Shăn Are the support of Kâu, Screens to all the states, Diffusing (their influence) over the four quarters of the kingdom.
Full of activity is the chief of Shăn, And the king would employ him to continue the services (of his fathers), With his capital in Hsieh[1], Where he should be a pattern to the states of the south. The king gave charge to the earl of Shâo, To arrange all about the residence of the chief of Shăn, Where he should do what was necessary for the regions of the south, And where his posterity might maintain his merit.
Of the services of the chief of Shăn The foundation was laid by the earl of Shâo, Who first built the walls (of his city), And then completed his ancestral temple[2]. When the temple was completed, wide and grand, The king conferred on the chief of Shâo Four noble steeds, With the hooks for the trappings of the breast-bands, glittering bright[3].
- ↑ Hsieh was in the present Făng Kâu of the department of Nan-yang.
- ↑ Compare with this the account given, in ode 3 of the first decade, of the settling of 'the ancient duke Than-fû' in the plain of Kâu. Here, as there, the great religious edifice, the ancestral temple, takes precedence of all other buildings in the new city.
- ↑ The steeds with their equipments were tokens of the royal favour, usually granted on occasions of investiture. The conferring of them was followed immediately by the departure of the newly-invested prince to his charge.
'mountains' in lines 1 and 3 is the same that occurs in the title of Yâo's minister. On the statement about the mountains sending 'down a spirit, Hwang Hsün, a critic of the Sung dynasty, says that it is merely a personification of the poet, to show how high Heaven had a mind to revive the fortunes of Kâu, and that we need not trouble ourselves about whether there was such a spirit or not.'
