Yuefu Poetry - War as a Theme in Early Popular Chinese Poetry

This episode first discusses the functions of the Han Music Bureau and the yuefu poetry as a poetic genre. It points out the fact that we still don’t know if the Bureau really collected these songs from various regions and matched them with music. Many of the popular poems we now call “Han yuefu” are actually preserved in the History of the Liu Song Dynasty written in the sixth century. The second part focuses on analyzing the yuefu poem entitled, “We Fought South of the Walls” from different angles. Guest host: Jui-lung Su, National University of Singapore