The Han Stele
English translation and interpretation are being reviewed.
彼何人哉轩与羲。
誓将上雪列圣耻，
坐法宫中朝四夷。
淮西有贼五十载，
封狼生貙貙生罴。
不据山河据平地，
长戈利矛日可麾。
帝得圣相相曰度，
贼斫不死神扶持。
腰悬相印作都统，
阴风惨澹天王旗。
愬武古通作牙爪，
仪曹外郎载笔随。
行军司马智且勇，
十四万众犹虎貔。
入蔡缚贼献太庙，
功无与让恩不訾。
帝曰汝度功第一，
汝从事愈宜为辞。
愈拜稽首蹈且舞，
金石刻画臣能为。
古者世称大手笔，
此事不系于职司。
当仁自古有不让，
言讫屡颔天子颐。
公退斋戒坐小阁，
濡染大笔何淋漓。
点窜《尧典》《舜典》字，
涂改《清庙》《生民》诗。
文成破体书在纸，
清晨再拜铺丹墀。
表曰臣愈昧死上，
咏神圣功书之碑。
碑高三丈字如斗，
负以灵鳌蟠以螭。
句奇语重喻者少，
谗之天子言其私。
长绳百尺拽碑倒，
粗砂大石相磨治。
公之斯文若元气，
先时已入人肝脾。
汤盘孔鼎有述作，
今无其器存其辞。
呜呼圣王及圣相，
相与烜赫流淳熙。
公之斯文不示后，
曷与三五相攀追。
愿书万本诵万遍，
口角流沫右手胝。
传之七十有二代，
以为封禅玉检明堂基。
English translation
The Yuanhe Son of Heaven, of godlike martial bearing, who are they beside him, Xuanyuan and Fuxi?
He swore to wipe away the shame of the emperors before him, and sitting in the Hall of Law, to receive the homage of the four barbarians.
In Huaixi there have been rebels for fifty years, the great wolf breeding the wildcat, the wildcat breeding the bear.
They hold not mountains and rivers but the open plain, with long pikes and sharp spears they would think to wave back the sun.
The emperor gained a sage minister, and the minister was named Du, though rebels struck him, the gods upheld him.
At his waist hung the minister's seal, as commander in chief, a somber wind stirred the Son of Heaven's banners.
Su, Wu, Gu, and Tong served him as claws and teeth, the rites officer and the junior clerk followed with their brushes.
The army's marshal was wise and brave, his hundred and forty thousand men were like tigers and pards.
They entered Cai, bound the rebel, and presented him at the Grand Temple, no merit would yield to his, no favor was too great.
The emperor said: Du, your merit is first, and your associate Yu should compose the record.
Yu bowed with his head to the ground and danced for joy: to carve inscriptions on bronze and stone, this your servant can do.
Since old such writing has been called the great brush, this matter belongs not to the offices of routine.
Where duty is clear one does not yield, as the ancients knew, and when he had done, the Son of Heaven nodded again and again.
The duke withdrew, fasted and purified, and sat in his small pavilion, dipping his great brush, how the ink flowed!
He altered words of the Canons of Yao and Shun, revised lines of the poems Qingmiao and Shengmin.
The piece was done, written on paper in a style that broke the mold, at dawn he bowed twice and laid it upon the red steps.
In his memorial he said: your servant Yu, risking death, presents this, a song of the sage and sacred merit, to be cut upon a stele.
The stele stood thirty feet high, its characters the size of pecks, borne upon a sacred tortoise, coiled about with dragons.
The lines were strange, the words weighty, few understood, and slanderers told the Son of Heaven it was written from private motive.
With a hundred-foot rope they dragged the stele down, with coarse sand and great stones they ground away the writing.
Yet this prose of the duke's is like the primal breath, it had already entered men's livers and spleens.
The basins of Tang and the tripods of Kong bore inscriptions, the vessels are gone, but their words remain.
Alas, the sage king and the sage minister, together they shone and spread a pure light.
If this prose of the duke's were not shown to later ages, how could men climb to match the Three and the Five?
I would copy it ten thousand times, chant it ten thousand times, till foam flecks my lips and my right hand is callused,
passing it down through seventy-two reigns, to be the jade record of the Feng and Shan sacrifices, the foundation of the Hall of Light.
Meaning
The emperor of the Yuanhe era was endowed by Heaven with a godlike and martial bearing, fit to be compared with Xuanyuan and Fuxi of high antiquity.
He took an oath to wash away the humiliation borne by the emperors of past ages, and sat firm in the palace, receiving the tribute of the barbarian peoples on every side.
The rebels of Huaixi had been in revolt for fifty years, holding their territory from generation to generation.
Trusting in their own brute strength, they held no fastness of mountain or river, but carved out their fief upon the open plain; they even dreamt of defying Heaven's mandate by force and rebelling openly against the court.
The sage sovereign gained a worthy minister in Pei Du; when the rebels attempted to assassinate him they did not succeed, for a spirit watched over him.
With the chancellor's seal at his girdle, Pei Du led the army to the front; the emperor's banners flew high in the cold wind.
Among the able generals under his command were Li, Wu, Gu and Tong; a director of the Ministry of Rites went with the army as secretary.
There was also Han Yu, the provost of the expedition, wise and valiant alike, and a hundred and forty thousand
Background
Read the background
In 817, the twelfth year of the Yuanhe era of Emperor Xianzong, the chief minister Pei Du led troops to pacify Huaixi, but it was the general Li Su who first broke into Caizhou and took the rebel Wu Yuanji alive. When Emperor Xianzong commanded Han Yu to compose "The Stele of the Pacification of Huaixi," Han dwelt chiefly on Pei Du's strategic direction in carrying out the emperor's will, which roused Li Su's resentment. Li Su's wife (a daughter of Princess Tang'an) went into the palace to complain that the inscription was untrue, and Emperor Xianzong ordered Duan Wenchang, an academician of the Hanlin Academy, to write a new text for carving on stone, one that took a very different view. Li Shangyin agreed entirely with Han Yu's position.