| 英文摘要 |
This study investigates the poems about being sent as an envoy to northern China written by Ruan Zhongyan (1289-1370), a native from Annam, and analyzes the writing of foreign lands in his poems. Ruan was a famous poet of the Annam Ch’en dynasty (1225-1400), a faithful official who served five emperors in the Ch’en dynasty, an outstanding Confucian, and a famous essayist. At 26, he was sent to the Mongol-Yuan Empire as an officially employed envoy. The next year, he returned to Annam and left behind numerous poems, sufficient for a collection. Between the 10th and the 12th century, most of these poems were lost. The remaining ones date from the Yuan dynasty, and are commonly considered the earliest existing poems about being an envoy to northern China. At present, Ruan’s Poetry Collection of Jie Xuan is the only existing collection of poetry about an Annam envoy to northern China, which foregrounds the importance of this study. However, the existing fifty-page Poetry Collection of Jie Xuan contains many mistakes. It is not a complete collection and includes poems unrelated to his trip to China. Most problematically, the collection mistakenly includes 24 poems about envoys to northern China during the Later Le dynasty (1428-1789) and poems by Ruan Zonggui (1693-1767). With a nearly 30% error rate, this collection misrepresents, to a degree, the overall feature of Ruan Zhongyan’s poems. Therefore, this study uses six Vietnamese poetry collections written in Chinese—namely Từ điển Hán Nôm (Poetry Collection of Yue Yin), Từ điển Hán Nôm (Poetry Collection of Zhai Yan), Selected Works of Metrical Poems, Vietnamese Poetry, Hoàng Việt thi tuyển (Poetry Collection of Huang Yue), and Minh đô thi tuyển (Poetry Collection of Ming Du) - to collate and annotate the Poetry Collection of Jie Xuan. The author has two aims in inspecting Ruan’s poems: . first, to retrace the route Ruan took, and second, to understand through close reading how Ruan represented the outlying territories and to discuss the unique characteristics of his writing about these foreign lands. |