Yellow River has been nourishing Chinese people and Chinese civilization for thousands of years. Inspired by the great waterway, Dictionary of Chinese Poetry: Volume of the Yellow River, has recently been released. (ZHAO DERUN / FOR CHINA DAILY)
The galloping Yellow River runs more than 5,400 kilometers and crosses nine provinces and autonomous regions in the country. It is the mother river that has been nourishing not only the people living in the north, but all of Chinese civilization for thousands of years.
The river, and its connection with the people, has been well documented in literature, and there are numerous poems dating back millennia dedicated to the river.
According to Liu Zhanfeng, a senior compiler of dictionaries and an expert on typology, from the time before Qin Dynasty (221-206 BC) to the late Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) there have been more than 300,000 poems hailing the mother river.
"Living and growing up by its side, the Yellow River means a lot to me," says the 67-year-old from Henan province. "It signals a spirit of perseverance and provides the energy to maintain vitality."
Inspired by the river, Liu and his team finished an 18-book collection of 8,000 Chinese poems about the Yellow River, selected from the reservoir of 300,000-odd poems. The collection, Dictionary of Chinese Poetry: Volume of the Yellow River, has just been published as the first volume of the magnum opus Dictionary of Chinese Poetry that is planned to be a total of 16 volumes and published over the coming years.
Liu's contribution to the collection was listing all 8,000 poems in order of themed keywords, categorizing them with phrases that indicate content or location, among other things. Before the publication, the classical way to arrange such a large body of poems was by time or by author, or－because in ancient times, Chinese poems would be sung to certain formulaic melodies－by the title of the tune to sing the words to.
Considering the fragmentation of information and reading habits of Chinese people in the present day, Liu believes that the collection can help to better appreciate "our cultural heritage" in an easier way, through which readers can adeptly locate relevant poems from the volume sorted by theme or by content.
In the meantime, as well as the printed volume, Liu's team plans to produce a series of related products, ranging from specialized dictionaries collating famous quotes, to a digital database and possibly even mobile games based on classic poems.
"Because these ancient poems are our national treasures, we're thinking about up-to-date ways to better utilize them, and through which we can help ignite cultural creativity among younger generations," Liu says.
The collection, published by Henan People's Publishing House this month, covers 632 themes under 40 categories. Love, sorrow, and the homeland are among the themes. The river has frequently changed course over its long history, so places where it once flowed in the past are also referenced.
Peking University librarian Wang Bo, who attended a symposium on the release of the book on Sept 17 in Beijing, praised the team that accomplished the task. "The Yellow River and its stories contain almost half of ancient Chinese history," Wang says.
The publication of the tome commemorates the anniversary of the Zhengzhou symposium that was held a year ago in Henan province. The symposium was chaired by President Xi Jinping and he underlined the importance of ecological conservation and high-quality development of the Yellow River Basin.
Xi called Yellow River culture a significant part of Chinese civilization. He emphasized the need to systematically protect cultural relics and explore the value of Yellow River culture in modern times, pooling its spiritual strength for the realization of national rejuvenation, as quoted in previous reports.
The collection was done by more than 20 experts in Liu's team in a year, but it was based on 15 years of effort by numerous scholars including Liu. In fact, the scholars have plunged themselves into a sea of books, dictionaries and printed collections, one by one, page by page, to find all those poems.
Xie Mian, an 88-year-old poetry critic and a professor at Peking University, says the typological classification that helps users can actually pose the hardest challenge for compilers, especially for tomes on such a large scale.
During the process, Liu's team also collated excerpts of famous quotes and stanzas, as part of the preparation for their next project－a dictionary of quotes. Liu hints that a rising trend among readers is that, rather than searching for words and vocabulary, they are now keen to draw "quotes, historical anecdotes and viewpoints from literary classics".
Librarian Wang says he hopes that the tome will help lay a foundation for a database in which, by clicking the city names along the Yellow River, relevant poems and information about their authors will appear.
Liu and another chief editor, Zhao Derun, believe that, on the basis of their classification work, more cultural products will be published. For example, Zhao says that, in the next few years, the database may be applied as an available resource for augmented reality or virtual reality creations, as well as for games and mobile apps.
Zhao says the collection in print was just their first step, and they'll keep looking for such inspiration and energy for new projects.
