In the early fourth century CE, after the escalation of a series of succession disputes among the imperial Sima clan, the Jin dynasty collapsed and its capital city of Luoyang 洛陽 was destroyed. However, the end of the dynasty did not cause the Sima clan to fall from power entirely. Instead, the Jin dynasty was reestablished in the new capital of Jiankang 建康, the city known today as Nanjing. The earlier incarnation of the Jin would come to be known as the Western Jin dynasty, while the restored Jin dynasty is referred to as the Eastern Jin. The impact of this cataclysm on the inhabitants of Luoyang and the surrounding regions is difficult to quantify, and even harder to understand in more personal terms. We know that many of those who did not perish fled to the southeast, crossing the Yangzi River to resettle in the new capital. Later texts refer to this period as “The disorder of the Yongjia Reign” (Yongjia zhi luan 永嘉之亂). This epithet uses the imperial reign name given to the period between 307 and 313, even though the disasters did not neatly begin and end with those years. Although the Yongjia troubles are addressed throughout surviving historiographic material, there is no work of history dedicated to documenting the ensuing exodus from Luoyang to Jiankang.
Nevertheless, accounts of the migration may be found throughout Jinshu 晉書, the standard dynastic history of the Jin completed in the early years of the Tang dynasty (618–907). Descriptions of the collective experiences of migrants appear in unexpected locations, such as the harrowing account of famine-driven migration in the text's treatise on “Food and Currency” (Shihuo食貨).Footnote 1 Jinshu biographies (liezhuan 列傳) of those who made the journey occasionally contain descriptions of migratory itineraries and travel experiences. Much more frequently, these biographies offer fascinating insight into the lives of migrants after their journeys ended. In these anecdotes, migrants reminisce about their lost homeland, mourn those unable to make the journey, and struggle to adjust to unfamiliar surroundings. Throughout these stories, migration is presented as a transformative experience that irrevocably alters those who undertake it and severs them from the past.
These postmigration anecdotes have undertaken transformative journeys of their own. Jinshu biographies were created with reference to a variety of other sources, including earlier dynastic histories of the Jin as well as anecdote collections, anthologies of biographical material, and a host of other sources on the margins of historiography and storytelling. The early Tang historiographer Liu Zhiji 劉知幾 (661–721) was among the first to critique the Jinshu for relying on unreliable sources. Generations of others have been dismissive of the text's value for similar reasons, despite the fact that such textual borrowing is not pervasive throughout the entire text.Footnote 2 Concerns about Jinshu's accuracy aside, this tendency to incorporate text from such a broad variety of sources for early Eastern Jin figures provides the opportunity to examine how new narrative perspectives can be generated by synthesizing and rewriting preexisting works.
Many of these antecedent sources are extant today only in fragments preserved in later works. One exception is Shishuo xinyu 世說新語 (A New Account of Tales of the World, henceforth Tales), the anecdote collection attributed to the Liu-Song dynasty prince Liu Yiqing 劉義慶 (403–44). This text has been transmitted along with a lengthy set of annotations added by the Liang dynasty scholar Liu Xiaobiao 劉孝標 (462–521). These annotations quote from hundreds of other sources and offer a rare glimpse into the variety of historiographic narratives to which early medieval scholars had access. Whether treated as a single incident in the lifetime of an individual, as in a Jinshu biography, or, as in Tales, as one of many examples of personality traits present in figures from many different periods, these anecdotes are preserved within compilational projects with other goals. When multiple versions of the same anecdote have been preserved, subtle variations reveal the work of editors altering the story to suit the overarching goals of these projects. And yet the quantity of migration anecdotes that have survived, and the persistence of themes of nostalgia and transformation throughout this scattered corpus of anecdotes, shows that the association of the Yongjia migration with these themes was a topic of interest across a spectrum of historians and storytellers.
The Jinshu biography of Guo Pu 郭璞 (276–324) is an instructive example. Its presentation of its subject's migration not only contains elements typical of early medieval biographies and narratives drawn from Tales but also features several episodes with close parallels in earlier collections of zhiguai 志怪 “anomaly accounts,” a genre with its own set of narrative patterns and didactic concerns.Footnote 3 Guo Pu's Jinshu biography weaves this hodgepodge of sources together to provide an episodic account of the dramatic events that occurred during his passage from the Luoyang region to the future Eastern Jin capital of Jiankang. The textual histories of the collections in which anomaly accounts originally circulated are complex and often mysterious, and most exist today only in recompiled versions based on citations and fragments preserved in other sources.
This combination of messy textual history and implausible contents has caused Guo Pu's biography to be treated with even more skepticism than typical Jinshu biographies. For example, even after setting aside the supernatural contents of these anecdotes, Cao Daoheng finds that the Jinshu biography does not hold up to scrutiny when compared against other records of the same events.Footnote 4 This is not to say that the text is of no historical value. In the longest treatment of Guo Pu's biography in English, Dominik Declercq finds within it a coherent and historically plausible portrait.Footnote 5 Declercq argues that Guo Pu's biography presents him as a talented man whose divination methods were seen as outdated by many prominent members of the Jin dynasty yet nevertheless represented a worldview that was still widely accepted outside of these elite circles.Footnote 6 Declercq thus reads these stories in relation both to the characterization of earlier practitioners of divination and to Guo Pu's failure to rise in the ranks of the Eastern Jin court and eventual execution by Wang Dun. My goal in revisiting this biography is to set aside its potential value as a source of information about the life of the historical Guo Pu and consider it instead in relation to other narratives of the Yongjia migration, as a way to better understand the legacy of this period among storytellers and scholars of later generations.
Descriptions of Guo Pu's migration told as anomaly accounts differ from other migration anecdotes not only in their supernatural contents but also in the way that they present migration as a series of adventures rather than a traumatic ordeal. Guo Pu's migration anecdotes present Guo Pu as a talented prognosticator and magician who uses his uncanny abilities to avoid danger and gain the loyalty and assistance of those he encounters in his travels. Nevertheless, in his Jinshu biography, these positive experiences are followed by an account of Guo Pu's life after arriving in Jiankang that details his declining social standing and eventual execution. What were once anecdotes of triumph and adventure during migration are recontextualized as precursors to a postmigration deterioration, bringing Guo Pu's life story thematically closer to those of the many other migrants documented in Jinshu. Guo Pu's biography thus illustrates the crystallization of a shared discourse on how the Yongjia migration would be remembered by later generations, but it also contains traces of alternative perspectives.
The Restoration of the Jin and “Crossing the River”
The chain of events that led to the migration of Guo Pu and countless others began with a succession dispute following the death of the founding emperor of the Jin, Sima Yan 司馬炎 (236–90). The escalation of this conflict, known as the “War of the Eight Princes,” led to an uprising by the Xiongnu chieftain Liu Yuan 劉淵 (d. 310). Liu declared himself the ruler of a new regime, and his successors were responsible for the destruction of Luoyang. After a short-lived attempt to relocate the Jin capital to Chang'an, Sima Rui 司馬睿 (276–323), an imperial cousin who had taken up a military position on the other side of the Yangzi earlier in the conflict, was named emperor of the Jin in 317, and a new imperial court was established in Jiankang.Footnote 7
Throughout these turbulent first two decades of the fourth century, migrants fleeing the Luoyang region resettled on the other side of the Yangzi River, in and around the eventual Eastern Jin capital.Footnote 8 Hardly an unpopulated frontier, the site was once the capital of the rival kingdom of Wu 吳 (222–80), which had been conquered by Sima Yan only forty years prior to the Yongjia era. While some native southerners were able to find a footing in this new system, and others participated in armed resistance and attempted to overthrow it, the restoration of the Jin in Jiankang permanently altered the region. Refugees from the north formed the basis for a new elite ruling class that would dominate imperial politics until the end of the Southern Dynasties.
It is within biographies of the first members of this elite class that the most detailed discussions of migration can be found. If a Jinshu biography contains some discussion of a migrant's memories of Luoyang or difficulties adjusting to life in Jiankang, there is a high likelihood that its subject was connected in some way to the minister Wang Dao 王導 (276–339), a Yongjia migrant who dominated court politics in the early years of the Eastern Jin. But the elite were not the only migrants who settled in and around Jiankang in this period. Migrants arrived in the south in such great numbers that entire districts were renamed for the places in the north from which their settlers had fled, referred to as “‘lodged’ [qiao 僑] provinces, commanderies, and prefectures.”Footnote 9 Thus, the migrants are collectively referred to as qiaoren 僑人 (lodged people) in some texts. But this term does not appear in Jinshu biographies. Instead, biographies of migrants can be identified by their tendency to use the crossing of the Yangzi River as a synecdochic reference to the entire migration, regardless of the individual's precise itinerary. If an anecdote set in or around the Yongjia period uses an expression that means “crossing the river” (guo jiang 過江, du jiang 渡江, or 度江) or “southern crossing” (nan du 南渡 or 南度), it is not a general reference to an incidental passage across the river or for any southward movement but a way of relating the events of the anecdote to the broader context of the Yongjia exodus. This smaller group of “river crossers” can be distinguished from the broader collective of qiaoren simply because they were prominent enough to have been given Jinshu biographies. In other words, their stories are known not because they were migrants but because of other appointments, accomplishments, and relationships that earned them the attention of the Jinshu compilers.
Jinshu biographies invoke “crossing the river” in several ways. It may simply be mentioned in passing as part of a description of a subject's bureaucratic appointments. For instance, the biography of Xun Sui 荀邃 (d. 329) lists the positions he held in the service of rival Jin princes, the Prince of Changsha (Sima Yi 司馬乂, 277–304) and the Prince of Chengdu (Sima Ying 司馬穎, 279–306), with no discussion of the bitter dispute between the two. Xun Sui was later summoned to the court of Emperor Min (Sima Ye 司馬鄴, 300–318), who briefly ruled as Jin emperor from Chang'an after the fall of Luoyang. However, Xun Sui's biography reports, “Because he feared the crisis in the Western Capital [Chang'an], he thus did not respond to the invitation. Instead he traveled east and crossed the river [du jiang 渡江].” After migrating, Xun Sui became a military advisor to the future Emperor Yuan (Sima Rui), who was then serving a military appointment.Footnote 10 Other brief references to river crossing may mention the companions with whom the biography's subject traveled, illustrating that migration was often undertaken by entire families or other large groups, rather than by solitary travelers. For example, the Jinshu biography of Xun Sui's brother, Xun Kai 荀闓, mentions that he “crossed the river” (du jiang 渡江) with his brother Sui, even though this detail is absent from Xun Sui's own biography.Footnote 11
Most discussions of migration in Jinshu biographies follow this pattern, limiting their scope to their subject and his closest associates, but there are occasional exceptions. As part of its explanation of Wang Dao's role in the restoration of the Jin in Jiankang, his Jinshu biography offers this broader description of the collapse of Luoyang and the exodus that ensued: “After Luoyang collapsed, six to seven of every ten men and women of the central provinces fled in chaos to the other side of the river. Wang Dao advised the [future] emperor to receive the worthies and noble men among them, and use them to craft a strategy.”Footnote 12 This detail—Wang Dao's strategy of gathering outstanding members of the migrant community and using them to bolster the authority of the new emperor—is a reminder that even a brief reference to “crossing the river” reveals more than just a travel itinerary, especially in the context of a history of bureaucratic appointments. It connects the subjects of these anecdotes to one another. Even though Jiankang was populated by settlers from many different places “north of the river,” and their journeys took place at different times and followed different itineraries, “crossing the river” is an experience that all shared. It was from the members of this community that Wang Dao established the foundations of the Eastern Jin elite.
Lengthier anecdotes that mention “crossing the river” often concern the social dynamics of this group of powerful migrants in the aftermath of their journey. Only rarely do they focus on events that occurred while traveling. Instead, they portray the Eastern Jin elite reminiscing about their past lives in Luoyang and contrasting these memories with their present situation in Jiankang. In these anecdotes, “river crossers” are characterized as a nostalgic community that recalls the late Western Jin as a bygone era seamlessly connected to the glories of the even more distant past, from which the present is irrevocably separated. In one anecdote from the Jinshu biography of the migrant Wei Jie 衛玠 (286–312), Wang Dao's cousin and eventual rival Wang Dun 王敦 (266–324) remarks that Wei Jie's talent for sophisticated conversation reminds him of past luminaries.Footnote 13 Wei Jie's impressive intellect prompts Wang Dun not to recall his own memories of the Western Jin, but to imagine the talents of the Wei dynasty philosopher Wang Bi 王弼 (226–49). Wang Dun then remarks that “I never thought that, in the midst of the Yongjia, I would again hear the tones of the Zhengshi era (240–9),” despite the fact that he was not alive to hear them when they were first uttered.
An earlier version of this anecdote appears in Tales, classified within a chapter titled “Appreciation and Praise” (Shang yu 賞譽).Footnote 14 This classification divorces the anecdote from other events in Wei Jie's life story and connects it to other examples of eloquently phrased admiration among prominent historical figures throughout history. Like many Tales anecdotes focusing on the early Eastern Jin, however, the story is still presented in the context of the tumultuous Yongjia era. It begins by describing how Wei Jie sought refuge under the protection of Wang Dun after “fleeing from chaos” in Luoyang. Another Tales account of a social gathering involving Wei Jie and Wang Dun places the event after Wei Jie had “crossed the river” (度江).Footnote 15 In this anecdote, the lively conversation lasts all night, and Wei Jie's ensuing exhaustion escalates into a decline in health that eventually takes his life. This characterization of “river crossers” as a nostalgic community in decline is present throughout both Jinshu biographies and Tales anecdotes, as it may even be seen among the citations from an eclectic variety of other texts included in Liu Xiaobiao's annotations.
Jinshu migrant biographies draw from these sources and more, stringing together anecdotes to create linear narratives that span the lifetimes of their subjects, before and after migration. In Wei Jie's case, this narrative realignment makes the tragic irony of Wei Jie's brief resurrection of past glories days before his death even more evident. It opens with signs of his childhood potential for greatness, but it also discusses his weak constitution.Footnote 16 Wei Jie's premature death occurs immediately after his talent is recognized by the man who was among the most powerful figures in the Eastern Jin. In the aftermath of his transit across the river, his childhood potential is realized, but this is immediately followed by his equally foreshadowed premature death. However, Wei Jie's Jinshu biography also introduces new complications to his life story. It omits events described in some of these earlier anecdotes entirely and offers alternative accounts of others, including an explanation of Wei Jie's death that removes any suggestion that the night he spent socializing with Wang Dun may have exacerbated his illness. While Wei Jie's Jinshu biography weaves many anecdotes together to create a text that is thematically satisfying, it does so at the expense of resolving the ambiguities and inconsistencies in the earlier corpus of anecdotes. What remains consistent is its characterization of those closely involved with the restoration of the Jin dynasty as a community afflicted by deterioration and wistful nostalgia.
Like Wei Jie, Guo Pu also migrated during the Yongjia era and joined the elite circle of migrants in Jiankang. His Jinshu biography also resembles that of other “river crossers,” coordinating text from Tales and a variety of sources. But its account of Guo Pu's experience as a migrant is unique. Here, Guo Pu uses his supernatural talents to succeed in circumstances where others would perish. After his migration concludes, however, Guo Pu's biography becomes a narrative of decline and death, his early successes recontextualized as signs of the unfulfilled promise of the lost age. If the biography of Wei Jie exemplifies the way the Jinshu editors identified themes of nostalgia and decline in an older corpus of anecdotes, the biography of Guo Pu reveals their ability to do so even for anomaly accounts in which such themes were not initially present.
Guo Pu: Scholar, Poet, Magician, and Migrant
Though Guo Pu was but one of many individuals whose migration experiences are documented in narrative anecdotes, among these migrants, Guo Pu was unique. Hailed by David Knechtges as “the most learned man of his time,” Guo Pu is credited as the author of several scholarly texts, including influential annotations to the glossary Er ya 爾雅 and a series of encomia to the cosmographic treatise Shanhai jing 山海經 (Classic of Mountains and Seas).Footnote 17 As a poet, he is best known for his “Rhapsody on the Yangzi River” (Jiang fu 江賦), a dense and ornate description of the scenery of the Yangzi River, and a corpus of poetry widely considered the apex of the “wandering immortals” (youxian 遊仙) subgenre.Footnote 18 His talents as a master of prognostication and geomancy are widely attested, and surviving fragments of a memoir concerning his divinations and a text on burial rites also bear his name.Footnote 19 These writings contain autobiographical details, which have been used to corroborate or disprove aspects of his Jinshu biography and examined for insight into his own attitude toward migration and his adjustment to life in the south.Footnote 20 While his Jinshu biography may not provide a plausible and consistent account of the actual experiences of its subject, it succeeds in creating a portrait of a supernaturally erudite and accomplished man who would have been capable of this broad range of scholarship. In his biography, Guo Pu is a master of knowledge, whether it is written in books, hidden in unexplored regions of the landscape, or encoded in hexagrams and the tumbling of divination stalks.
Much of Guo Pu's biography is devoted to his migration. While traveling, he uses his knowledge of natural and supernatural phenomena to make predictions that allow him and his companions to safely reach his destination in the southeast. The first time Guo Pu speaks in his own biography, and the first time his divination skills are demonstrated, is within an anecdote about his departure from his home region prior to the fall of the Western Jin:
In between the reigns of Emperors Hui and Huai [around 307], Hedong was the first to be disturbed. Guo Pu divined about it. As he cast the stalks he sighed and said, “Alas! Our people will soon be enveloped by other races, our mulberry and catalpa razed into dragon wastelands.”Footnote 21 Thereupon he secretly gathered several dozen households of his relatives and associates, then proceeded to flee the land for the southeast.Footnote 22
While other divination stories require narrative proof of a successful prediction, Guo Pu's apocalyptic vision requires no confirmation within the text. Its accuracy would have been evident to all early readers of Jinshu. Within the context of the biography's narrative arc, this event not only displays Guo Pu's skill as a diviner, it also provides the inciting incident for the subsequent anecdotes that detail episodes from Guo Pu's journey to the southeast.
Guo Pu's apocalyptic vision offers a far more dramatic image of impending doom than Xun Sui's apprehension about relocating to Chang'an. But both migrants’ departures are made possible thanks to their awareness of future unrest. Their successes are also reminders of the fate that befell the many more who did not realize the necessity of migration and the severity of the disturbances in the capital. As a master of esoteric knowledge and divination, Guo Pu is the perfect subject for stories about disasters avoided and fortune gained through attention to signs that others ignore. In subsequent anecdotes, Guo Pu's ability to render the complex intelligible is presented even more clearly. Guo Pu's supernatural exploits place him in the narrative tradition surrounding the fangshi 方士 (masters of methods), figures who use arcane knowledge and magic to impress and assist patrons, secure benefit for themselves, and even escape mortality. Because Guo Pu displays intimate knowledge of aspects of his surroundings that are hidden to others when traveling in unfamiliar territory, he can even be identified with the subset of these figures that Robert Campany has referred to as “long-distance specialists.”Footnote 23 However, while other “long-distance specialists” are often able to retrieve objects from far-off lands in the blink of an eye, despite his many supernatural talents, Guo Pu makes his journey on foot.
The next incident in the biography is the first to draw from an anomaly account. In it, Guo Pu encounters the general Zhao Gu 趙固, who may have been a military officer of the Former Zhao 前趙 (304–29), the state founded by the Xiongnu leader Liu Yuan. The contradictions that arise when attempting to corroborate details in this episode with other historical records, and Guo Pu's willingness to help a general of a rival regime, are one source of Cao Daoheng's skepticism about the veracity of Guo Pu's biography.Footnote 24 Anachronisms aside, this anecdote provides Guo Pu the opportunity to demonstrate one more of his many arcane talents. Here, he aids Zhao Gu by resurrecting a dead horse. Guo Pu instructs several dozen men to carry bamboo sticks thirty li 里 (roughly 15 kilometers) into the woods, where he tells them they will find a temple in a grove on a hill. By banging their sticks in this area, they will acquire an object that will be able to revive the dead horse. They do as they are told and find a creature that “resembles a monkey.” When it is brought back, the monkey-like thing is able to resuscitate the horse. Though no divination is performed, this incident presents Guo Pu's arcane knowledge as knowledge of the future: his directions are specific despite his presumed unfamiliarity with the region, he predicts what the men will find, and his prediction is confirmed to be accurate by the events that unfold after he makes it. In addition to informing readers of the next stop of Guo Pu's passage to the southeast, this episode thus also contributes to Guo Pu's characterization as a man who is capable of securing benefit for himself and others thanks to his ability to gather information from situations and environments that are unintelligible to others.
Two alternative versions of this anecdote complicate its relationship to Guo Pu's migration. One occurs in Soushen ji 搜神記, a Jin dynasty anomaly account collection attributed to Gan Bao 干寶 (286–336), lost sometime during the Song dynasty and recompiled from fragments preserved in anthologies and encyclopedia in the Ming, most likely by the scholar Hu Yinglin 胡應麟 (1551–1602).Footnote 25 A longer version appears in the Song encyclopedia Taiping yulan 太平御覽. In that text, its source is listed as Xu Soushen ji 續搜神記, the sequel to Soushen ji attributed to the poet Tao Qian 陶潛 (365–427). Xu Soushen ji was also recompiled, probably by Hu Yinglin at the same time as Soushen ji.Footnote 26 Because of this, there is high potential for misattribution both in citations and in the recompiled versions of both texts.
In the Soushen ji, Guo Pu's migration from the north is never mentioned. It begins with Zhao Gu lamenting the death of his horse and immediately seeking help from Guo Pu, who appears to already be in his service. The Jinshu and Xu Soushen ji versions begin by describing Guo Pu arriving at Zhao Gu's estate and finding that Zhao Gu is grieving the death of his horse and thus not receiving guests. When Zhao Gu's aide denies him entry, Guo Pu instructs the aide to inform Zhao Gu that he is able to revive his horse, and only then is he permitted to enter.Footnote 27 The Xu Soushen ji version is even more explicit in situating the events of the story within the context of Guo Pu's migration to the southeast, adding more detail about his departure from the north and ending by explaining that the reward Zhao Gu gives him enables him to “cross the river” (guo jiang 過江). Because of the messy textual history of both Soushen ji and its sequel, the relationship between these three versions is difficult to determine. On one hand, the longer Xu Soushen ji anecdote may be a later embellishment of the Soushen ji original.Footnote 28 On the other hand, the shorter version that appears in the recompiled Soushen ji may be a heavily edited fragment of a longer original, the basis for versions in both Jinshu and Xu Soushen ji.Footnote 29 Whatever the case may be, the inclusion of the detail about Guo Pu's passage across the Yangzi River suggests that the association between Guo Pu's adventures and the Yongjia migration was important not only to the Jinshu editors but to some compilers and editors of anomaly account collections as well.
The incident that follows this one in Guo Pu's Jinshu biography is also present in the recompiled Soushen ji, but no extant citation of this passage lists its source as Soushen ji.Footnote 30 In it, Guo Pu is again presented as a crafty magician who uses his talents to secure passage to the south for himself and others. In this case, however, Guo Pu's predictions of disaster are ignored. It opens with Guo Pu's arrival just north of the Yangzi in Lujiang 廬江, currently undisturbed by the troubles in the north. There he meets a Hu Mengkang 胡孟康, an otherwise unknown figure whom the text identifies as the governor of the region.Footnote 31 Hu Mengkang has just been summoned to take up a military position further south. However, because his region is currently at peace, he has no interest in crossing the river. Guo Pu performs a divination on his behalf with inauspicious results, but Hu Mengkang does not take his advice, so Guo Pu prepares to abandon him and continue his journey. Before leaving, Guo Pu conjures an illusory army from a handful of magic beans and uses them to trick Hu Mengkang into selling Guo Pu an enslaved woman that he had grown fond of, allowing her to flee to the south as part of Guo Pu's entourage. At the end of this anecdote, we are told that the region fell several weeks after Guo Pu's departure, confirming the accuracy of the prediction that Hu Mengkang ignored.
Guo Pu's passage across the Yangzi River is finally described in the next section of his biography. From Lujiang, he is said to have traveled “across the river” (guo jiang 過江) and arrived in Xuancheng 宣城, where he becomes an aide to the local governor Yin You 殷祐. The first services Guo Pu renders as a bureaucrat are similar to his earlier activities as a wandering magician. He is asked to perform Yijing divination concerning the recent appearance of a peculiar animal. It is described as a gray animal “as big as a water buffalo,” whose feet “resemble an elephant's.”Footnote 32 Through divination, Guo Pu determines that the animal is called a “donkey rat” (lüshu 驢鼠). This anecdote offers a detailed description of Guo Pu's divination methods, and quotes a brief poem Guo Pu composes to report the results of the divination to his hosts.
Declercq and contemporary scholar Lian Zhenbiao have offered differing interpretations of the significance of these details. They concur that the poem describes capturing the beast and stabbing it once before it disappears, but while Declercq sees this as a recommendation, Lian reads it as merely a prediction.Footnote 33 Whatever the case may be, the people of Xuancheng do indeed trap the animal and plan to kill it, but it escapes and disappears after being struck. They seek the counsel of a spirit medium, who informs them that the temple's god is displeased, and that the creature is merely an “emissary of the Lord of Gong Pavilion at Mount Lü [Gong ting Lüshan jun 䢼亭驢山君],” passing through Xuancheng on its way to Jingzhou 荊州.Footnote 34 The results of this divination do not lead to any material benefit for Guo Pu, but they do further illustrate Guo Pu's uncanny ability to find meaning in the inexplicable. Moreover, despite the largely inconsequential outcome of his divination, this incident combines several aspects of Guo Pu's output as a scholar and writer that would have been familiar to readers of texts attributed to him. It offers more detail about the style of divination Guo Pu performs, and combines a demonstration of his skills as a poet with a narrativized rendition of his encyclopedic knowledge of flora and fauna as evidenced elsewhere in his annotations to Er ya and Shanhai jing.Footnote 35
Guo Pu's mastery of esoterica and divination is unmatched by other migrants, and anecdotes from Guo Pu's migration have an adventurous tone that is absent from other descriptions of the traumatic Yongjia period. Nevertheless, there are other stories in which people perform acts of kindness that enable others to escape from harm. The most dramatic of these occurs in the biography of Xi Jian 郗鑒 (269–339), in an anecdote almost certainly drawn from a close parallel in Tales. The circumstances of this anecdote create a very different sense of the potential dangers of the Yongjia era, and of the skills needed to avoid them. Xi Jian's river crossing story, included in both Tales as well as his Jinshu biography, is not one of magic or divination, but of selflessness in the face of scarcity and starvation:
When Xi Jian encountered the disorders of the Yongjia, he was living in his home village, starving in extreme poverty. Because of his reputation and virtue, his countrymen shared their food with him one after another. His brother's son Mai and his sister's son Zhou Yi 周翼 (300–64) were young, so he once brought them food to eat. The people of the village said, “Everyone is suffering from hunger. Because of your worthiness, we want to help you, but we're afraid not everyone can be preserved.” After this he went to eat by himself, filled his cheeks with rice, returned, and spat it out for the two children. Later, they all survived, and crossed the river [guo jiang] together.Footnote 36
In this anecdote, Xi Jian saves the lives of his younger relatives even though the other people in the village do not deem them worthy of support. His own behavior, though hidden from the villagers, confirms the worthiness that has earned him their acceptance in the first place. Like Guo Pu's rescue of the enslaved woman, this anecdote illustrates the altruism of its protagonist in the context of the hardships of migration.
When read as self-contained anecdotes independent of the context of a longer biography, these two narratives are similar. But they are incorporated into longer Jinshu biographies of their subjects in very different ways. Xi Jian's act of kindness appears at the end of his Jinshu biography, as a confirmation of the virtue that allowed him to lead an illustrious career among the elite of the Western and Eastern Jin. In Guo Pu's biography, however, his successes as a traveler do not lead to ongoing prosperity in Jiankang. The long arc of this decline causes his life story to more closely resemble similar reversals of fate experienced by Wei Jie and other migrants.
Guo Pu in Jiankang: Decline and Execution
Before completing his journey, Guo Pu first travels with Yin You to the fortified city of Shitou 石頭, just outside Jiankang. There, he again performs a divination about the appearance of yet another strange animal. After this episode, however, the tenor of Guo Pu's Jinshu biography changes dramatically. While he still performs divinations after entering the capital region, they no longer showcase his ability to interpret natural and supernatural phenomena, nor do they ensure his own safety. Instead, Guo Pu performs divination as a servant of the state. He warns Wang Dao of an impending earthquake, interprets the portentous significance of the excavation of ancient ritual bells, and, in a particularly bizarre episode, unsuccessfully attempts to warn Emperor Yuan not to harbor an untrustworthy eunuch. These incidents are interrupted by elements typical of a more conventional biography. Long passages of Guo Pu's memorials and literary pieces are quoted, including one in which Guo Pu urges an amnesty on the occasion of the birth of the emperor's grandson.
After entering the service of the Eastern Jin, Guo Pu's talent for divination no longer has entirely positive results. He is mocked for it, which inspires him to air his grievances in a piece titled “On a guest's insolence” (Ke ao fu 客傲賦).Footnote 37 He is also criticized for his excessive drinking by none other than Gan Bao, the compiler of Soushen ji. Most significantly, he makes a prediction that Wang Dun's upcoming insurrection will fail, an affront that leads to Guo Pu's execution. The section detailing the execution describes three occasions on which Guo Pu correctly predicts his own death. In the most detailed of the three, the biography again doubles back to present an incident in which Guo Pu gave a gift to a stranger, then returns to the present to reveal that his executioner was none other than the man he had encountered years before.Footnote 38 Guo Pu's earlier kindness to the man causes him to grieve, but does not prevent the execution.Footnote 39 In the anecdotes Jinshu uses to fill in the details of Guo Pu's migration to the south, he is able to use divination to keep himself safe from harm. After he arrives in Jiankang, although his divinations remain precise, he is no longer able to use them to change his own fate.
Early in Guo Pu's biography, his journey to the south is portrayed as a series of adventures and conquests. But his luck changes on the other side of the river, and in this regard, his story is quite similar to those of other migrants. While Wei Jie's premature death is perhaps the most dramatic postmigration decline, there are numerous anecdotes that report similar experiences of declining health and ability among other “river crossers.” Like Guo Pu, the statesman Zhou Yi 周顗 (269–322) was criticized for his alcoholism in his later years.Footnote 40 In a Tales account not included in his Jinshu biography, Zhou Yi's decline is correlated with his arrival on the other side of the river:
While the Great General Wang [Dun] was in the Western [Jin] Court, whenever he met with Sir Zhou he would always fan himself and screen his face without ceasing. After crossing to the left bank of the river [du jiang zuo 度江左], he could no longer have this effect. Wang said, “I wonder—Have I advanced, or has he regressed?”Footnote 41
Wang Dun is Zhou Yi's evaluator as well as his foil: while Zhou Yi illustrates the potential for one to decline in ability and prestige in the aftermath of migration, Wang Dun suggests that it was also possible for one to acquire new status and influence. Here, Wang Dun's response is sympathetic, and the rest of Zhou Yi's biography confirms that the two once had a close relationship. But Zhou Yi was another casualty of Wang Dun's usurpation of power from his cousin Wang Dao. Like Guo Pu, Zhou Yi's decline culminated in an execution ordered by Wang Dun.
Individual episodes from Guo Pu's biography present their subject as a triumphant adventurer who uses supernatural techniques to flee disaster and help others. These anecdotes contrast most of those with their origins in Tales, which tend to represent “crossing the river” only in retrospect, often only as a barrier between an imagined ideal past and the present. Nevertheless, Guo Pu's adventures have parallels in stories like the tale of Xi Jian's altruism. Both show that the disastrous fallout from the collapse of Luoyang provided the opportunity for the talented to use their abilities in service of others. When considered in relation to anecdotes about Guo Pu's life after reaching Jiankang, however, Guo Pu's story begins to resemble that of less successful migrants even more closely. While “crossing the river” is never explicitly stated to be the cause of this decline, in cases like those of Wang Dun's appraisal of Zhou Yi, it is indicated quite clearly as the barrier between these two states. Guo Pu's biography allows the Jinshu editors to incorporate the triumphant Guo Pu of anomaly accounts into the framework of decline by these anecdotes of social performance and character evaluation, transforming tales of Guo Pu's successes into reminders of who he was before “crossing the river.”
Conclusion: The Legacy of the Yongjia Migrants
The Yongjia migration loomed large in the minds of the Southern Dynasties elite. The body of lore and narratives concerning the era, despite never having been incorporated into a work dedicated exclusively to the experiences of migrants, still informed the perceptions of the descendants of those who “crossed the river” centuries before. Near the end of the Southern Dynasties, during the collapse of the Liang dynasty, Yu Xin 庾信 (513–81) composed the “Lament for the South” (Ai Jiangnan fu 哀江南賦) to describe his experiences abandoning his home in the south and “returning” to the north from which his ancestors had arrived. Yu Xin begins with a long overview of his family's history from antiquity to his own lifetime, of which his ancestor's migration to the south in the Yongjia era is treated as an important part. He begins with the origin of his surname, describing the Yu clan's service to the Han, and explicitly situating his family in relation to the rivers of the north, writing “We spent generations with our backs to the Luo / living at peace overlooking the He [the Yellow River].”Footnote 42 He then turns immediately to the Yongjia era, spending the next ten lines describing collapse of Luoyang and the departure of his ancestors for the south. The shifting of eras from the Jin to the Song and Southern Qi dynasties, in contrast, takes place over the course of a single line, and is depicted as a natural shifting of the elements as opposed to a cataclysm: “Water and wood followed in sequence.”Footnote 43
The “Fu on Observing My Life” (Guan wo sheng fu 觀我生賦) of Yan Zhitui 顏之推 (531–91) is another memoir of experiences as a migrant on the road to the north at the end of the Southern Dynasties. Like Yu Xin's “Lament,” Yan Zhitui also fixates on the migration of his ancestors southward during the Yongjia disturbances several centuries before. He begins before human civilization, advances quickly through the dawn of civilization and the dynasties of antiquity, but lingers on the collapse of the Western Jin and the relocation of his ancestors to the south. Of the fall of the Western Jin, he writes that his homeland was “devastated to the point of becoming a dragon wasteland,” echoing the prediction that Guo Pu is said to have made nearly 250 years earlier, on the eve of his own departure.Footnote 44 Even as many migrants’ descendants enjoyed unprecedented power and privilege among the Jiankang elite, these pieces show how the characterization of the Yongjia as a period of decline became important elements of the story of the origins and shared struggles of this new class, and gained new relevance among those who became migrants again generations later.
Acknowledgments
An early version of this essay was presented at “Chinese Migratory Realities,” a CCKF-CHCI Summer Institute, at the University of Calgary in 2018, and a revised version was presented at the “Migration and Border-crossing in Early Medieval China” workshop at Harvard University in 2019. I would like to thank the participants in both events for their engaging feedback and discussion. I would also like to thank the other contributors to this forum, Wen-Yi Huang, Xiaofei Tian, and Jin Xu, for their support, encouragement, and advice throughout the revision of this essay, as well as the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and corrections.
