ABSTRACT
The drift of history into legend was already underway in the generation immediately following the An Lu-shan rebellion. There are over a hundred extant poems, both shih and fu, on different aspects of this topic, dating from the late eighth century to the end of the dynasty. Poems explicitly dealing with historical themes cannot help but involve the reader in issues beyond those of verbal artistry and literary appreciation. The furnishing of a self-commentary to a long poem was a practice that some writers were beginning to exploit occasionally in the first half of the ninth century. Very few of the comments are simple scholia merely meant to identify potentially unfamiliar terms or names. Cheng Ch’u-hui’s work seems to have been well received. Works like “The Chin-yang Gate” and the anecdotal histories it resembles force the reader to examine not only the particular past being evoked, but also our approach to the past itself.
