Ricerc@Sapienza

Scholars have long been puzzled as to why the collected works of the mid-Tang poet Bai Juyi (772-846) achieved exceptional popularity among the literate elites of Heian Japan (794-1185), while the literary collections of other Tang literati that are known to have reached Japan were largely disregarded. This project aims to situate the origin of the Heian appreciation of Bai Juyi in the context of the so-called "Yuan-Bai style" that was disseminated across East Asia through the corpus of the poetic exchanges between Bai Juyi and his intimate friend Yuan Zhen (779-831). In particular, the hypothesis underlying this project is that the popularity of this specific corpus among Heian poets in ninth- and early tenth-century Japan should be put in connection with their poetic exchanges involving the envoys who were regularly dispatched by the Korean kingdom of Balhae (698-926). The main goal of the project is to make the case that the educated elites of Balhae were the driving force behind the reception and the appreciation of specific continental texts, such as Bai's collected works, in Heian Japan. Secondly, I argue that this connection can help to indirectly reconstruct one aspect of the Sinitic literacy of Balhae, about which very little textual evidence has survived.