The literary image of imperial Consort Yang during the Ming dynasty = Yang gui fei zai Ming dai wen xue zhong de xing xiang

Abstract

Imperial Consort Yang (719-756) was the most favored imperial consort of Li Longji (685–762, also known as Emperor Tang Xuanzong, reigned 712–756). Yang lived during the most prosperous period of the Tang Dynasty, but was killed in the “Ma-Wei Incident” at the age of thirty-eight. Descriptions of her life are vague and often contradictory in official histories. Yet her love story with Li Longji sparked a rich corpus of literary works and continued to be a popular literary theme until the late imperial period. These works are generally referred to as “Li-Yang literature” in recent studies. Yang’s literary image within these works varied across great expanses of time. Some scholars believed that it was the sketchy accounts about her in official histories that left room for literary imagination. Although many scholars have examined the literary image of Yang in some splendid “Li-Yang literature” such as “The song of Everlasting Regard” of the Tang Dynasty and “The Palace of Eternal Life” of the Qing Dynasty, to date little attention has been given to the respective literary works in the Ming Dynasty. This thesis therefore aims to bring together and examine these works and hence to explore her portrayal during this period. This thesis is divided into three chapters, each of which highlights a particular aspect of Yang’s literary images that emerged during the Ming period. First, I discuss some writers’ fascination with her teeth disease, her tiny feet, and her socks. Second, I examine why some writers tended to portray her as a jealous wife and at the same time promoted the concept of karmic retribution. Finally, I explore how others included Taoist elements into their works and expressed their views on philosophical thoughts and the development of theatrical theory via modifying Yang’s image as a ghost. I argue that these characteristics did not appear in the works of previous dynasties because they were created within the specific cultural, ideological, and legal contexts of the Ming Dynasty. I also propose that these newly-emerging features of Yang’s literary image had a crucial impact on the “Li-Yang literature” of the ensuing times. Through this work, some rarely known “Li-Yang Literature” of the Ming Dynasty has been collected and analyzed. The research highlights the importance of this period as the turning point in terms of the development of “Li-Yang Literature”, and its innovative findings can enlighten future studies in this field.