As a public cultural event in the old-style poetry circle, “Leifeng Pagoda’s collapse” is characterized by a large number of participants and a long period of time. The objects of poets’ inscriptions are mostly unearthed bricks, stone carvings, sutra and other “remains” of Leifeng Pagoda. The core activity of this public event was initiated by Zhou Zuoji; Chen Zengshou actually led the alliance, and the group of Qing loyalists used “Bashengganzhou” as the cipai to inscribe ci poetry on the Baoqieyinjing collected by Zhou Zuoji. It is worth noting that Qing loyalists regarded the collapsed Leifeng Pagoda as an intuitive symbol of the abrupt interruption of their regime and Confucianism. Under the “shuli” tradition, the strong meaning chain of “sorrow of shuli-Buddhist pagoda-national fortune” prompted Leifeng Pagoda to complete the upgrading of its meaning after its collapse. In the responsorial poems of “Ganzhou” filled with the feeling of eschaton, Qing loyalists endowed Leifeng Pagoda with a novel image of “dragon,” but at the same time, the highly intertextually responsorial text was full of various types of ambiguity and dislocation: For instance, loyalists used the literal meanings of “dragon,” “king” and “sky” in some Buddhist vocabularies to express their meanings in twists and turns, and mourned the monarchy.
For Chen Zengshou, a specifical poet in this event, “Leifeng Pagoda's collapse” was also a major disaster in his personal life course. Chen had a very deep topophilia with Leifeng Pagoda. I longitudinally investigate Chen’s poems which regarded Leifeng Pagoda as the object of the writing, from the 1911 Revolution to the after period of Leifeng Pagoda’s collapse. So we can find the subtle relationship between the evolution of Chen’s mentality and the changes in the image as well as meaning of the Leifeng Pagoda in Chen’s writings. In addition, I also intend to explore the interaction between poets, landscape and poetry, the unique bearing capacity of old style poetry writing to major social and historical events, as well as the tense and delicate relationship between the old and new literature in the 1920s.
