Sima Xiangru: A Staged Courtship, a Rhapsody of Nobodies —Memories of Hanshu Figures, No. 12

When the Hanshu describes the respect the magistrate of Linqiong showed Sima Xiangru, it uses one word: miu. The Tang commentator Yan Shigu glossed it bluntly: "Miu means deceit."

The banquet that ended with Zhuo Wenjun fleeing into the night began with a carefully rehearsed show of "respect."

1. Puppy

Sima Xiangru, courtesy name Changqing, came from Chengdu in Shu Commandery. His childhood name was Quanzi, "Puppy."

After he had studied books and swordsmanship, he came to admire Lin Xiangru of the Warring States and renamed himself Xiangru.

His family's wealth bought him a post at the court of Emperor Jing, where he served as a mounted attendant. It was not the work he wanted, and Emperor Jing had no taste for rhapsodies.

When King Xiao of Liang came to court, he brought a circle of wandering scholars: Zou Yang, Mei Sheng, Yan Ji. Xiangru took to them at once. He resigned on grounds of illness, went to Liang as a guest, stayed for several years, and wrote the Rhapsody of Sir Vacuous.

When King Xiao died, the scholars scattered. Xiangru returned to Chengdu, where his family was now too poor to make a living.

2. The Magistrate's Play

Wang Ji, magistrate of Linqiong, was an old friend. Wang told him: Changqing, you have spent years seeking office far from home without success. Come stay with me.

Xiangru took up lodging at the Linqiong guesthouse.

From then on Wang Ji called on him every morning, "feigning respect." At first Xiangru received him; later he claimed illness and had his attendants turn the magistrate away. Wang only grew more deferential.

All of it was staged for the people of Linqiong.

Linqiong had many rich men. Zhuo Wangsun kept eight hundred servants; Cheng Zheng kept several hundred. The two families conferred: the magistrate has an honored guest; we should give a banquet for him, and invite the magistrate too.

On the day of the feast, the Zhuo household had more than a hundred guests. At noon they sent for Sima Changqing. Changqing pleaded illness and said he could not come.

Magistrate Wang did not dare taste a bite before him and went in person to fetch him. Only then did Xiangru come, "having no choice."

"The whole company was overwhelmed." Everyone present was won over by his bearing.

3. One Piece, Then Another

When the drinking was at its height, Wang Ji carried a zither over to Xiangru: "I have heard that you are fond of this, Changqing. Please play for your own pleasure."

Xiangru demurred, then played one piece, and another.

The Hanshu then reveals the point of the whole performance. Zhuo Wangsun had a daughter, Wenjun, recently widowed and fond of music, "and so Xiangru, feigning mutual esteem with the magistrate, used the heart of the zither to stir her."

Xiangru and the magistrate pretended to hold each other in high regard precisely so that his music could reach her.

That day Xiangru arrived with carriage and attendants, relaxed and elegant, superbly composed. Wenjun watched him through a crack in the door. She was taken with him, and afraid she was not his equal.

After the banquet, Xiangru had someone give rich gifts to Wenjun's maid and asked her to convey his feelings.

That same night Wenjun slipped out of the house and ran to him. The two rode through the night back to Chengdu.

Later generations named the music "The Phoenix Seeks Its Mate" and even supplied lyrics: "Phoenix, O phoenix, returning to its home, roaming the four seas in search of its mate." But neither the Shiji nor the Hanshu gives a title, let alone words. Those one or two pieces have no name in the histories.

4. Four Walls

Only in Chengdu did Wenjun see the situation clearly: "his home was nothing but four standing walls."

Apart from the walls, there was nothing.

When Zhuo Wangsun learned his daughter had run off with a man, he was furious: "My daughter is worthless. I cannot bring myself to kill her, but she will not get a single coin!"

People tried to intercede; he would not listen.

As time went on, Wenjun was unhappy. She said to Xiangru: "Let us just go back to Linqiong together. If we borrow from my brothers, it will be enough to live on. Why suffer like this?"

5. The Honored Guest Washes Dishes

The two returned to Linqiong, sold their carriage and horses, and bought a wine shop.

Wenjun stood at the wine counter and served customers.

Xiangru put on a short pair of work breeches shaped like a calf's nose, mixed in with the hired hands, and washed wine vessels in the open street.

This was a public performance, harsher than the magistrate's.

A few months earlier he had been the honored guest whom the magistrate fetched in person and who dazzled the whole room. Now, in the very city where Zhuo Wangsun lived, he was washing dishes in the street, and the Zhuo family's daughter stood behind a wine counter in full public view.

Zhuo Wangsun was mortified and shut himself indoors.

His brothers and the elders took turns urging him: You have one son and two daughters; money is not what you lack. Wenjun has already given herself to Sima Changqing. Changqing is tired of chasing office; he is poor, but his talent is enough to rely on, and he is the magistrate's guest besides. Why humiliate him like this?

Zhuo Wangsun gave in. He gave Wenjun a hundred servants, a million cash, and the clothes, bedding, and goods of her first marriage.

The couple went back to Chengdu, bought land and a house, and became rich.

The story is often told as a clever genius forcing a snobbish father-in-law to back down. It makes a satisfying tale, but it hides several things. The idea of returning to Linqiong was Wenjun's, and it was Wenjun who stood in the most exposed place, at the wine counter. Xiangru's leverage was not only his writing but also the magistrate's prestige, his own labor, and his father-in-law's fear of public disgrace.

Then there is the question of where the Zhuo fortune came from. In the Qin and Han, Linqiong was one of the most important ironworking centers in Ba and Shu, and both the Zhuos and Cheng Zheng were iron magnates who had been moved there. Behind the hundred guests, the eight hundred servants, and the million cash stood the wealth of an industrial city.

6. Sir Vacuous and Master Nobody

What actually carried Xiangru into the palace was not the zither but the Rhapsody of Sir Vacuous.

Much later, a man of Shu named Yang Deyi served in the palace as keeper of the hounds, looking after the emperor's hunting dogs.

Emperor Wu read the Rhapsody of Sir Vacuous and was full of admiration: "Alas that I alone could not live in the same age as this man!"

Yang Deyi said: "Sima Xiangru, a man from my town, says he wrote this rhapsody."

The emperor was astonished and summoned him.

Xiangru said: "It is so. But it concerns only the affairs of feudal lords and is not worth reading. Allow me to write a rhapsody on the hunts of the Son of Heaven."

The emperor ordered the secretariat to give him brush and writing slips.

Xiangru created three characters: Sir Vacuous, meaning empty words; Master No-Such, meaning "there is no such thing"; and Lord Nobody, meaning "there is no such man." These three nonexistent men boast to one another of the parks of Chu, of Qi, and of the Son of Heaven, cataloguing mountains and rivers, plants, beasts, and chariots almost without end, and only in the final section bring the argument round to frugality.

The Chinese idiom zixu wuyou, "Sir Vacuous and Master No-Such," meaning something utterly made up, comes from this.

Three fictional men delivered a real author to the emperor's side.

7. Proclamations and a Final Scroll

Xiangru became a court gentleman and later went to the southwest as an envoy bearing the imperial tally.

Tang Meng was building roads in Ba and Shu, conscripting officials and laborers on a large scale and alarming the people. Xiangru was ordered to write the Proclamation to Ba and Shu, explaining the court's intentions to the population. He then wrote Rebutting the Elders of Shu, first voicing the objections of those opposed to opening the southwest and then answering them one by one.

A rhapsodist's brush could depict the splendor of imperial parks, and it could also organize language for an empire's roads, new commanderies, and expansion.

His career was not always bright. Someone accused him of taking bribes during his mission, and he lost his post. A little over a year later he was recalled as a court gentleman.

Ban Gu says he "stammered but excelled at writing," and that he suffered from the wasting-thirst illness. After marrying into the Zhuo family he was well off; in office he took little part in the affairs of the high ministers, often stayed home on grounds of illness, and did not covet rank.

Later he left office because of illness and lived at Maoling.

Emperor Wu said: Sima Xiangru is gravely ill. Send someone to fetch all his writings, or they will be lost. When the envoy Suo Zhong arrived, Xiangru was already dead, and there was not a single scroll in the house.

They asked his wife. She said: "Changqing never kept any writings. He wrote from time to time, and people would take them away. Before he died he wrote one scroll and said that if an envoy came asking for writings, it should be presented."

That last scroll was about the feng and shan sacrifices.

8. Whose Figure?

The Hanshu gives Sima Xiangru a long biography in two parts, copying out his rhapsodies and essays at length. Zhuo Wenjun's real role is concentrated in one short passage: she listens to the zither, flees at night, proposes returning to Linqiong, and takes her place at the wine counter. At every turning point, she is the one who moves.

Yet the biography bears Sima Xiangru's name. Once the couple grows rich, she almost vanishes from the main narrative, reappearing only at the very end as "his wife," answering the envoy.

Later generations would not accept her silence and kept filling it in, layer by layer. The Miscellanies of the Western Capital says that Xiangru wanted to take a woman of Maoling as a concubine, that Wenjun wrote the White-Head Lament to break with him, and that he then gave up the idea; ever since, the line "I wish for a single-hearted man, never to part until our hair is white" has been fastened to her. The two Zither Songs attributed to Sima Xiangru, for their part, gave the one or two nameless pieces at Linqiong the lyrics of the phoenix seeking its mate.

None of this appears in the Shiji or the Hanshu. These additions show what kind of Zhuo Wenjun and Sima Xiangru later readers needed; they cannot show that any of it actually happened on some day in the Western Han.

9. Coda

At the end of the biography Ban Gu relays a debate. Sima Qian held that although Xiangru's rhapsodies were full of empty and extravagant words, in the end they led toward frugality, no different from the admonitions of the Classic of Poetry. Yang Xiong disagreed: there was far too much ornament and far too little admonition, "like galloping through the music of Zheng and Wey and playing a proper court air only when the piece is over. Is that not mere play?"

The remark fits Sima Xiangru's romantic fame as well.

Over two thousand years, the zither, the phoenix, the night flight, the wine counter, and the white hair have been layered into one ornate melody. It is so beautiful that it buries everything beneath it: the magistrate's word miu, the Zhuo family's iron workshops, the eight hundred servants, the decisions Wenjun made herself, and the late dates of those poems.

What was played at the Linqiong banquet, we do not know.

We know only that before the zither sounded, the magistrate had already spent days acting out a play with him. And the woman who watched him through a crack in the door later walked out of that door on her own, and on her own took her place behind the wine counter.