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322
THE SHIH KING.
DECADE II.
on your private fields[1], All over the thirty lî[2]. Attend to your ploughing, With your ten thousand men all in pairs.
Ode 3. The Kâu Lû.
Celebrating the representatives of former dynasties, who had come to court to assist at a sacrifice in the ancestral temple.
This piece may have been used when the king was dismissing his distinguished guests in the ancestral temple. See the introductory note to this Part, pp. 300, 301.
A flock of egrets is flying, About the marsh there in the west[3]. My visitors came, With an (elegant) carriage like those birds.
There, (in their states), not disliked, Here, (in Kâu), never tired of;—They are sure, day and night, To perpetuate their fame.
- ↑ The mention of 'the private fields' implies that there were also 'the public fields,' cultivated by the husbandmen in common, in behalf of the government. As the people are elsewhere introduced, wishing that the rain might first fall on 'the public fields,' to show their loyalty, so the king here mentions only 'the private fields,' to show his sympathy and consideration for the people.
- ↑ For the cultivation of the ground, the allotments of single families were separated by a small ditch; ten allotments, by a larger; a hundred, by what we may call a brook; a thousand, by a small stream; and ten thousand, by a river. The space occupied by 10,000 families formed a square of a little more than thirty-two lî. We may suppose that this space was intended by the round number of thirty lî in the text. So at least Kăng Khang-khăng explained it.
- ↑ These two lines make the piece allusive. See the Introduction, p. 279.
