1. There is much debate about what actually occurred that day; a variety of interpretations are found in Li Xia’s Essays, Interviews, Recollections, and Unpublished Materials of Gu Cheng (1999). Here can also be found a wide range of assessments of Gu Cheng’s life and work.

2. This anecdote is attached to Gu Xiang’s on-line version of Gu Cheng’s complete poems, see www.gucheng.net.

3. Zoule yiwanyiqianli lu: Gu Cheng shoudu mianshi shishougao (Walking the 11,000 Mile Road: Gucheng’s Poetry Manuscripts). Gu Xiang, ed. (2005), p. 28.

4. Wolfgang Kubin (“Gu Cheng: Beijing I” Essays, Interviews) discusses the sequence and gives detailed notes (his own, and those taken from Gu Cheng) on the meaning of several of the poems. The title “The City: June 4^th” is from his materials; Gu Xiang (on-line Notes), gives the alternative title, “The City: A Day in June.”

5. This expression dates from ca. 600 BC, and becomes closely linked to the earliest Chinese poetic work, the Book of Songs (Shijing) in commentaries dating from around 100 BC.  The phrase has received a great deal of attention in the study of Chinese poetics; Stephen Owen’s treatment (Readings in Chinese Literary Thought (1992)) is the most sophisticated and detailed in English.

6. Talad Asad, “The Concept of Cultural Translation,” in Writing Culture (Berkeley: U of California Press, 1986), 157.