6 _Cultural achievements of the south_

For nearly three hundred years the southern empire had witnessed
unceasing struggles between important cliques, making impossible any
peaceful development within the country. Culturally, however, the period
was rich in achievement. The court and the palaces of wealthy members of
the gentry attracted scholars and poets, and the gentry themselves had
time for artistic occupations. A large number of the best-known Chinese
poets appeared in this period, and their works plainly reflect the
conditions of that time: they are poems for the small circle of scholars
among the gentry and for cultured patrons, spiced with quotations and
allusions, elaborate in metre and construction, masterpieces of
aesthetic sensitivity--but unintelligible except to highly educated
members of the aristocracy. The works were of the most artificial type,
far removed from all natural feeling.

Music, too, was never so assiduously cultivated as at this time. But the
old Chinese music disappeared in the south as in the north, where
dancing troupes and women musicians in the Sogdian commercial colonies
of the province of Kansu established the music of western Turkestan.
Here in the south, native courtesans brought the aboriginal, non-Chinese
music to the court; Chinese poets wrote songs in Chinese for this music,
and so the old Chinese music became unfashionable and was forgotten. The
upper class, the gentry, bought these girls, often in large numbers, and
organized them in troupes of singers and dancers, who had to appear on
festal occasions and even at the court. For merchants and other people
who lacked full social recognition there were brothels, a quite natural
feature wherever there were considerable commercial colonies or
collections of merchants, including the capital of the southern empire.