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“Brothers” (xiongdi 兄弟) is one of the five cardinal relationships in Chinese thought and society, joining with ruler–subject, husband–wife, father–son, and friends to fill out the five. Three of the other four (all except that between friends) are hierarchical relations, and “brothers” is too, since one is bound in Chinese to say “older brother” and “younger brother,” rather than putting them on the same footing. This introduces an element of precedence and distinction into the fraternal relationship, from which it rarely manages to be freed.
So it is with the example of famous historical brothers to be examined in this essay, the brothers Su: Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037–1101), the elder, and Su Zhe 蘇轍 (1039–1112), the younger. As exceptional as the pair was in many respects, in one trait they typified the fraternal relationship of their culture: there was never really any question of whose star shone more brightly. Su Zhe lived out his life largely in his elder brother's shadow. The few attempts by their own contemporaries to argue otherwise, which we encounter here and there, only serve to remind us how dominant and persistent was the view of Su Shi as the more formidable one of the pair, whether in thought, literary work, or deed. We could, of course, find examples in Chinese history of brothers who contradict this presumed ranking, in which the younger one outperforms his elder in the eyes of their contemporaries and of posterity, for example the Three Kingdoms period military strategist Zhuge Liang 諸葛亮 (181–234) and his much less famous older brother Zhuge Jin 諸葛瑾 (174–241), or the great fourth-century calligrapher Wang Xianzhi 王獻之 (344–386) and his vastly less prominent six elder brothers. But those are exceptional cases. Nevertheless, despite having to go through his life as “Dongpo's younger brother,” as Su Shi himself once dubbed Su Zhe (see below), that younger brother was also a person of real achievement. We will try to reconstruct something of Su Zhe's own distinctive voice and personality in the pages that follow, and to see how he coped with the role of being “younger brother” to a giant of a man.
Do we study a particular case of a cardinal human relationship because it is typical or atypical? We are...