Since the Wei and Jin Dynasties, "the old and the old retired, but the mountains and rivers were graceful and graceful", and poetry with pastoral poems as its description content rose. Scholars of later generations have different opinions about the origin of landscape poems and pastoral poems. Broadly speaking, the origin of China's classical pastoral poems can be traced back to the pre-Qin period. The pre-Qin period is the period of the emergence and development of China's poetry, which occupies an important position in the history of China's poetry. The ancient working people created the economy, culture and art at that time with their own labor, and also created the most primitive poetry. Many poems in that period were closely related to labor. "It is also a song of persuasion for those who hold big trees today to call out evil promises before responding" ("Huai Nan Zi Dao Ying Xun"); "The land is against its house, the water belongs to its valley, the insects do nothing, and the vegetation belongs to its ze" (Book of Rites, Suburb Special), all of which are inseparable from agricultural labor.

China's first poetry collection, The Book of Songs, collected 305 poems from the early Western Zhou Dynasty to the mid-Spring and Autumn Period. Among them, "National Wind" mostly shows the productive labor of the broad masses of working people and their anger and accusation against the reactionary rulers, and profoundly reflects the social life at that time. July is a narrative of slaves' hard work all the year round, which profoundly exposes the cruelty of slave owners, is a microcosm of social life at that time, and comprehensively reflects slaves' pastoral productive labor from spring ploughing to severe winter. "In spring, the sun shines, and Amin is ploughing. Women carry baskets and follow them to pick soft mulberry. " The poem depicts the bright sunshine in spring, birds full of life singing, girls walking on country roads with bamboo baskets, picking mulberry and raising silkworms. "If you don't get enough crops, you'll get 300 tons of grain." "If you don't hunt, Hu Zhan's court will die" (Guo Feng Jian Tan). Since the Book of Songs, poems describing landscapes and pastoral areas have been scattered in the poems of past dynasties and become a steady stream of excellent works.

If some chapters in The Book of Songs reflect the pastoral life of ancient working people and can be regarded as the source of China's classical pastoral poetry, then as a literary genre, the pastoral poetry school appeared in the Jin and Song Dynasties. Since Tao Yuanming returned to Gengzi at the end of Jin Dynasty, he really brought pastoral landscape into his aesthetic and literary vision.

Of course, the formation and rise of literary schools is not a person's accidental behavior, but has a wide range of social and natural reasons, and is also the result of the comprehensive "collision" between the pursuit of ancient literati and social phenomena. To sum up, there are many reasons, as follows. First of all, it was the rise of landlord manor economy at that time. Manor life has become a realistic and ideal life for the literati class. The changed environment not only changed their aesthetic taste, but also affected their literary creation theme. Secondly, it is the geographical factors of mountains and rivers in the south. After the Eastern Jin Dynasty, the cultural and political center of gravity gradually moved south, and the delicate and gentle side of the southern pastoral landscape made these natural objects an important object of literary expression. Third, it was the product of the complex and contradictory relationship between people at all levels at that time. Contradictions within the ruling class have led some people to wander between pursuing fame and profit and avoiding harm, so the wind of "avoiding the DPRK" has intensified. Some people stay in Shan Ye, or simply hide in the mountains and rivers, and express their lofty aspirations through mountains and rivers, so that the relationship between man and nature is closer. In addition, the prevalence of "metaphysics" at that time also played an important media catalytic role in the rise of pastoral poetry. At that time, the scholar-officials pursued the beauty of personality, and regarded whether they could appreciate the beauty of mountains and rivers as an important criterion to measure a person's personality realm. This aesthetic relationship and viewpoint between man and nature is also one of the factors contributing to the rise and development of pastoral poetry.

The pastoral poems of Jin and Song Dynasties are Tao Yuanming's pastoral poems and Xie Lingyun's landscape poems. Before that, there were not many descriptions of natural landscape in poetry, but strictly speaking, most of them were just as a way to cheer up the spirit, or to create an atmosphere with scenery, which was not the main content of poetry. Therefore, we say that the genre of pastoral poetry was formed in the Jin and Song Dynasties. Since then, pastoral poetry has been separated from the vassal status attached to other poems and independent of the poetry world.

In the folk songs of Yuefu in the Southern Dynasties, only a few of them simply wrote about rural labor, all of which were similar to Shang Mo Sang written by Yuefu in Han Dynasty, which permeated the description of love in working life. Such as Caisang, Lapu and Journey. In fact, Xizhou Qu, the representative work of Yuefu folk songs in the Southern Dynasties, is used to express the theme of love, and labor scenes such as "picking lotus" and "making lotus" seem to fall into the category of pastoral life poems. Writing poems about the working life of the working people, the folk songs of the Northern Dynasties also showed a unique style, such as the famous Chilean songs.

Wang Wei's Handed-down Works Snow Stream Map

In the prosperous Tang Dynasty, due to social stability, economic prosperity, the advocacy of Buddhism and Taoism, and the popularity of hermit thought, China's classical pastoral poetry flourished again. Representative poets are Meng Haoran and Wang Wei. They are all famous for describing pastoral poems, and their artistic styles are similar, so they are called the school of pastoral poems. As for the great romantic poet Li Bai, he spent most of his life roaming. Long-term and in-depth visits and observations have enabled him to write a large number of poems describing the magnificent mountains and rivers of the motherland, many of which are landscape poems that have never been sung before.

During the Southern Song Dynasty, the inheritance and development of landscape pastoral poetry should be the first to promote the "four masters of Zhongxing". They broke through the barriers of Jiangxi poetry school and made great achievements in poetry creation. Among them, Yang Wanli, for example, draws on natural materials, absorbs ordinary things that can be seen at any time in life, and blends his true feelings with fresh and lively language that appeals to both refined and popular tastes, forming a "sincere style" with novel artistic conception and full of interest. He writes about quiet ponds or rural scenery in summer. He is good at capturing images, and his poems are full of life. Fan Chengda, on the other hand, pays attention to real life. Whether he is an official or retired, he shows that he is a poet with patriotic thoughts and cares about people's livelihood. Fan Chengda is famous for his pastoral poems, among which the most successful is sixty Four Seasons Pastoral Music written by Shi Hu in his later years. These sixty quatrains of four seasons are divided into five groups: spring, late spring, summer, autumn and winter, with twelve poems in each group, which constitute a whole group of poems, profoundly and comprehensively reflecting the rural life in the south of the Yangtze River. These poems use natural and fluent language to outline an idyllic picture full of life. There are magnificent and beautiful natural scenery, simple and touching customs, and joyful labor songs. Of course, in Fan Chengda's pastoral poems, there is also indignation at the oppression and exploitation of the people by the exploiting classes. The poet Lu You wrote in "The Farmer's Sigh" the tragic situation that the peasants worked hard but could not get enough food and clothing, and were forced to rent by the government. There are also some poems by Lu You, which vividly depict the magnificent scenery of nature and simple rural life customs, and constitute a unique picture of social life. Although these are not the main body of Lu You's poems, there is no doubt that they can all be classified as pastoral poems.

With the development and change of society and the rise of different literary styles (such as Ci and Qu), poetry has experienced its heyday since the Tang Dynasty. As one of the contents of poetry, pastoral poetry has rarely developed since the Southern Song Dynasty, although its flow has never stopped.

Looking at the origin of China's classical pastoral poetry, we can see that it originated from the agricultural production of ancient working people and was rooted in the soil of realism. In different historical periods, due to different historical backgrounds, it may rise or fall. It records the life and feelings of the ancient working people, and also records the ancient people's aesthetic concept of nature and working life.