This chapter was unexpectedly hard - poetry often is, but this time it was poetry that hasn’t been translated into English fully, and quite a complicated one at that. I admittedly did not expect that when I promised to try and post two chapters at once a month ago…

The song in the second half of the chapter is an excerpt from Luo Binwang’s The Imperial Capital, a somewhat well-known example of the genre of capital poems.

Luo Binwang and Wu Zetian had… a history. He used to hold an official position in Chang’an, but criticized Wu Zetian quite a bit and was eventually demoted and sent away from the capital (that was in 684, before Wu Zetian was crowned Emperor and moved the capital to Luoyang). After that, he wrote a particularly scathing declaration against her as part of a resistance against her rule (It starts with “The wrongfully ruling Lady Wu has a disagreeable temper and a dishonorable ancestry,” and kind of goes downhill from there; it’s quite an interesting piece the translation to which you can find in Luo Binwang’s wikipedia article).

Luo Binwang was killed in the resistance, but Wu Zetian was both rather amused by the aforementioned declaration and impressed by his other work, so she was the one who ordered for his writings to be published.

After making the translation, I still had to cut it down to fit into the speech bubbles, but here is a rough full version of these lines with an equally rough commentary (take it with a slight grain of salt - I’m hardly an expert):

In summer mornings, the wine gourds fill the air with hundreds of smells, In autumn nights, exquisite lanterns are dimly lit.

(The commentaries seem to agree that these lines refers to singing, dancing and indulging in the illusion of pleasure-seeking; I’ll take their word for it)

Emerald green curtains do not shine alone, The voice and the zither depend on one another.

Zither here is actually a se - a 25- or 16-stringed instrument similar to a zither. The curtains need lanterns to bring out the color, same as music is most pleasant when there is both a voice and a musical instrument.

Remembering thirty-six thousand days of being right, Rather than knowing the mistakes of the past forty-nine years.

This one’s trickier. 36000 days is roughly 100 years, a human lifetime; 49 years of mistakes is a reference to Zang Boyu - a Wei state minister, who is famous for saying how at 50 years old he remembered the mistakes of the past 49 years. I can’t quite figure out if it’s meant to be praise or admonishment; it looks like this poem in general somewhat struggles with conveying clearly if it’s praising or condemning the kind of things it’s describing. For some more information, I will have to send you to The Poetry of the Early Tang by Stephen Owen - it’s an old book, but it seems to still be held in high regard by modern researchers.

Since ancient times glory and fame were like floating clouds, You cannot split off the highs and lows of human life.

And that’s the passage I can’t take credit for! Kept Owen’s translation here since he provided it in his book, these lines seem self-explanatory.

“I established the dynasty” - while Wu Zetian’s official rule is generally viewed in the context of the Tang dynasty, reminder that she technically established her own Zhou dynasty of which she is the only ruler.