岳飛〔滿江紅〕詞考辨

Abstract

The "Man-chiang-hung" tz'u (song words) under discussion has been attributed to the Sung general Yüeh Fei for several hundred years. Full of patriotic sentiments, this tz'u has exerted considerable influence upon the Chinese people, especially during the time of their resistance against foreign invasions. As a patriotic poem, it deserves high esteem. The attribution of the authorship to Yüeh Fei, however, is unreliable. In his Ssu-k'u t'i-yao pien-cheng 四庫提要辨證, the late Professor Yü Chia-hsi 余嘉錫 has raised doubts concerning the authorship. His arguments against the attribution are (1) that Yüeh Fei's son Lin 霖 and grandson K'o 珂, who did their best to collect Fei's writings, did not seem to know the existence of the tz'u at all, and (2) that it first appeared only in a compilation dated 1536 without mentioning its sources. In this article, the author points out an internal evidence against the attribution. The tz'u mentions the place name Ho-lan-shan 賀蘭山, which was located to the north-west belonging to the Hsi-Hsia, and was not in the direction of the Jurchens who were the enemy of Sung. The place name cannot be considered a historical allusion because it does not appear often in earlier literature. In Ming times, however, it was an important place on the frontier bordering on the Tartars (Mongols). Actually, a major victory was won by the Ming general Wang Yüeh 王越 against the Tartars at Ho-lan-shan in 1498. Therefore, it was a place name most meaningful to the people and it featured in the literature of several writers at the time. According to tradition, the tz'u attributed Yüeh Fei was first carved on stone in 1502. This reveals the likely date of its authorship, namely, sometime between 1457 and 1502, 1547 being the date when the Tartars began to make trouble again on the Ming frontier. Furthermore, in a drama on Yueh Fei attributed to an unknown Yüan author, one finds no references to this tz'u. On the other hand, a certain Ming drama on Yüeh Fei is full of quotations from this piece. This also supports the theory that it was by a Ming author.