Li Bai

• 1. The Banished Immortal

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  Around the year 701, in the Silk Road city of Suyab, in what is now Kyrgyzstan, a merchant family welcomed a son they named Li Bai. His mother, according to his biography in the New Book of Tang, had dreamed of the planet Venus while giving birth. So they gave him the courtesy name Taibai, meaning Great White, the name for Venus at that time. He would grow up far from that frontier, in the mountains of Sichuan, and he would become one of the greatest poets of the Tang dynasty. Roughly a thousand of his poems still survive. He has been called the Immortal of Poetry, the Wine Immortal, and the Banished Transcendent. But how did a merchant's son from the edge of the empire end up seasoning soup with an emperor? Why was he sent away from the royal court in disgrace? And how did a man celebrated for friendship and wine come to die, his exact date and cause lost to history? This is the story of Li Bai, the poet whom one admirer nicknamed the Immortal Exiled from Heaven.

• 2. A Name Of Many Tongues

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  Li Bai has been written as Li Po, Li Bo, and Ri Haku, and the variation is no accident. His given name carries two pronunciations in Standard Chinese, the literary reading bo and the colloquial reading bai. Earlier writers used the Wade-Giles system while modern scholars prefer pinyin, multiplying the spellings further. Scholars have even reconstructed how he and others would have said it in the Tang dynasty, a sound rendered as Bhaek. Beyond his given name, Li Bai carried a small constellation of titles. He was known by the art name Qinglian Jushi, meaning Householder of Azure Lotus. Admirers called him the Immortal of Poetry, the Wine Immortal, the Banished Transcendent, and the Poet-Knight-Errant. In Japan, where his work also took root, his courtesy name was romanized as Ri Taihaku. When the poet He Zhizhang first met him, he bestowed a nickname that would follow Li Bai across centuries: the Immortal Exiled from Heaven.

• 3. Swordplay And Wild Youth

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  "When I was fifteen, I was fond of sword play, and with that art I challenged quite a few great men." So Li Bai described his own youth in Sichuan, where his father had secretly moved the family in 705, when the boy was four years old. There is mystery around that relocation, because moving out of the border regions generally required a legal authorization the family appears to have lacked. The young Li read widely, including the Confucian classics The Classic of Poetry and the Classic of History, alongside astrological and metaphysical materials that Confucians tended to avoid. He could compose poetry before he was ten, yet he disdained to take the literacy exam. He tamed wild birds, fenced, hunted, and gave money and arms to aid the poor and oppressed, living by the knight-errant tradition known as youxia. Before he was twenty, Li had fought and killed several men, apparently for reasons of chivalry. In 720, the governor Su Ting interviewed him and judged him a genius. Li expressed a wish to become an official, yet he never took the civil service examination that would have been the usual path.

• 4. Four Marriages And A Restless Map

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  In his mid-twenties, about 725, Li Bai left Sichuan, sailing down the Yangzi River through Dongting Lake to Nanjing and beginning his days of wandering. He met celebrities and gave away much of his wealth to needy friends. His travels carried him up and down the great rivers of China for the rest of his life. Li married four times across that restless map. His first marriage, in 727 in Anlu, Hubei, was to the granddaughter of a former government minister from the well-connected Xu family. He made this his home for about ten years, living on Mount Bi in a house owned by his wife's family. His second marriage, in 744 in what is now the Liangyuan District of Henan, was to a fellow poet surnamed Zong. With her he had children and exchanged poems full of love for her and for them. Lady Zong was a granddaughter of Zong Chuke, an important official under the Tang and during the reign of Wu Zetian. In 735, in Shanxi, Li intervened in a court martial against Guo Ziyi, an act of help that the future top general would one day repay in full.

• 5. Soup From The Emperor

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  The Daoist priest Wu Yun was summoned to the imperial court in 742, and there his praise of Li Bai was great. That praise led Emperor Xuanzong, also known as Emperor Minghuang, to summon the poet to the court in Chang'an. After an initial audience where Li was questioned about his political views, the Emperor was so impressed that he held a banquet in his honor. He was even said to personally season the poet's soup. Xuanzong employed Li as a translator, since the poet knew at least one non-Chinese language. He was given a post at the Hanlin Academy, providing scholarly expertise and poetry for the throne. When summoned to the palace, Li was often drunk, yet quite capable of performing on the spot. The favor did not last. While drunk, Li once got his boots muddy and Gao Lishi, the most politically powerful eunuch in the palace, was asked to help remove them in front of the Emperor. Gao took offense, and afterward persuaded the royal consort Yang Guifei to resent Li's poems about her. At their urging, Xuanzong reluctantly sent the poet away, with large gifts of gold and silver. Li Bai then formally became a Taoist and resumed his wandering for the next ten some years.

• 6. Rebellion, Exile, And A Reflected Moon

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  At the end of 755, the disorders instigated by the rebel general An Lushan burst across the land, eventually leaving most of Northern China devastated by war and famine. The Emperor fled to Sichuan and abdicated, while the Crown Prince declared himself emperor and head of government. Li Bai became a staff adviser to Prince Yong, one of Xuanzong's sons, named in 756 to share imperial power as a general. But the brothers fell to fighting each other with their armies. When Prince Yong's forces were defeated in 757, Li escaped, was captured, imprisoned in Jiujiang, and sentenced to death. Guo Ziyi, the very general Li had saved from court martial decades before, intervened, offering to exchange his official rank for the poet's life. Lady Zong and others wrote petitions for clemency. The death sentence was commuted to exile in Yelang, in what is now Guizhou, a remote region considered outside the main sphere of Chinese civilization. Li traveled there at a leisurely pace, stopping for social visits that sometimes lasted months. His poem Struggling up the Three Gorges hints that his hair turned white on the journey. Word of an imperial pardon reached him in 759, before he ever arrived, and he turned back down the river, mocking his detractors in Departing from Baidi in the Morning.

• 7. Wine, Mountains, And The Old Manner

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  John C. H. Wu observed that while some may have drunk more wine than Li Bai, no one has written more poems about it. In Chang'an, Li belonged to a circle that his friend Du Fu called the Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup. The critic James J. Y. Liu noted that the word zui in this poetry does not mean drunk so much as being mentally carried away from one's normal preoccupations, which he translated as rapt with wine. Burton Watson concluded that nearly all Chinese poets celebrate wine, but none so tirelessly and with such genuine conviction as Li. Li Bai had a strong sense of himself as part of a poetic tradition. Watson found his work essentially backward-looking, a revival of past glory rather than a foray into the future. About one sixth of his poems take the form of yuefu, reworked lyrics from traditional folk ballads. He compiled a fifty-nine poem collection called Gu Feng, or In the Old Manner, paying tribute to the poetry of the Han and Wei dynasties. His verse also carried fantasy and childlike wonder, drawn from a fascination with Taoist recluses who practiced alchemy in the mountains, hoping to become xian, or immortal beings. Many of his poems begin in real mountain scenery and modulate into visions of nature deities and the jade maidens of Taoist lore.

• 8. The Reach Of A Thousand Poems

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  In a mere 20 words, Li Bai's poem Quiet Night Thought uses moonlight and frost imagery to convey homesickness, and it is still memorized by schoolchildren in China today. His poems were collected in 753 by Yin Fan into the most important Tang anthology, the Heyue yingling ji, and thirty-four of them later entered the Three Hundred Tang Poems, first published in the 18th century. One sample of his calligraphy survives in his own hand, a scroll titled Going Up to the Sun Terrace, now housed in the Palace Museum in Beijing. Li Bai died sometime in 762, in Dangtu, Anhui, where he had gone to stay with his relative Li Yangbing, the magistrate to whom he entrusted his manuscripts. The exact date and cause were lost to history. The Tang poet Pi Rixiu suggested he died of chronic thoracic suppuration. Another account holds that he drowned, falling from his boat while drunk as he tried to embrace the reflection of the moon in the Yangtze River. Unlike his younger friend Du Fu, Li did not live to see the end of the chaos that engulfed his final years. His reach extended far beyond China. The Austrian composer Gustav Mahler set German adaptations of four of his poems in Das Lied von der Erde in 1908. In 1915, Ezra Pound gave Li Bai's poems the lion's share of his collection Cathay, eleven of its nineteen pieces, carrying the Banished Immortal into the modern West.