The Elusive Crane: Memory, Metaphor, and a Stone Monument from Sixth-Century China

An inscription carved on a cliff of Jiaoshan Island in the Yangzi River, Yiheming, or "Eulogy on burying a Crane," traditionally has been dated to 514 CE and attributed to the Daoist master Tao Hongjing (456-536). It is one of the most famous works of Chinese calligraphy and has been the focus of extensive epigraphic research since it was discovered in the eleventh century. Despite a long history of scholarship, its mysterious origin and the formation of its canonical status still await a critical examination and contextual interpretation. The analysis in my thesis unfolds in two sections. The first inquires into the origin of this inscription and argues that it was not a real tombstone for a crane, as most scholars have believed, but a symbolic monument erected to convey the discontent of a group of Daoist adherents. Placing its text and visual form into historical context, I demonstrate that the eulogy should be read as a literary concoction rather than a historical document: the burial of the crane was a metaphor rather than an actual event. The ostensible theme of the inscription, a lamentation for a bird, was rooted in the earliest history of Chinese poetry and was a rhetorical device through which writers expressed personal or political views. At the same time, although the inscription adopts the form of a conventional epitaph, its unusual calligraphy and placement in a landscape signified to its original audience that this was not a conventional funerary monument. Based on this new interpretation, I investigate a little studied episode in the history of medieval Chinese Daoism-the persecution of the Highest Clarity Sect-and suggest that members of this sect were the authors and patrons of the inscription. The original meaning of Yiheming had been completely forgotten by the time it was discovered in the eleventh century. Since then, however, it has gained new significance as a canonical model of calligraphy. The second section of my thesis reexamines the aesthetic discourses around the inscription and demonstrate that its exalted status as a masterpiece of calligraphy arose from the interaction of two fundamentally different attitudes toward the physical remains of the past: a desire to venerate ancient objects for their aesthetic value and a tendency, especially in the late imperial period, to treat ancient inscriptions as documentary sources. I also look into a paradox in the perception of the calligraphic style of the inscription: some found it useless owing to the badly damaged state of the monument, whereas others found it a superb model for practicing calligraphy. Through a historical examination of this paradox, I reconstruct the process of the canonization of Yiheming and use it as a lens through which to view the history of Chinese calligraphy as an ongoing process deeply embedded in socio-cultural realities of different periods.