IN THE SOUTH
Most Li Bai chronologies indicate that he returned to Anlu in the spring of 737. His wife was pleased to see him back, though she scolded him for not sending her word ahead of his return. Bai was happy too, in part because he had brought back cash and other valuable items—damask, jade, medicinal herbs. Thanks to his increasing fame, as he had traveled home he had been generously treated by the governments of counties and prefectures, whose officials presented him with small gifts. With this experience, he realized that he could make money by traveling, enjoying the admiration of others and the hospitable events held in his honor. He told his wife about this, joking that they might even become rich someday. She did not believe him but was glad to learn that his popularity had increased.
Soon Bai became restless again, tormented by a poignant wanderlust. He was prone to depression and attempted to mitigate his despair with drinking. At heart he could not accept his failure in seeking office. He was only thirty-six, his mind keener than ever and his body still strong. He believed he had to trust his talent and knowledge and mustn’t give up. He wanted to try his fortune elsewhere again, convinced that eventually he would succeed. For months he had been thinking about the land south of the Yangtze, which, though he had been there before, was still slightly exotic to him. But for a trip to Yangtze, he would need to secure sufficient funds.
Since his household still depended on the rent collected from the few acres of farmland, it would be impossible for him to get the money needed for travel. He turned to his friends for help, but none was rich enough to assist him. Some offered to take him along to places where they were planning to go. Ever impulsive, Bai simply set out for Yangtze on his own, believing that his fame and ability would carry him there. He first went to Mount Song to see his friend Yuan Danqiu, who kept him there for several days. At the moment, Danqiu was short on cash as well and could only help Bai with a small sum. Bai took the money and continued south without delay.
By now, the Tang dynasty was at the peak of its prosperity—most counties and prefectures had full granaries and were flush with cash. The farmland south of the Yangtze was fertile; the local governments had grown rich collecting taxes and didn’t hesitate to spend money entertaining visitors, especially officials from the north and the central land. Known for his splendid poetry, Li Bai was treated decently in most of these places, where he would attend dinner parties given by officials. Without fail he would compose verses in honor of his hosts and recite his other poems. Most officials, vain but generous with public funds, valued Bai’s presence at their gatherings as someone extraordinarily artistic, someone who could offer them entertainment of a different order from the common dances and songs performed by girls and courtesans. Some officials, usually friends of Bai’s, would put him up for ten days or even a month. By now he seemed to have friends everywhere thanks to his poetic reputation. Most officials were highly literate and often knowledgeable about literature and the arts, so they sought the company of a literary luminary like Li Bai. Before he left, they would present him with a small amount of cash for the road. He now considered such money as earnings that he should be securing regularly, and always saved a portion for his family. Indeed, he was more careful about his expenditures than before.
But gradually he discovered that he was still just a poet, with talent and showmanship but no power or influence, and so even as his popularity grew, officials would rarely receive him as a truly important guest. Above him, there were always personages that they would lavish with flattery and gifts. At times these honored guests were merely sons of powerful officials in the central government, incapable and ignorant with no achievements of their own. Bai couldn’t help but feel resentful whenever he came upon such young dandies.
After revisiting Nanjing, where contrary to his expectation he didn’t find any friends, Li Bai arrived at Yangzhou in July. There he wanted to see Meng Rong, his old friend who had introduced him to his wife, but he soon learned that Rong was no longer in the city. He had been transferred west, Bai was told, but no one was sure of his exact whereabouts. Bai was disappointed, unable to find out anything more about his friend. Then a number of admirers and well-wishers, having gotten word of Bai’s arrival, came to his inn, eager to see him. His literary reputation had spread widely now, even preceding him on the road, and some of his short poems were known all over the country. A few of these visitors were especially friendly and invited Bai to restaurants and taverns. There was a sense of warmth and familiarity: Bai knew a number of the men already, from his previous visit more than a decade back, and even those who hadn’t met him before felt connected to him because one of his most famous poems, “Reflection in a Quiet Night,” had been composed in this very city twelve years before. Li Bai remembered the difficult time he had been going through then, ill and penniless in a downtown tavern. It had been his dear friend Meng Rong who had cared for him and helped him recover. Where was that sweet man now? How Bai wished to see him again!
As they reveled about town, the local literary figures, who were meeting Bai for the first time, asked him about his friends, particularly those to whom he had dedicated his poetry. They loved the farewell poem he had composed on seeing Meng Haoran off at Yellow Crane Tower and the short verses titled “Midnight Songs.” Bai was flattered, not having expected to meet so many fans in the city. When the wine had loosened his tongue, he told his new friends about his humiliating experience in the capital, how Zhang Ji had taken him in and dispatched him to Zhongnan Mountain. They were offended on his behalf, cursing the vainglorious and duplicitous men in the palace.
After a heartening stay in Yangzhou, Bai sailed down the Yangtze, continuing toward the coast. He wanted to reach the end of the land, to see the ocean for the first time. His destination was Wenzhou, the east end of this land, though he might wander elsewhere. He wanted, indeed, to see the entire country, believing that his mind would be expanded and that, in turn, his poetry would gain greater spirit and depth. For him, travel was not simply entertainment; it was how he learned and grew. He was determined to make himself more capable, to become a better poet and a wiser statesman. He still clung to his political ambitions, though his quest for an official post had, after years of rejection, become halfhearted and he was somewhat detached.
After a few days on the water, he arrived at Jingkou (in modern Zhenjiang). From there he took a skiff west to Jin Hill and Jiao Hill, which lay in the middle of the river. The pair of hills, thickly wooded, were a kind of resort frequented by visitors. The land and feel of Jiao Hill resonated deeply with Bai; there he composed this poem while gazing at another island far away that had a hill on it too.
石壁望松寥 宛然在碧霄
安得五彩虹 駕天作長橋
仙人如愛我 舉手來相招
《焦山望寥山》
From the cliff I’m watching Songliao Hill
Feeling like I am standing in clouds.
I’d like to grab hold of a colored rainbow
And raise it as a celestial bridge.
If a goddess is fond of me
She will surely wave me over.
“GAZING AT SONGLIAO HILL FROM JIAO HILL”
He continued to sail down from Jingkou, and soon the estuary came into view. He could see the two waters of the river and the sea, pushing at each other and tossing wavelets and eddies. In the distance rose a few dark reefs that resembled tiny knolls. Seabirds—petrels and gulls—glided in the air and let out their cries. Far away, the horizon shifted with the tumbling water. Bai was enchanted by the endless waves and couldn’t help imaging the world beyond the ocean in the east. He had heard of Japan, which to him seemed a wonderland inhabited by gods and spirits. Someday he thought he might take a boat sailing that way, or ride a crane there as a xian. In his mind, the celestial sphere would always be accessible to him once he was done with his life on earth. He would be able to accompany the divine bird through the universe without any attachment to this earthly existence.
On the canal he traveled south down to Wuxi, Suzhou, then Hangzhou. The West Lake in Hangzhou, the waterscape of breathtaking beauty that the city has boasted for more than a millennium, hadn’t been fully constructed yet, but he liked the coastal climate and visited Tianzhu Temple, accompanied by the prefect Li Liang, whom Li Bai thought might be a distant relative of his. He wrote about this visit in a poem, addressing Li Liang as his nephew. It is believed that this gesture, far from ingratiating himself to Liang, only irritated and alienated the prefect. In his eyes, Bai was just another office-seeker vying for his favor, and he couldn’t wait to get rid of him. Bai likely composed numerous other poems on this leg of the journey around the coastal area, but most of them have not survived. From Hangzhou he took a boat up the Fuchun River to Wenzhou, which he had planned as the destination of this trip on the seacoast. Then he turned back inland, passing Lu and Wu prefectures along the way (present-day Tong-lu and Jinhua). In Jinhua, he stopped at Yiwu Town to pay homage to Luo Binwang (619–687), one of the four great early Tang poets (the others were Wang Bo, Yang Jiong, and Lu Zhaolin).
Luo was one of Li Bai’s heroes. At age seven, Luo had composed the most popular nursery rhyme in Chinese—it is the first poem that tens of millions of people hear in their childhood: “Goose, goose, goose / Stretches its neck and sings to the sky, / Its white feathers floating on green water / And its red webs paddling blue waves.” Li Bai commented about Luo’s work, “Luo Binwang’s poetry is high in style and lofty in spirit. His poems read like something made in heaven, where deities gather, riding clouds like cranes and floating about with ease.”1 Yet despite Luo’s fame as a prodigy and his career as a leading voice in Chinese poetry in his time, his official career was fraught with frustrations and setbacks. Time and again he was demoted, banished to the borderland in penal servitude, and once even imprisoned, because he wouldn’t stop criticizing the extravagance and corruption of the court and speaking on behalf of common people at the bottom of society. His parents had been poor, and so he empathized with their plight.
At age fifty-six, when Luo was a county magistrate, he wrote a “Proclamation Against Empress Wu” and then joined the rebels, led by the banished duke Li Jingye (636–684), in fighting the imperial army and attempting to topple the court. In belligerent language Luo called Empress Wu, the only empress in Chinese history, “a fake ruler” and claimed that “her promiscuity had ruined her court.” But when Her Majesty listened to the condemnation, she couldn’t stop smiling; in spite of the criticism, she couldn’t help but appreciate the beauty and vigor of Luo’s writing. Toward the end of the reading, at the sentence “The earth of the late emperor’s grave is still wet while the royal heir has no idea whom he can trust,” she turned to a chancellor and asked sternly, “Why have we neglected such a gifted man?”
When the rebels were finally suppressed, Luo vanished. There was some talk that he had been killed by imperial troops, but other rumors claimed that he had become a monk in a secluded temple and still roved the wilderness.
Undoubtedly Li Bai was a greater poet than Luo, but his official career, if there was one, had been even more difficult. Still, he viewed Luo as a kindred spirit. He made a special trip to Luo’s adobe house in Loujia Village, paid his respects at the cenotaph built for him, and fed the waterbirds in the pond next to his house. From Yiwu Town, Bai headed back to Anlu. Along the way he visited numerous legendary mountains and resorts, especially those associated with ancient figures. He traveled homeward unhurriedly and often stayed in a city or town for ten days or more at a stretch.
In late fall Li Bai arrived at Xiangyang, about 140 miles south of Anlu. Bai hoped to see his old friend Meng Haoran, but when he arrived at his friend’s farm in Deer-Gate Mountain, Bai was stunned to find that Haoran had just died. He had succumbed to running sores on his back after indulging in a binge of drinking with his visiting friend, the poet Wang Changling (698–756). Haoran had suffered from this ailment for a long time, but before his friend’s arrival, the sores were in remission and his doctor had urged him to avoid seafood lest they break out. But on the dining table was a braised bream from the Han River, and the fish was so fat and tempting that Haoran couldn’t help applying his chopsticks to it. He and Changling regaled themselves with both savory dishes and alcohol. As a consequence, the sores burst on his back and he died two days later. Li Bai was devastated to hear of his friend’s passing—he threw away the wine he had brought for Meng and couldn’t help but lament how precarious life was.
After having wept and grieved at Haoran’s funeral, Bai left two days later, heading south to the Dongting Lake region. In Baling Town, he encountered Wang Changling and told him the news of Meng Haoran’s death. Changling was only two years older than Bai but had been an official for more than a decade. He was known as a master of short poems, especially the type called jueju, which is a quatrain, strictly rhymed and with elaborate metric patterns. He was a leading capital poet, and many of his poems had become popular songs. Bai had heard Wang Changling’s poems performed in taverns and teahouses and greatly admired them.
Like Bai, Changling wrote many poems about women, which was uncommon among poets then, though their approaches were different. Changling was a master of mood, his language evocative, full of drama. His “Boudoir Grief” was sung everywhere and was particularly loved by married women. It goes, “The young bride doesn’t know sorrow yet. / She makes up and climbs a high tower. / Catching sight of greening poplars and willows along the road, / She regrets letting her groom seek to be a duke far away.” What differentiates this poem from Li Bai’s works about women is the absence of persona, or characterized voice, which Changling rarely used. Changling was also known for his borderland poetry. His best-known frontier poem is “Charging out of the Border,” which praised the man Bai believed to be his own ancestor, General Li Guang:
秦時明月漢時關 萬裡長征人未還
但使龍城飛將在 不教胡馬渡陰山
出塞》
The bright moon of the Qin dynasty
Has seen the mountain pass of Han times.
Thousands of miles away from home,
The soldiers haven’t yet returned.
So long as the Swift General stays at Dragon Fort
No barbarians’ horses dare to pass Mount Yin.
Because of Bai’s personal attachment to this poem, he had become fond of its author before they had even met. By this time, Li Bai’s reputation as a poet was almost equal to Wang Changling’s, but to date they had admired each other only from a distance. Now their meeting delighted both of them. They chatted about people they both knew and about the news in the capital. Changling felt awful about Meng Haoran’s death—he had known Haoran was absentminded but hadn’t thought he would be so careless about his health. If only he, Changling, had stopped him from eating the fish and drinking so much that night!
Upon hearing that Bai was on the last leg of his long trip and that he was still bent on finding a position, Changling sighed and told him about the other side of an official’s life. After passing the civil-service examination, he had started his career as a county magistrate in Henan at the lowest rank, the ninth. He quickly became tired of the official decorum and drudgery; he applied for a position at the Secretariat in the palace, which seemed impossible but which miraculously he was granted. The new post sounded prestigious, but he soon discovered that the Secretariat was somewhat like an old-age home: it was filled with many senile scholars who simply did clerical work, copying and transcribing and proofreading documents. It badly needed young hands. Worst of all, Changling said, an honest man in the palace could not survive the political maneuvers and intrigues against him. He had witnessed high-ranking officials beaten half dead, flogged with sticks in front of the emperor and dozens of courtiers for having done nothing more than to speak a few candid words. Changling always feared that he might end up in such a plight. Just now he had lost his job at the central government and had to take a post elsewhere, all because he had gotten drunk one night in downtown Chang’an and overslept and missed his shift at the office. It was only minor negligence, he argued, but the men above him had seized the opportunity to drive him out of the capital. That was why he had been demoted and sent down to a small county. In brief, it was dangerous and unpredictable to serve at court.
Seeing Bai look unconvinced, Changling pressed on. Look at their late friend Meng Haoran, who had remained a farmer recluse all his life but was still known and revered everywhere. Because he had depended on nothing but his own talent and effort, his poetry had breathed new life into the world of letters. His might be a better way to follow.
Although dismayed at the story of his friend’s demotion and grateful for his honest words, Bai couldn’t give up his endeavor so easily and found Changling too pessimistic. But hearing of scholars who had gotten into trouble for presenting petitions to the emperor curbed Bai’s desire to write to His Majesty directly—he would go on to abandon his half-finished letter addressed to the court. In appearance the emperor always welcomed petitions, but it was hard to predict what contents might offend him. Li Bai had dreamed that his writing might impress His Majesty and earn him a favor directly from the emperor. Now it was clear that even if he had dispatched a letter to the court, it might never have reached the Son of Heaven. Changling also mentioned that the central government was shifting its focus to promoting warriors rather than scholars. This planted a new idea in Bai’s mind, as he also thought of himself as a soldier. If the country needed more military talents, he was skilled with the sword and knew the art of war well—he was good officer material. But he told Changling that he would think about his advice.
It was getting cold, and Bai realized he must not linger on the road any longer and must get home before winter began. So he headed back to Anlu without further delay.
By Zhan Ying’s chronology, early in 739, Li Bai’s wife gave birth to their first child, a daughter. We don’t know how Bai felt about the arrival of his first child, who wasn’t born until the twelfth year of his marriage, but we are certain that when she was growing up she was very attached to her father. Bai named her Pingyang. The name, which had associations with historical royalty, indicated that he had high hopes for her. It was the namesake of Emperor Han Wu’s sister, a woman who lived a troubled but extraordinary life (having survived three husbands), and it was also the name of the first Tang emperor’s third daughter. This daughter had been a commander of troops, fighting for her father in order to found the dynasty. Prior to her time, few women had ever played such a role. When she fell on the battlefield, her body was retrieved and she was memorialized as a valiant officer, her funeral accompanied with a military salute. Li Bai must have hoped that his child would grow up to be noble, beautiful, and courageous like those extraordinary women.
We know little else about Bai’s daughter. His biographers have inclined to touch on her very briefly, partly because of the paucity of information we have on her and partly because traditionally, scholars tended not to focus on an ancient literary figure’s domestic life. But it is necessary to know as much as we can about Bai’s family life and his relationships with his children if we want to understand him intimately.
There are three crucial pieces of information that can help us approximate a rough sketch of Pingyang’s life. One is from Wei Hao, Bai’s devoted disciple in the poet’s later years. In his introduction to Li Bai’s collected writings, Wei Hao states that Pingyang “died soon after she married.” The other two pieces of information are from Li Bai’s poetry. He wrote a handful of poems about his children (he might have composed many more, but only a few are known to us), and one, the famous “To My Two Young Children in East Lu,” contains these deeply felt lines:
南風吹歸心 飛墮酒樓前
樓東一株桃 枝葉拂青煙
此樹我所種 別來向三年
桃今與樓齊 我行尚未旋
嬌女字平陽 折花倚桃邊
折花不見我 淚下如流泉
小兒名伯禽 與姊亦齊肩
雙行桃樹下 撫背復誰憐。。。
《寄東魯二稚子》
The south wind blows my heart back home
And it lands before my lovely wine drinking house.
In front of it stands a peach tree,
Whose branches and leaves are haloed.
I myself planted that tree before I left—
It’s been almost three years now.
Now the tree must be as tall as the house,
But I’m still on the road, unable to return.
My daughter, named Pingyang,
Picks flowers next to the peach tree.
As she goes, she cannot find her dad
And her tears flow like a spring.
My young son, named Boqin, is already
Tall enough to reach his sister’s shoulder.
They are both under the peach tree,
But who would pat their shoulders
And take pity on them now?…
The poem is universally believed to have been written in 749 when Li Bai was staying in Nanjing, separated from his family in Shandong. We know he had again left home for the south in late 746, and as he writes in the poem, he hasn’t seen his children in three years. At the time, Pingyang must have been around ten years old, as suggested by the “young children” in the title and her tearful response to her father’s absence, more characteristic of a small girl than a teenager.
In the preface to another poem written in 755, six years later, Li Bai says, “My disciple Wu E is a righteous man with a steady disposition. He admires the knight-errant Yao Li, hunting and fishing on rivers and lakes without caring about worldly affairs. But upon hearing of the outbreak of rebellion in the central land, he hurried west to see me. My beloved son is still in Lu, and I implored Wu E to go and fetch him before the arrival of the barbarous forces. Tipsy and grateful, I am writing this poem for him” (“For Wu Seventeen E”).2 The rebels, led by An Lushan, the emperor’s adopted son, had just occupied Luoyang and were going to Chang’an to overthrow the dynasty, so Li Bai was asking his disciple to go to Shandong and rescue his family. But what is notable is that Wu E was supposed to bring back only Li Bai’s son. The absence of Pingyang here gives us our third piece of information, signifying that she must have died by then (“soon after she married,” as Wei Hao wrote). If she were alive, she would have been sixteen.
In the Tang dynasty, girls could legally marry at age thirteen; the most common age was fifteen, but a great many brides were still in their early teens. So we can be fairly certain that by the time Wu E went to Shandong (Lu) to rescue Li Bai’s family in 755, his daughter was already dead. This is consistent with the preceding poem that portrays her as a young child in 749, and further points to 739 as the year of her birth.3 Most Li Bai scholars have placed Pingyang’s birth many years earlier, as far back as 728, probably because his children were not that important in the conventional Li Bai scholarship and because information on his daughter’s birth was insufficient. This has created a good deal of confusion and inconsistency in the resulting biographies of Li Bai. We must clarify this issue because Pingyang’s birth seems to be a pivotal moment in Bai’s life. Once he became a father, he seemed more attached to his home and viewed himself as a family man. Although he would not spend much time with his children throughout their lives, it is evident that he loved them and would always have them taken care of.