DISSIPATION
Li Bai took his time as he wandered farther south. As this journey was meant to gradually build his reputation as a knight-errant and itinerant bard, he traveled at his own pace, often without an immediate destination. Whenever possible, he would make an excursion to sightsee or visit luminary figures. According to the Li Bai chronology by Zhan Ying, late in the summer of 725 he arrived in Jiangxia (modern Wuhan), where the legendary Yellow Crane Tower stood on a small hill, commanding a panoramic view of the Yangtze. This was the place where Li Bai would develop a minor poetic rivalry lasting many years. Before going to the tower, he planned to write a poem on a wall there (it was customary for poets and dignitaries to leave their words on historical sites). Such an inscription served as both a permanent advertisement and a memorial—provided that the writing and calligraphy were good enough to win the admiration of subsequent visitors. In Li Bai’s time, Yellow Crane Tower was a spot frequented by literary figures and officials. It has remained so. In modern times, even Mao Zedong wrote a poem there.
The view of the waterscape moved Li Bai. But as he was about to compose his poem, he found another already up on the wall. Its author was Cui Hao (704?–754), who was three or four years younger than Bai but already an official in the palace. The poem on the wall looked to have been inscribed recently:
昔人已乘黃鶴去 此地空餘黃鶴樓
黃鶴一去不復返 白雲千載空悠悠
晴川歷歷漢陽樹 芳草萋萋鸚鵡洲
日暮鄉關何處是 煙波江上使人愁
《黃鶴樓》
Someone already rode the Yellow Crane away
And only left an empty tower here.
The crane, once gone, will not return,
White clouds floating for thousands of years.
Along the river ancient trees stand clear, one another,
While green grass covers Parrot Island.
In such twilight where can I find home?
The misty waves on the river make me grieve.
“YELLOW CRANE TOWER”
The poem is based on a local legend, which centers on an old man who used to frequent a tavern and drink there without ever paying his bill. The owner never asked him to settle it. This went on for half a year. Then one day, the old man picked up an orange peel and with it painted an enormous crane on a wall in the dining room of the tavern. The owner thought the painting was simply the old man’s grateful gesture, because the crane was a symbol of longevity and immortality. But soon he discovered that whenever customers sang or music was played, the bird on the wall would flap its wings and dance. Thanks to this marvel, the tavern’s business boomed and the owner grew rich. The old man wasn’t seen again until ten years later, when he returned, summoned the crane off the wall, and rode it away. Cui Hao’s poem begins at the end of the tale and envisions the aftermath of the bird’s disappearance.1
Li Bai felt that his work might not surpass Cui Hao’s, and so decided not to put a composition of his own on the wall. It is also said that he wrote a piece then tore it up. There have been legends about this moment when he abandoned his own poem. One even claims that he composed a doggerel, which reads, “I smash Yellow Crane Tower with my fist / And kick over Parrot Island. / Such a beautiful view I cannot describe / Because Cui Hao’s poem is already there.” According to the Japanese scholar Mori Daiki, these lines are a joke, and their authorship has nothing to do with Li Bai. However, Bai did write something similar. In a later poem, he tells a friend, “I will smash Yellow Crane Tower for you / And you must turn Parrot Island upside down for me” (“Composed in Jiangxia for Nanling Magistrate Wei Bing”). His jealousy is understandable—Cui Hao was a court poet and had passed the civil-service examination at age nineteen.
No doubt Bai felt challenged poetically. In Tang poetry, Cui Hao’s “Yellow Crane Tower” is traditionally considered a perfect execution of its form.2 Li Bai was not strong in this form, which was popular among capital poets. Throughout his life, Bai would return to Yellow Crane Tower both in person and in his verse to face Cui Hao’s poetic challenge. More than fifty of his poems refer to this site. But at the moment, he had to concede the superiority of Cui Hao’s poem.
Li Bai left Wuchang in the fall of 725 and continued east to Jiujiang, where he wished to see Mount Lu. This trip was clearly dated by his masterful poem “Watching the Lushan Waterfall.” The mountain was known for its fine scenery and for its temples deep in the forests. It was also a place where many devoted Buddhists had gathered to study scriptures. From Xunyang, a river town, Li Bai and his pageboy Dansha rode south across hills and streams for more than ten miles and arrived at the East Woods Temple, built three centuries earlier in honor of Master Hui Yuan (334–416). Though not a Buddhist, Bai admired the detached spirit of the master and had heard about the tranquil beauty of his temple. The grand monk had lived there for over thirty years without ever leaving Mount Lu, dedicating himself to the study and translation of Buddhist scriptures. Li Bai and a handful of local friends were put up at the temple. They stayed there a few days, during which he paid homage to Hui Yuan’s study and residence, which had been kept as a miniature shrine with a tiny altar in it, its walls decorated with paintings and calligraphy. Bai looked through the master’s books and lit two sticks of incense for Hui Yuan’s spirit. He also went to visit some tombs of Buddhist saints.
Accompanied by monks, Li Bai climbed to the top of Mount Lu, wearing sandals and a straw hat, a hemp rope tied around his waist. The young monks used machetes to cut a path in the bushes as they progressed. The climb was arduous, but Li Bai was captivated by the gorgeous views. On this trip he composed several poems, one of which was about the waterfall below Incense Burner Peak. It is a signature poem of his, still memorized by schoolchildren today:
日照香爐生紫煙 遙看瀑布掛長川
飛流直下三千尺 疑是銀河落九天
《望廬山瀑布》
The sun shines on the Burner Peak, raising purple smoke.
Look, far away a waterfall hangs on the river ahead,
Its stream flying down three thousand feet.
I wonder if it’s the Milky Way descending from heaven.
“WATCHING THE LUSHAN WATERFALL”
Bai did not return to Xunyang with his local friends. Instead, he and Dansha rode back with them for a few miles, then parted company, going their own way.
About eight miles north of Mount Lu was a hamlet called Shang-jing. The poet Tao Yuanming (376–427) had once lived there. It was remarkable that Li Bai journeyed to the small village to look at Tao’s homestead and pay his respects at his grave, which had fallen into disrepair, the words on the stone hardly legible. Like his deserted homestead, Tao had remained obscure for more than three centuries after his death. Only two decades prior to Li Bai’s visit had Tao’s poetry begun to be recognized by Tang poets, particularly for his presentation of immediate experiences in nature and the daily life of the countryside. Evidently Li Bai was one of his new admirers. Viewed from Tao’s homestead, Mount Lu loomed in the distance, often half-hidden in clouds, against which birds sailed in the misty sky. The sublime scene depicted in Tao’s poem “Drinking Wine” must refer to this view: “Picking chrysanthemums under my eastern hedge, / I raise my eyes and see the mountain in the south.”
Li Bai’s visit showed the esteem he held for Tao. There was no doubt that he liked Tao’s simple natural poetry, which had founded the pastoral tradition in Chinese literature, but the two poets were very different in disposition and outlook and in their approaches to their art.
Tao Yuanming had been from a minor aristocratic family. His great-grandfather had been a high-ranking officer in charge of eight prefectures’ military affairs, his grandfather the governor of Wuchang, and his father the prefect of Ancheng. In his early years, Tao Yuanming served at several official posts and then as the magistrate of Pengze County in the northeast of Jiujiang for less than three months before he decided to resign. He couldn’t stand the obsequious official decorum and “wouldn’t bend his back to petty lackeys for five pecks of rice” (his monthly salary). He left behind his official ribbon and seal and returned home. In his own words, “Trapped in the net of dust for so long, / At last I can return to nature.” The word “nature” here also refers to his own disposition and to the state of freedom—he believed that social structures and rules were the source of evil, and he wanted to escape them. He worked as a farmer for the rest of his life. When he could find a respite from his work, he would read books and write poems, many of which were gradually discovered and embraced as masterpieces after his death. He wrote lines like these: “Life has its own way, / Where food and clothes form the root. / If you don’t earn your own keep, / How can you ever feel at peace?” (“Gathering Rice in the West Field in September 410”). This stands in stark contrast to the romantic sentiments of Li Bai, who claimed, “Heaven begot a talent like me and must put me for good use / And a thousand pieces of gold, squandered, will come again” (“Please Drink”). Tao is viewed as a saint of poetry and Li Bai a god—one belonged to earth and the other to heaven. Tao’s poems are calm, dignified, and painful but without malice, while Li Bai’s poems are wild and passionate and often give the feeling that they tumble down from another world. More fundamentally, Tao embodied a kind of cultivation and dignity beyond Li Bai’s grasp—that is, the dignity in serving neither a ruler nor a country, and in farming his own two acres to earn his living by the sweat of his brow. Like the plain surface of his poetry, there was nothing romantic or glorious in the life Tao had chosen. At times when his grain jar was empty, he even begged in nearby villages, though people respected him and treated him decently. He accepted poverty, loneliness, illness, and death with serenity, as he says at the end of the preceding poem: “I hope this kind of life will last forever / And I mustn’t sigh about tilling my own fields.”
Li Bai must have seen in Tao Yuanming the true state of a return to nature, which could not be separated from labor, hardship, and humility. Tao’s way of life provided a point of reference for Li Bai, and served as a reminder of a stark reality. Never would Li Bai pursue Tao’s kind of seclusion.
Most Li Bai chronologies agree that he arrived in Jinling (modern Nanjing) in the spring of 726. The city was a cultural and commercial center in the south. It was strategically located, and many dynasties had founded their capitals there: it faced the Yangtze to the north and Zhong Mountain to the south, believed to be easy to defend and hard to attack. It was also thought to have an imperial aura, an auspicious site for a capital. Legend holds that some ancient emperors even buried gold in this location in order to preserve its imperial spirit—this is why it is called Jinling (Gold Hill). But despite all this, throughout history the city has fallen to rebels and foreign invaders many times, so it is a heartbreaking place as well. In recent centuries, the Taiping rebels seized Nanjing in 1853 and made it their Celestial Capital, which was meant to be equal and even superior to the royal capital in Beijing; a decade later, the imperial army took the city back and slaughtered half a million people. In December 1937, the Japanese army captured the city and committed the infamous Nanjing massacre. In reality, Jinling seemed quite vulnerable to invasions. But it was a vital place geographically and economically in the Tang dynasty. It controlled the waterway transportation down to the ocean in the east and up to the interior in the west. Salt, grains, timber, iron, and other products were all shipped through the city. The surrounding regions were fertile and abundantly supplied with water. The mild climate and copious rainfall allowed double cropping of rice and even triple cropping of some produce. This made the region affluent, and the wealth helped create a colorful culture. The area was known as the Wu land, also called “the land of rice and fish.” Thanks to its plentiful resources, the land of Wu was viewed as the empire’s economic backbone, and a good place for training and keeping troops.
It is believed that Li Bai’s family had a business in Jinling, probably a shop, and that he stayed there after arriving in the city. He was fascinated by the fleets of wooden boats loaded with goods sailing up and down the Yangtze, and by the city’s marketplaces glutted with merchandise, some of which he had never seen before. As he explored the city, Bai began to make friends, wining and dining at expensive places whenever he could. He often gave away money generously to those in need. By his own account, in a single year (725–26) he spent a huge amount of cash, the equivalent of more than a dozen pounds of gold. At the same time, he began the process of ganye, introducing himself to officials in order to find patronage. He paid visits to many dignitaries and powerful men, but for the most part he was not well treated. Many simply declined to receive him. To make matters worse, the emperor had just announced that he and many of his courtiers were to visit Mount Tai in Shandong. The central government ordered every prefecture in the country to send its representatives to the sacred mountain to participate in the royal ceremony. Mount Tai is about four hundred miles north of Nanjing; most officials in the city were busy preparing to join the emperor there and had no time for an obscure man like Li Bai.
Meanwhile, Bai continued to give parties, where the wine flowed nonstop. As he drank, he would compose poetry, especially at the tipsy stage, inebriated but still lucid, which was believed to be the most intense and productive moment. Among Chinese artists both ancient and modern, alcohol has been regarded—even revered—as a way to stimulate creation, particularly in poetry, painting, and calligraphy. Even today, some artists still purposely become drunk so that they can achieve a kind of spontaneity in their works. Li Bai himself wrote, “Your mind will open naturally when you have imbibed enough wine.” He often drank to access the emotion needed for his poems. But drinking was also a way to blunt his despair at failing to find patronage and entering the official circle, and to numb his homesickness. He wrote, “When the cup is emptied, sadness won’t come.”
Frustrated over his career prospects and at times lonely, he would remember his friends elsewhere and even imagine some new ones. Try as he might, he couldn’t make real friends in Jinling; most of those he befriended were merely fair-weather ones who enjoyed his largesse. Instead, he began to spend time with women. He admired the fine figures, delicate skin, and soft accents of the women of Wu, and composed numerous poems about them. One was nicknamed Jinling Girl, a prostitute who appears in a few of his poems. In his verses, he idealizes her:
金陵城東誰傢子 竊聽琴聲碧窗裡
落花一片天上來 隨人直度西江水
楚歌吳語嬌不成 似能未能最有情
謝公正要東山妓 攜手林泉處處行
《示金陵子》
Whose daughter is this girl in the east of Jinling?
I listen to her music rising from a curtained window.
She’s like a flowered cloud that fell from heaven
And she floats with her lover across the western river.
She sings in the Wu dialect, but her soft voice accented,
And this imperfection makes her sing with more feeling.
I think of Master Xie who took girls from Eastern Hill
Through all the woods and mountains and streams.
“FOR JINLING GIRL”
Throughout his life, Bai wrote many great poems about women, especially those spoken in female voices, which belong to the classical category of yuefu poetry, folk songs collected by the court. “For Jinling Girl” does not reach that level of greatness. It is too easy, rather frivolous, and is thought by some to be indicative of a larger lack of seriousness in his poems composed during this period. The poet and scholar Wang Anshi (1021–1086) of the Song dynasty even remarked that Li Bai’s “vision got lower and lower—nine out of ten of his poems are about wine and women.”
During his stay in Jinling, Bai did indulge in a kind of debauched poetry that tended to view women superficially. The last two lines of “For Jinling Girl,” however, may reveal something deeper at work. They allude to Xie An (320–385), a statesman and calligrapher who had been the prime minister of East Jin State, and had once with his army of eighty thousand men defeated an invading force of a million troops. Before becoming a prime minister, Xie An had lived in Jinling, where Bai was now, spending his days with young courtesans on the mountains and rivers. Li Bai couldn’t help comparing his situation with the ancient master’s. He was twenty-five years old, confused and lost, and dreamed that his path, though seemingly frivolous now, would follow Xie An’s to greatness.
Soon Bai’s money ran out. It’s believed that his family’s business suffered a downturn at this time and was no longer able to provide for him. From this point on, he would be completely on his own. Most of his newly made friends deserted him, and as his situation in Jinling grew more unbearable, he decided to leave. The hardship, however, did not diminish his buoyant spirit, and the poetry he produced was still extravagant, full of energy and ease. At the farewell party attended by a few (so-called) friends of his, Li Bai composed a poem ending with these lines: “Please ask the river that’s flowing east / Which is longer—its water or our attachment to each other?” These lines expressed his belief in friendship and his longing for loyal companions, but the others at the table were more struck by his reinvention of the flowing river image. Traditionally it has been a metaphor for sorrow, but here it refers to friendship and affection. Li Bai often expanded the space in his poetry to the maximum. In this case, friendship is stretched as vast as a river.
Before the end of the summer, Li Bai arrived in Yangzhou, a city sixty miles east of Nanjing. The weather was still summery, cicadas humming here and there in spite of the sultry heat. Bai noticed many affluent young men lounging around the downtown, and he asked after the powerful people of the city. Without delay he began to pay visits to them. But before he could fully embark on this new round of self-introduction, he fell ill. Now destitute and with no friends in the area, he was helplessly stranded. The tavern where he was lodging refused to let him stay on credit any longer—he had to pay or leave. The desperateness of his situation made him miserable and homesick. He wrote a letter in the form of poetry to Zhao Rui, saying he couldn’t come home because he had not yet realized his ambitions, though he had little faith that his efforts would produce results. He mailed the letter the next day through the unreliable official post service, which mainly functioned to ensure the delivery of administrative orders and treated personal letters carelessly. Bai knew he might never hear from his teacher—he couldn’t give a return address.
One night, unable to sleep, he watched the moonlit sky out the window for a long time and then composed this poem:
床前明月光 疑是地上霜
举头望明月 低头思故乡
《静夜思》
Moonlight spreads before my bed.
I wonder if it’s hoarfrost on the ground.
I raise my head to watch the moon
And lowering it, I think of home.
“REFLECTION IN A QUIET NIGHT”
This would go on to became his best-known poem, which over a millennium every Chinese with a few years’ schooling has learned by heart. On March 20, 2015, the United Nations Postal Administration issued a set of six stamps to commemorate World Poetry Day. Each design bore a poem in its original language. There are poems in English, Chinese, French, Russian, Spanish, and Arabic. Li Bai’s “Reflection in a Quiet Night” was printed on the stamp exemplifying poetry written in Chinese.
Finally Bai realized that he couldn’t buy lasting friendship with money. He was lying miserably in bed. Dansha tried desperately to nurse him back to health, but in vain. They were both starving now. Fortunately, a local official named Meng Rong, an admirer of Li Bai’s poetry, came to his aid. As soon as Rong heard that Bai was in town, he hurried over to see him. He gave Bai some cash and helped him settle his arrears with the tavern. Rong was the deputy magistrate of Guangling County, which was part of Yangzhou. The owner of the tavern knew Meng Rong and from then on treated Li Bai decently. Rong also sent for a doctor, and within a month Li Bai recovered. Together Rong and Bai visited Buddhist temples and historic sites, which show up in Bai’s poems. Rong advised Bai to stop wandering and seeking the appreciation of those men who were inferior to him in every aspect except for the posts they held. Rong knew office-seekers who had ruined themselves that way, becoming bankrupt and utterly lost, so he believed that Bai should first find a home or a haven that could act as a solid base. Rong had some friends in the official circle and suggested that Bai go to An Prefecture, more than three hundred miles west of Yangzhou.
Rong knew the renowned Xu family in Anlu, the capital of An Prefecture. The Xus had a daughter, who was in her mid-twenties and was still unmarried. We don’t know her given name, though we do know that she later became Bai’s wife. Over the previous three generations, her family had produced many preeminent statesmen. Her great-grandfather had been a classmate of Emperor Gaozu, and her grandfather, Xu Yushi, had been a chancellor at the Tang court. Xu Yushi, however, had been demoted and banished from the capital because of his attempt to protect his son—who had killed a man in a hunting accident—from charges of manslaughter. Yushi was demoted to a far-off prefecture and eventually managed to return to his hometown of Anlu. It is recorded that while serving as a prefect, he was known for his leniency—when he found his subordinates involved in corruption, instead of punishing them he would give them a verse titled “Poem About Cleanness” so that they might repent their wrongdoings and reform themselves.
That was almost half a century back, and the Xus were no longer as prominent. Still, because they were a wealthy and renowned family, it was not easy for a man to join them by marrying their only daughter. As a result, Miss Xu had almost become an old maid by the standards of the period. Her father, Squire Xu, had asked Meng Rong to keep an eye out for a suitable match for his daughter. Rong worshiped Li Bai, who he believed was “overflowing with talent and lofty aspiration.” He was convinced that Bai would become a great poet, “as famous as Chen Zi’ang,” as he said to Squire Xu, so when he told Bai about Miss Xu’s family in Anlu, he had him in mind as a prospective bridegroom for her.
Li Bai, however, was not inclined to marry now—he felt he had not yet accomplished anything and it was not time for him to settle down. Moreover, he felt uncomfortable “marrying into” a family and living under his in-laws’ roof. Tang marriage law didn’t even mention this kind of union, which meant it was abnormal and looked down upon. The accepted custom was for a successful man to bring home his bride, who ideally should be a daughter from one of the five most prestigious clans in the country: the Wangs (in Taiyuan), the Zhengs (in Henan), the Lis (in southeastern Gansu and southern Hebei), the Cuis (in Qing-he, Hebei), and the Fans (in central Hebei). The daughters of those clans were better educated and more capable of managing social life, and could bring wealth and powerful connections to their husbands.
Despite his uneasiness Li Bai agreed to go to Anlu, which was closer to Chang’an, the Tang capital. Meng Rong had friends in An Prefecture who should be able to help Bai get a post. Rong couldn’t leave his work to travel with Bai, so he wrote a letter of recommendation that could secure help for him along the way.