The Ninth Eccentric of Yangzhou

Walk from Yixing number one factory past the gate of the number two factory, and then cross the street. The studio of the 'Ninth Eccentric of Yangzhou' is two small rooms slightly below the level of the street. There is an eccentric mix of not so old antiques, and dusty paintings hung so close together that the edges are frayed. Two bird cages hang near the door, from the bottom of one of these hangs a tiny fighting cricket cage with the dried carpace of a formerly large cricket.

The "Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou" were eight scholars and artists from Yangzhou, Jiangsu province. The Ninth Eccentric is certainly an artist. The casual observer recognizes this fact immediately as he wears two scarves, a velveteen suit jacket, long hair and a goatee.

This artist's paintings were not very appealing to me in terms of style, but his Yixing carving was some of the best I have seen in Yixing. I selected a tea canister and a small tray which I use for gongfucha. It is not my intention to come across overly sarcastic in my description. The workshop was cold, the paintings not to my liking, and the artist himself likable and strange at the same time. There was an overabundance of Mao era memorabilia and "antiques" of this kind. At the same time he reminds me of the old books describing Yangxian (Yixing) pots. They werethe product of a co-operation of potters and scholars who would carve a line on the pots, or design their ideal tea pot and press their chop underneath it. This 9th Eccentric of Yangzhou truly creates some beautiful Yixing artwork

Xiaoguang's Tea Tray

My friend just switched to a new larger tea tray.  His old one was bamboo, and beginning to split apart.  His new one is also bamboo, but it is laminated under high pressure with lots of adhesive and a good topcoat of laminate or something similar.  On the left hand side of the tea tray is found the design pictured here .  I had looked at it a few times until I noticed something wrong.  The legend in the upper right hand corner reads as followed (re transcribed from up-down, right-left to left-right, up-down)

山路庄

雅客

少。胡

琴一曲

代RA

DIO

I translated the poem, and have arranged it as the artist has above

On the mountain road, the small hut

is refined, travelers

are few. The er-

hu's song

instead of a RA

DIO

The use of one English word strikes me so funny here.  At first I didn't understand that the five English letters were one word.   The free verse is beautiful, but what is the English word doing hanging off the end making it almost impossible for English speakers or Chinese speakers to get a full understanding without help unless they speak at least a little of the other language?  Who came up with this? I like how the author made such a simple legend into a poem and a thing of beauty as much through the wording, simplicity and arrangement as through the scene described.  Then, it seems the author becomes a little bit evil... was he thinking that most people who bought this would never really read the whole thing?  Was it a jibe at the complacency of humans to add this bit of a foreign language just to make the customer work for this little gem?  If so, he certainly provided me with some entertainment. My only answer to the question is that this is a haiku, and it works out to the proper number of syllables in Japanese when the English for radio is added.  Unfortunately I don't speak Japanese, so I have no good way of testing this hypothesis.  It works out to 13 syllables in Chinese(including the English), and looks like free verse, although very short.