is complex to create beauty." ("Wen Xin Diao Long·An Fu") and Wang Shizhen of the Ming Dynasty said in his "Yiyuan Zhi Yan" that Sima Xiang's poems are "extremely rich in material, extremely beautiful in diction, extremely elegant in brushwork, extremely fluid in spirit, and extremely high in meaning, so it is unattainable." The original biographies of "Historical Records" and "Hanshu" indicate that because Sima Xiangru wrote "Zixu Fu" in Liangdi and was summoned by Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, he "asked him to write a poem for the emperor's hunting expedition" and presented it with "Shanglin Fu". Therefore, these two poems are generally regarded as a continuation and are often discussed together.