The late Professor Ch'en Yin-k'o (2) suggested the Chinese year corresponding to 578 A.D. as the date of composition of the ‘Lament’. His reasoning is as follows: Line 8 of the Preface mentions the fall of Chiang-ling in the year chia-hsü, or 554. The phrase chou hsing in line 11 seems to indicate the passage of a 12-year Jupiter cycle between that and the composition of the poem (e.g. Morohashi, 3441/314). This would suggest the date 566 (= 554 + 12) for the ‘Lament’. Yü Hsin would have been 53 years old then, and could reasonably have spoken of his ‘twilight years’, as in line 510. On the other hand, he says in lines 505–6, ‘The rest have almost all withered and fallen, And, another Ling-kuang, I alone remain.’ He could hardly consider that he ‘alone remained’ in 566, since Wang Pao, the other great Southern writer exiled in the North, was then still alive and would die only eleven years later, in 577. If, however, we add still another 12-year Jupiter cycle to 566, we arrive at 578. Wang Pao would have died the year before, and Yü, then 65, would indeed have been the only one left.

I agree with Professor Ch'en that a date would be welcome, and my own subjective feeling is that the ‘Lament’ probably was written around the time he suggests. It seems to me, however, that the critical phrase in line 11 makes better sense if we reject the idea of the Jupiter cycle.