Trapped by Precedent
The Poetry Production of Emperor Jiaqing and the Publication of His Imperial Poetry Collections
Abstract
This paper studies the poetry production of Emperor Jiaqing (1760–1820, r. 1796–1820) as well as the publishing routine of his imperial poetry collections. The publishing routine of Jiaqing’s poetry collections was inherited from that of his father Emperor Qianlong (1711–1799, r. 1735–1795), and Jiaqing’s poetry oeuvre is second only to that of Qianlong in Chinese history. However, the statistics of their annual poetry production suggest that these two emperors displayed different levels of initiative in the daily practice of composing poetry. Moreover, two cases studies, one on Jiaqing’s semantic repetition in occasional poems and the other on the timing of his writing of large setpoems, indicate that Jiaqing saw poetry composition as an obligation and his attitude towards it was less autonomous than that of Qianlong. The review of how Jiaqing followed Qianlong’s precedent in the routine production of a large number of imperial poems leads to a discussion of the idea that the possible involvement of ghostwriters could be an important factor in understanding the nature of Jiaqing’s imperial poetry. Finally, this paper ponders what the potential meanings of poetry production to Jiaqing could have been.
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