BOOK REVIEWS
337
guiding me to the foot of the Peak of Yellow Crane; there, after my contemplation of the Hiding Dragon Spring, I begin to search the Cave of Dragon and Reach the Cave of Immortal Lady”32. In Vol. I, from the last line of p. 236 up to line 21 in p. 237, the English translation deals with this poem. Once again, in Plate LXXX-L, from the last two characters of line 17 till the end of the inscription, the content is to be identified as Li E's third poem. It is entitled "A Travel to the Temple of Crane and Forest,33 Prof. Li's English translation of this poem is at Vol. I, lines 22 to 29 on p. 237.
In the "Collected Poems Written in the Fan-hsien Mountain Studio" all poems are chronologically arranged, and the dates of each year are always recorded under the first poem of each year. Thus, according to such chronology, these three pieces cited are all Li E's poems written in 1735. That is, they are all composed one year before Chin Nung had completed the Drenowaltz album, since the latter is dated 1736. In logic, it seems alright for Chin Nung to inscribe Li E's three poems on the last leaf of this album since the two men seem to have been very good friends since at least 171434. However, it is absolutely impossible for Chin Nung to have inscribed two poems in 1736, one by Li E and other by Ma Yueh-kuan, to be written as late as 1748 in leaf 11 of this album.
The significance of this discovery should be interpreted critically. The date of the inscription in this Drenowaltz album is some 12 years earlier than the actual date for composing the poems, and so the authenticity of the former is obviously doubtful. This brings us to the question of whether the calligraphy is really by Chin Nung or is perhaps by a very good copist. To think even one step further, the problem of whether extraordinarily elaborate landscapes should really be accepted as authentic works of this artist needs to be reconsidered.
There happens also to be a third problem of identification. For instance, on the 1st leaf, as well as on that with Wu Ta-chang's colophon of Tai Itsi's album of ‘Landscapes after Great Masters' (Vol. II, Fig. 56, plates XCIV-XCIX), there appears a number of collectors' seals. Of them, as Prof. Li has specifically noted, (Vol. I, p. 262) "Six of Chang Hsiang-ning, ho p'ing-chai, who cannot be identified, one which cannot be identified”.
In fact, this unidentified collector is not a mystery. He is Chang Hsiang-ning, a contemporary Cantonese literary man, a