I have read the accounts of travel in Sichuan and the ancient state of Chu, all of which contain the lines about leaving Baidi in the morning and lodging in Jiangling by nightfall. Those who have taken Li Bai as a model for their poetry invariably speak of light boats that fly easily, traveling a thousand li in a single day like a bird in flight or a galloping cloud. But how is one to learn about vortices in the rapids or striking submerged rocks. If one disregards the ends [of these rocks], danger will certainly appear time and time again.
Navigation was of limited interest to the writers I discuss in Part I. It was the landmarks that line the river that really captured their imaginations. This is partly because they were not responsible for manning their own boats, but mostly because the literary forms they practiced offered few conventions for recording such information. As a result, the pilots who guided their boats and the laborers who pulled them rarely appear in their work. For Li Bai and the poets who followed him, boats “fly easily, traveling a thousand li in a single day like a bird in flight”:
| 朝辭白帝彩雲間 |
At dawn depart Baidi midst many-colored clouds |
| 千里江陵一日還 |
Across 1,000 li to Jiangling in a single day return |
| 兩岸猿聲啼不住 |
From both banks the sound of gibbons crying without rest |
| 輕舟已過萬重山 |
The light skiff has already crossed myriad-fold mountains |
Li’s quatrain alternates between the fixity of the local and the journey’s blur of space and time. The first and third lines offer familiar reference points—Baidi, colored clouds, and crying apes—that situate the reader within a physical and textual landscape. The second and fourth lines respond to these stock images with an almost cinematic blur of movement. The river’s extension in space is reduced to the pointlike “single day” in the second line, while the single point of the boat in the fourth line spins out to encompass a mountainous panorama. Li renders the downstream journey fantastical, a premodern experiment in representing the “annihilation of space and time” that would accompany the modernization of transportation in later centuries.2 Like a steamship, the boat in Li Bai’s poem flies across 1,000 li and an expanse of mountains with no trace of human labor, as if by magic.