National Treasures & Important Cultural Properties
of National Institutes for Cultural Heritage, Japan

This scroll, which contains an anthology of Chinese poems from the Tang dynasty, has lost both its ends, leaving its original title a mystery to us. The authors of the poems were poets and officials from around the seventh to the early ninth century, during the early to mid-Tang dynasty. A total of twenty-seven poems survive in this fragment, composed by poets like Li Jiayou, Su Weidao, Cui Tong, Zhang Shuo, Meng Haoran, Lang Shiyuan, among others. Most of these works revolve around Buddhist temples.

Around ten of these poems also appear in the Complete Anthology of Tang Poetry (Quan Tang shi), which was compiled by imperial order of Qing-dynasty emperor Kangxi (1654–1722). However, there are differences between the versions of the poems as recorded in the two works, such as the presence of variant characters. In particular, this fragment contains a category of characters known as “Zetian Characters,” which are glyphs introduced to the Chinese script by Tang Empress Wu Zetian (624–705) during her reign. Based on the style of calligraphy used, scholars have estimated that this copy of the anthology was created sometime in the mid-ninth to early tenth century, during the late Tang dynasty. Unfortunately, the full anthology itself seems to have been lost in Chinese literary history.

Interestingly, this scroll also contains another poetry anthology written on its back: the Changqing Anthology of Bai (Bai shi changqing ji). This is a collection of poems by Bai Juyi, a Tang Chinese poet who had greatly influenced Japanese literature during the Heian period (8th–12th century). According to records, his Changqing Anthology had come to Japan in 838. In other words, we can deduce that sometime after the now-fragmented Chinese poetry anthology had come to Japan, someone had treated it as waste paper and used it to copy out Bai’s anthology instead. Since Bai’s anthology was inscribed in a style reminiscent of Fujiwara no Yukinari (972–1027), one of the three most famous Heian-period calligraphers, it may have been copied in the tenth to eleventh century, during the mid-Heian period. Notably, this copy of the Changqing Anthology contains many differences from widely circulated editions, making it an important source for scholars trying to rediscover what the original anthology may have looked like.