神洲都會 A Metropolis Of The Sacred Land
真個是：真个是：
逐句解 Line by line
Truly it was:
真個是：, truly it was, standing on its own line is the formula that throws the switch from prose to verse. Watch for it again a few lines down, though: the same three characters turn up inside the poem itself, at 真個是神洲都會. The phrase does double duty here, once as the announcement and once as a line of the thing announced.
A dragon coiled in the lie of the land; a tiger crouched, a wall of gold.
龍蟠虎踞, dragon coiled and tiger crouched, is the classical formula for a site destined to carry an imperial capital. It has been said of Nanjing since the Three Kingdoms and is still what Chinese reaches for when a place looks made for greatness. The poem opens by asserting the very conclusion the prose is about to spend a whole passage arguing for.
On four sides the canopy hangs low and near; through a hundred windings the purple wards lie level.
華蓋 huá gài is the imperial canopy and also the constellation of that name, which stands above the throne of the Celestial Emperor; the line means both at once. 紫墟 is the purple quarter — purple because it is the colour of the pole star, and so of the sovereign.
Jade-stone bridge-rails ranked with cunning beasts; golden terraces and daises set with men of worth.
The couplet sets the carved animals on the balustrades beside the living officials on the terraces and uses one verb of arranging for both, so the ornament and the administration get described in the same breath.
Truly a metropolis of the sacred land, a storehouse of heaven, a capital of jade.
都會 dū huì is a metropolis, and 都 reads dū here, not the dōu that means all. 康熙字典 gives 唐韻 當孤切 and quotes the 《廣韻》: 天子所宮曰都, the place where the Son of Heaven keeps his palace. Which is precisely what the disciples are about to start arguing about — and the poem has settled it over their heads before they open their mouths.
For ten thousand lǐ the royal domain stands firm; through a thousand years the imperial enterprise rises.
邦畿 bāng jī is the royal domain, the land held directly by the sovereign. It comes out of the 《詩經》 — 商頌·玄鳥, 邦畿千里，維民所止, a royal domain of a thousand lǐ where the people come to rest — and not out of anything a traveller could see from outside a gate.
Barbarians fold their hands in submission, so far does the ruler's grace reach; sea and mountain come to court at the source, and the sage assembly is full.
朝元 cháo yuán is presenting yourself at court at the source, 朝 in the reading that means appearing before a sovereign. Keep an eye on it. The other 朝 in this poem, three couplets on in 朝陽, is the other reading entirely, and the two stand thirty-two characters apart with nothing whatever in the writing to warn you.
The imperial stairs are spotless; the carriage-road is quiet and calm.
輦路 niǎn lù is the road kept clear for the sovereign's hand-drawn carriage. This is the first couplet in the poem to describe something nobody standing outside the wall could possibly have seen.
In the wine-shops the singing is loud; from the flowered towers a glad air rises.
After eight lines of dynastic vocabulary the poem drops without warning into taverns and noise. 花樓 is a tower of the pleasure quarter, and this is the only couplet in which ordinary people are enjoying themselves.
Outside the Weiyang Palace, the trees of everlasting spring; fittingly they let the coloured phoenix cry on the sunward slope.
長春 cháng chūn is everlasting spring, not the zhǎng of growing. 朝陽 is zhāo yáng, the sunward face of a hill, and the line is reworking the set phrase 鳳鳴朝陽, the phoenix crying on the sunward slope. 《昭明文選》 卷二十 uses it, and 李善 traces it to the 《毛詩》: 鳳凰鳴矣，于彼高岡；梧桐生矣，于彼朝陽 — the phoenix cries on that high ridge, the paulownia grows on that sunward slope — with the gloss 山東曰朝陽, meaning the east face of a mountain. A phoenix crying there is the standard sign of a wise reign. 未央宮, the Weiyang Palace, was the Han seat at Chang'an, borrowed here for a foreign capital thousands of lǐ further west.
This is a rhapsody — a long showpiece description built out of matched pairs of lines — and it is a hymn to a Chinese imperial capital in which almost nothing belongs to the place actually standing there. The Weiyang Palace was the Han seat at Chang'an. The royal domain, the court at the source, the carriage-road, the phoenix on the sunward slope: all of it comes out of the stock cupboard for praising a dynasty. The kingdom has not even been named yet, and the poem does not need it named.
The borrowing is not laziness. The novel's foreign kingdoms are consistently described in the vocabulary of the Chinese court, and that is what makes their failures readable. A place praised in these terms is being measured against a standard, and the reader is being told what it ought to be.
One character carries two readings inside this single poem. 朝元 is going to court; 朝陽, thirty-two characters later, is the sunward slope. Nothing marks the change. It is exactly the sort of place where a reader with the sound already in his ear does the work without noticing, and where an annotated edition has to stop and decide.
What the poem conspicuously does not show you is anybody in trouble. The wine shops are loud, the stairs are swept, the barbarians have folded their hands. Under two hundred characters after the poem ends, the pilgrims walk into ten-odd monks in cangues and fetters begging from door to door, and not one of these nine couplets has prepared for it.