ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the literary aspect of Chinese military culture in the Tang. It examines how wars, frontier wars in particular, were seen represented in the High Tang frontier poems; and analyses the dynamic interaction between wen and wu in frontier poems, which reflected the general attitude of the society towards the military, and consequently influenced the literati's career choices and paths. The wen-wu dyad is a useful Chinese conceptual framework that can be deployed to discuss the dynamics of the Tang military culture in terms of the poetic representation of war in the High Tang that valued the military, praised military campaigns and raised the status of a military career. The chapter explores how the meaning of war was understood and constructed by the intellectual elite through their literary creations. For the High Tang poets, their frontier poems were not only a way of relating war, but also a means of constructing the meaning of it.
