How Three Hundred Tang Poems defined “Chinese Poetry” across the World

The Eide Center is excited to host a lecture by Thomas Mazanec, Associate Professor of Premodern Chinese and Comparative Literature at UC Santa Barbara. Professor Mazanec will be discussing the Three Hundred Tang Poems anthology, and how this important work shaped the world’s reception of classical Chinese poetry.

Few books have shaped the modern reception of Tang poetry—and classical Chinese poetry more generally—more than Three Hundred Tang Poems (Tangshi sanbai shou 唐詩三百首). Since its compilation in 1764 by the schoolteacher Sun Zhu and his wife Xu Lanying, the anthology has been practically synonymous with the Tang poetic canon. The text has been republished in hundreds, if not thousands, of annotated editions.

If world literature is writing that crosses borders, then Three Hundred Tang Poems fits the bill, perhaps more than any other anthology of Chinese poetry. This presentation, based on the introduction to my new translation of Three Hundred Tang Poems, aims to recount the reception history of this famous anthology. It will do this in two ways: first, I will compare Three Hundred Tang Poems to other well-known anthologies of Tang poetry and demonstrate how it is the product of a specific anthologization culture, with pedagogical aims, that had reached a heyday in the late 18th century. Second, I will examine the use of Three Hundred Tang Poems in educational contexts in the twentieth century, in both Chinese- and foreign-language settings. To do so, I will gather translations of Three Hundred Tang Poems into a variety of languages (modern Chinese, Japanese, English, French, Korean, Mongolian) and look at how its texts are used in textbooks of world literature and of classical Chinese poetry.

About the Speaker:

Thomas Mazanec is Associate Professor of Premodern Chinese and Comparative Literature at UC Santa Barbara. His publications cover a broad range of topics, from the evolution of a Sanskrit literary term in medieval China; to systems of monetary, religious, and literary debts; to the potential contributions of network analysis to literary history.

Prof. Mazanec’s first book, Poet-Monks: The Invention of Buddhist Poetry in Medieval China, was recently published by Cornell University Press. He is currently completing a new translation of Three Hundred Tang Poems, with selections from traditional commentary, for the Hsu-Tang Library of Classical Chinese Literature.

Host or Publisher Elling Eide Center