THE BOOK OF SONGS AND CHINA'S LITERARY TRADITION Collecting Songs and Polling the People: "Big Rat, Big Rat" |
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Robert Oxnam :: Many of the poems in the Book of Songs** are about courtship and marriage; others reflect the daily concerns of ordinary people. Marcia Wagner :: Tradition has it, at least the legend goes, that in China it was very important for the emperors, the rulers, to know how the common people were feeling. And so they would send people out from the court into the countryside to hear what the people were singing. And the tradition is that the collection of these popular songs was a kind of a Gallop poll being taken of how people were feeling, how they were feeling both about their own lives and about the government. Conscripted soldiers are singing about how miserable they are being on forced march or how much they dislike being sent to war and how much they long for home and how poor the conditions are when they're sent out to frontier battle duty. Some of them are complaints against tax collectors. There's one about "Big Rat, big rat, why are you taking so much of our millet?"
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** The Book of Songs is also known as the Book of Poetry, the Classic of Poetry, and sometimes the Book of Odes. These are all possible translations of the Chinese title, Shi jing [Shih-ching in Wade-Giles romanization]. |
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