‘Quant a moi, je dis que…(le lotus) est le symbole…de l’homme de bien’ (the ‘the Superior Man’)

One recurring image is the lotus in the well of jade, a fairly obvious allusion to intercourse. Hán Yù (768-824), the Táng dynasty poet, wrote the seminal quatrain on this theme:

(Quán 1960:3789)

to which Mạc Chi (−1346) devoted a phú, ‘prose poem’, the Ngọc liên phú (Anthologie 1972:95 sqq.). Since then the topic was a favourite of Vietnamese scholastic literature (Daudin 1974:18 sqq.). Two examples from the thi tập are

Trãi’s (1380-1442):

(Thanh-lãng 1969:223)