Poem in running script

Picture stones from Taihang look like crowding clouds,
Human craft cannot achieve the majesty of Heaven's art.
The flower-and-stone convoys ended and Bian River froze,
Snow Wave Studio was destroyed, winter clouds grew dark.
Master Su is long departed and his stone is gone as well,
The inscription that still remains in a desolate town.
Along Black Water in Liangzhou, a jade axe drew the line,
And the sovereign kingdom of Dali opened its national gates.
Sun Zhiwei has been dead now for eight hundred years,
But into the Diancang Mountains his soul was summoned back.
The painter's powdered drawing entered the bones of the rock,
The spiritual force of the poet penetrated the roots of Heaven.
Breakers soaring up to Heaven copied the whiteness of clouds,
Ancient snows immured in earth transformed to scars of jade.
On slice after slice, the waves of Erhai magically appeared,
That single billow from Dingzhou was not the final say.
Moreover these toppling waves crashing on the quay,
Stand in a screen and do not use Su Shi's level basin.
The plum blossoms before my studio seem like fragrant snow,
One glance at Master Snow, and the Way is there before me.

An exceptionally erudite scholar, Ruan Yuan was one of the most important and influential figures in the cultural and intellectual milieu of early nineteenth century China. Born in Yizheng, Jiangsu Province, a large town on the lower Yangtze River near the city of Yangzhou, Ruan Yuan passed the national examinations in 1789 and pursued a highly successful official career. After 1799, he was governor of several provinces, including Yunnan (1826-35), where he was able to pursue his passion for collecting marble "picture stones" from the area of Dali, the main subject of the above poem. Ruan Yuan composed his poem to follow the same rhyme scheme as an earlier verse, the Snow Wave Stone, by the famous Song dynasty poet Su Shi (1037-1101), who also wrote a prose inscription on the subject. Su's poem and inscription were both quite well-known in Ruan Yuan's day, especially among stone fanciers such as Ruan, and their imagery, diction, and content underlie various lines in his poem.

Ruan Yuan's contributions to the study of ancient script are particularly notable and he wrote two important theoretical essays on the evolution of calligraphic scripts and styles, dividing their historical development into northern and southern schools, each with a distinct lineage of successive masters. Closely reflecting these scholarly interests, Ruan Yuan himself wrote in various styles of seal script, clerical script, and standard script, but most frequently encountered are his works in running script, as seen in this scroll, which fall squarely within the model-letters tradition favored by the court. Reflecting more of a scholarly than artistic sense of style, this scroll is an excellent example of Ruan's limber, if somewhat conventional, approach.