| New Songs from the Jade Terrace | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Traditional Chinese | 玉臺新詠 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Simplified Chinese | 玉台新咏 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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New Songs from the Jade Terrace (Chinese: 玉臺新詠; pinyin: Yùtái xīnyǒng) is an anthology of early medieval Chinese poetry in the romantic or semi-erotic "palace style" (gongti 宮體) that dates to the late Southern dynasties period (420–589).[1] Most editions of New Songs contain 670 poems by many different authors, mainly comprising pentasyllabic poetry but also some yuefu lyrical verse and other types of poems.[1] New Songs was probably compiled around the early to mid-530s by Xu Ling, an official and scholar who served at the court of Xiao Gang, a crown prince of the Liang dynasty (502–587) who later ascended the throne as Emperor Jianwen of Liang.[2]
The term "Jade Terrace" is a reference to the luxurious palace apartments in to which upper-class women were often relegated, and a number of scholars have concluded that the New Songs was probably compiled to provide reading material for palace ladies.[3] The American sinologist Burton Watson notes that this expression may also refer to "a mirror stand of jade such as women use in their toilet; and since the Chinese are fond of elegant euphemisms for parts of the body, it may even have some more esoteric connotation."[4] New Songs from a Jade Terrace is an important collection of Chinese poetry, in part because of the individual poems which it contains, but also because the overall theme of the collection involves the discussion of sex and gender roles and ideals of love and beauty.