Cranes have been one of the most beloved creatures in premodern Chinese literature. Originating with the story of Ding Lingwei 丁令威, a Han dynasty (206 BCE – 220 CE) official who returned to his home in the form of a crane after a thousand years of practicing Daoist cultivation, the crane motif has always been used to lament the vicissitudes of life in the mundane world. Focusing on the poetry of Cai Songnian 蔡松年(1105–1159), this talk explores how Cai appropriated the crane motif to write about his life experience on the Liaodong peninsula, a place closely related to the legend of Ding Lingwei.
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