Extant Ci Poems from Liwei

Lihwei Ci Cun is a collection of ci poetry by the renowned agricultural historian Shi Shenghan. Shi Shenghan (1907–1971) devoted his later years to collating and studying China's ancient agricultural scientific heritage, completing fourteen major works including A Modern Annotation of Qimin Yaoshu and A Collated and Annotated Edition of Nongzheng Quanshu. He is regarded as one of the key founders of the discipline of Chinese agricultural history. In her eight-thousand-character preface to Lihwei Ci Cun, Professor Ye Jiaying writes: "The character and moral sensibility revealed in this collection, together with the author's profound classical learning, moved me directly. Professor Shi Shenghan was born with a sensibility peculiarly attuned to the beauty of the ci—a ci poet's temperament: delicate, sensitive, naturally in harmony with the aesthetic of the form. He was entirely free of the self-satisfied airs and social versifying habits common among poets; everything in his ci is the most sincere and deepest 'blockage' of the heart. Though born with a ci poet's sensibility, he never received the traditional training of a conventional student of ci; yet from childhood he cultivated a profound grounding in classical literature. But for all his deep cultivation of and interest in classical literature, his vocation lay not in literature but in science. These manifold and contradictory elements give Professor Shi's ci an altogether extraordinary character." This volume reproduces two rare handwritten manuscripts of Shi Shenghan's ci, together with a selection of his seal impressions, in facsimile at the back, the seal impressions printed in two colors. It also includes more than ten rare photographs of Shi Shenghan and related calligraphy as color inserts.