Active mid-to-late 8th century
Zhang Ji
張繼
Read Zhang Ji beyond Maple Bridge, through a working mountain household, an absent friend, and the costs of military service away from home.
This is Zhang Ji, 張繼, the poet of Night Mooring at Maple Bridge, rather than the different Tang poet Zhang Ji written 張籍. The Chinese name matters when following sources or searching a larger anthology.
Listening from a boat
At Maple Bridge, the sleepless traveler receives impressions from beyond his boat: moonset, crows, fishing lights, and a temple bell. The final sound reaches the place where he lies. Read the poem’s positions and movements before treating every object as a fixed symbol for sadness. The arrangement makes a listening place within a much larger night.
Ordinary work and ordinary hopes
A Mountain House uses six-character lines to fit people, water, chickens, tea, and grain into a compact scene. Smoke that might trouble a visitor belongs to useful work. The closing invitation to welcome clear weather asks us to judge the place by the household’s needs.
In To Secretary Zheng, friendship takes the form of a modest preparation: wooden clogs are made ready for a walk when the rain clears. The desired shared view is still in the future. Compare it with the actual visit in Meng Haoran’s farm poem.
Who is missing from the scene?
At a Post Station reveals that military employment repeatedly keeps a traveler away from home at flowering time. A Scene at Chang Gate widens that concern: recruitment has emptied the fields of their cultivators. Green grass and scarce hearth smoke become signs of disruption.
These poems extend the frontier shelf beyond desert encounters. They ask what service costs at home as well as on the road. Their Chinese texts are grouped in Quan Tang shi, juan 242; the author record supplies the courtesy name used here.
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