River Snow / Liu Zongyuan, five-character jueju text

Liu Zongyuan's River Snow: Text, Pinyin, and Translation

Liu Zongyuan's River Snow: Text, Pinyin, and Translation with original text, pinyin, a literal rendering, a readable translation, source location, key terms, and a careful modern reading.

Start here

Liu Zongyuan River Snow original Chinese pinyin translation meaning

River Snow, Liu Zongyuan, five-character jueju text: read "千山鳥飛絕，萬徑人蹤滅。孤舟簑笠翁，獨釣寒江雪。" before the English explanation.

Original text

千山鳥飛絕，萬徑人蹤滅。孤舟簑笠翁，獨釣寒江雪。

Qian shan niao fei jue, wan jing ren zong mie. Gu zhou suo li weng, du diao han jiang xue.

Literal layer

Across a thousand mountains, bird flight has vanished; across ten thousand paths, human traces are gone. In a lone boat, an old man in straw cape and hat fishes alone in the cold river snow.

Readable layer

Liu Zongyuan's River Snow creates a world almost emptied of life, then places one solitary figure inside that cold silence.

Poem on reclusion from The Metropolitan Museum of Art open-access collection — **Poem on reclusion; Zhou Lianggong; Gift of Julia and John Curtis, 2020; The Metropolitan Museum of Art.**Poem on reclusion is used as a public-domain poem or landscape surface for line-order reading on Liu Zongyuan's River Snow. The fit is semantic: the page asks readers to inspect Liu Zongyuan, five-character jueju text and the term qian shan, while the image remains illustrative rather than proof of the exact manuscript, author portrait, or historical scene.

Reader focus

What this page helps you decide

River Snow is a four-line poem about more than a fisherman in winter. The first two lines erase ordinary movement from the world: bird flight disappears from a thousand mountains, and human traces vanish from ten thousand paths. Only after that vast absence does the poem reveal a lone boat and an old man fishing in cold river snow. The image feels still because the poem has first emptied everything around it.

Watch qian shan, wan jing, jue; these terms decide where the literal layer and the readable layer separate.
Compare this page with Du Mu's Qingming and Wang Wei's Deer Enclosure before using River Snow as a generic solitude quote.

The Poem Before Paraphrase

This block uses River Snow, Liu Zongyuan, five-character jueju text as the anchor, with "千山鳥飛絕，萬徑人蹤滅。孤舟簑笠翁，獨釣寒江雪。" kept in front of the explanation.

Full Text: The page uses the complete four-line jueju because each half changes scale. The opening couplet removes birds and people across mountains and paths. The closing couplet narrows to one boat, one old man, one action, and cold river snow. Without the opening erasure, the fisherman looks merely picturesque.

Erasing The World: Jue and mie are strong verbs. Bird flight is cut off, and human traces are extinguished or gone. The poem does not simply say it is quiet. It removes signs of ordinary life. This makes the silence active and almost absolute before the human figure appears.

Scale Before Figure: Qian shan and wan jing create huge spatial scale: a thousand mountains, ten thousand paths. Classical numbers here do not need to be counted literally. They widen the world until the final lone boat feels very small. The page keeps that order because the poem's emotional effect depends on scale.

Lone Boat: Gu zhou gives the poem's first close object. A lone boat appears only after the world has been emptied. The boat is not a social scene or a travel marker. It is the smallest possible human platform in a vast cold landscape.

Images, Sound, And Emotional Turn

Straw Cape And Hat: Suo li weng names the figure through clothing and age: an old man in straw cape and hat. The clothing belongs to weather and labor. It keeps the image concrete, not abstract. The poem lets the reader see the figure without giving biography or speech.

Fishing Alone: Du diao is the key action. The old man fishes alone in cold river snow. The line can suggest endurance, withdrawal, exile, concentration, or refusal, but the poem does not explain which one. A careful reading preserves that openness while showing how the image is built.

Liu Zongyuan's River Snow Translation Limit: This page translates han jiang xue as cold river snow to keep the three nouns close. A smoother English line could add atmosphere, but it might hide the compactness of the Chinese. The working translation therefore stays fairly literal before the commentary opens possible meanings.

Liu Zongyuan's River Snow Reading Payoff: This page differs from Du Mu's Qingming because River Snow removes travel, village, and social help; it leaves one solitary act in a stripped world. It differs from Wang Wei's Deer Enclosure because the absence here is wintry and humanly severe, not a mountain-light perception. The article gives readers a source-based way to read the famous image without turning it into a generic solitude poster.

Keep the term set visible here: qian shan, wan jing, jue. The reading changes if one of these terms is translated too smoothly.

Translation Choices To Keep Visible

Liu Zongyuan's River Snow Source Checkpoint: Let the poem move line by line before paraphrase begins: River Snow, Liu Zongyuan, five-character jueju text, opening with "千山鳥飛絕，萬徑人蹤滅。孤舟簑笠翁，獨釣寒江雪。". Keep qian shan beside the Chinese wording before accepting the readable English. On this page the source anchor is doing real work: it tells the reader where the claim begins, which phrase is being interpreted, and why the explanation should stay narrower than a later proverb or author label.

Liu Zongyuan's River Snow Reader Decision: The practical decision is whether the reader can watch image order, sound, and the emotional turn. Compare qian shan with wan jing, then ask which English phrase compresses the most. That check blocks the common mistake of summarizing the feeling before seeing how the lines create it; it also gives the page a finish line, so the reader leaves with a source habit rather than a smoother slogan.

The reading should end in one practical move: Compare this page with Du Mu's Qingming and Wang Wei's Deer Enclosure before using River Snow as a generic solitude quote.

Next reading

Links chosen for reading movement