Abstract：It has been believed for a long time that the Orchid Pavilion Poems, which were considered playing a significant role in the pivotal shift in the history of poetry, maintained their original appearance in the Eastern Jin Dynasty. In reality, this proposition is actually based on a misunderstanding of the textual appearance. Only by re-examining the development process and internal causes of the changes of these poems can we reveal their true nature and reassess their significance in literary history. The earliest existing manuscript is The Orchid Pavilion Poems attributed to the Tang Dynasty calligrapher Liu Gongquan. It transcribes 37 poems by 26 authors, with each poem consisting of either 4 or 8 lines. As noted in the manuscript, its purpose was to “select the best lines”, and thus it is not a complete representation. The most complete single version that exists today is the Five-Character Orchid Pavilion Poem by Wang Xizhi, attributed to the Tang Dynasty calligrapher Lu Jianzhi. It consists of 5 chapters with a total of 52 lines, and its original manuscript is likely a copy of Wang Xizhi’s original work.During the process of copying and transmission, as the medium of the manuscript changed, the original information was subject to additions and deletions. This led to misunderstandings and biases in the understanding of the Orchid Pavilion Poems. Representative works in this regard include A Collection of Local Works in Kuaiji (《会稽掇英总集》) and An Investigation Around Orchid Pavilion (《兰亭考》) in the Song Dynasty. The Orchid Pavilion Poems included in these works are essentially consistent with the version attributed to Liu Gongquan, but they differ in order and have relatively more accurate wording. In fact, both are the results of reorganizing the text attributed to Liu Gongquan. There are instances where annotations have been inserted into the main text, and the textual contradictions thus created have not been completely eliminated even after revisions.Beyond textual correction, the adjustment and expansion of “paratextual” elements such as author information and the order of poems and prefaces have made the new texts appear even more ancient and reliable. By examining the age of Wang Xianzhi, who was newly added and considered not to have written poetry, as well as the titles of the authors Xie An and Sun Tong, it can be determined that the information about the attendees recorded in the A Collection of Local Works in Kuaiji and An Investigation Around Orchid Pavilion did not originate from the old collections of the Jin Dynasty, but rather was fabricated by people from the Tang and Song Dynasties. Such textual forgery and pseudographia were common during the Song Dynasty. However, regardless of this, the information about the authors, together with the preface and the poetic texts, has created a complete new cultural memory of the “Orchid Pavilion Poetry Collection”. This has become an important basis for Song and Yuan literati to reconstruct the literature and culture of the Eastern Jin Dynasty. In the realm of art, the 42 figures, including those who were pseudographically added, became the main subjects of paintings themed on the Orchid Pavilion. In literature, the “Continued Orchid Pavilion Gathering” presided over by Liu Renben in the Yuan Dynasty and the poems inscribed in Zhao Zhong’s Orchid Pavilion Painting demonstrated a close imitation of the textual structure and discourse of the Orchid Pavilion poems that had been established since the Song Dynasty. This directly reflects that the misperception of the appearance of the Orchid Pavilion Poems was fully solidified during this period and has continued to influence to this day.The phrase文多, which appears twice in the annotations of the manuscript attributed to Liu Gongquan, is used to explain the reason for the excerpt. By examining the meaning in its historical context, it is clear that it specifically refers to the abundance of literary expressions. From this, it can be inferred that the original form of the Orchid Pavilion Poems should not be far from the 52-line structure of Wang Xizhi’s Five-Character Orchid Pavilion Poems attributed to Lu Jianzhi, rather than the 4-line or 8-line versions. Given the strong correlation between the forms of poems in the context of gift-giving and poetic exchanges during the medieval period, the structure of the 52-line work can serve as a benchmark to attempt a reconstruction of the positions of the existing Orchid Pavilion Poems within their original compositions.Overall, the literary historical significance of the Orchid Pavilion Poems in poetics, especially in terms of poetic form, does not point to the era in which they were created, but rather to the era in which they were received.
裘石. 记忆异相：兰亭诗经典化中的错位建构[J]. 浙江大学学报(人文社会科学版), 2026, 56(2): 126-137.
Qiu Shi. Misalignment in the Canonization Process of the Orchid Pavilion Poems. JOURNAL OF ZHEJIANG UNIVERSITY, 2026, 56(2): 126-137.
2026, Vol. 56 
