Five Hundred Years of Chinese Poetry offers the only historical survey, in any language, of this important span of Chinese poetry. Written by the foremost Japanese sinologist of this century, and translated here in a lucid analogue to his famous prose style, the work provides a brief but comprehensive review of the period's literary history, a sketch of its political and social history in relation to literature, and a rendering of more than one hundred and fifty poems.

Originally published in 1989.

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