A Brief History of Tang Poetry (Part 4) | Ep. 221

Welcome back again, everyone. Laszlo Montgomery here, China History Podcast, episode 221, part four, this little overview covering the history of Tang poetry. I'm sure you're all relieved that finally, last episode, we got to the Tang poetry portion of the series. Well, it's all Tang dynasty from here on out, and this is the episode where we will dive a little deeper into that part of the Tang dynasty that stood head and shoulders above the rest. Not since Taizong and Gaozong at the start of the dynasty did China have it so good. Once again, the Middle Kingdom and the two splendid capitals of Chang'an and Luoyang were arguably the most amazing places on the planet. Elsewhere, contemporaneous with these high Tang times, you had the Umayyad Empire at its peak, the start of the Abbasid Caliphate, the Nara period in Japan, Charles Martel and his progeny in Europe, the Mayans and Honduras in Guatemala, 8th century, a lot happening in the world. Emperor Shenzong and his reign from 712 to 756, China had one of its many finest hours during all those millennia of history, and Emperor Shenzong, like the musical king Joseph II would during the second half of the 18th century in Europe, held court to all the most talented writers and artists in all of China, and who came to China as well. He was at the center of it all, and fat with all the riches flowing back and forth along the Silk Roads and from up and down the Grand Canal. Tang Shenzong was extravagant in his generosity as a benefactor to all men and women of talent and all the arts. And as much as Tang poetry was concerned, this was the age that produced the greatest and most revered and beloved poets in Chinese history. I thought between now and the final buzzer, we could survey some of these greats and the times they lived in. Why don't we start with Li Bai? Some experts, aficionados and lovers of Chinese poetry will call him the greatest poet in all of Chinese history. Some will say it was Du Fu. It's all talk. I wouldn't even dare to call one Primus Inter Paris over the other. But these two, they've almost become this pat answer to the question, who were China's two greatest poets? Let's do a brief run-through of some of the milestones and stories from Li Bai's life and then finish off the episode with a reading of a few of his poems. He's also known as Li Bo, the literary variant. Out on the streets, I hear most people calling him Li Bai, so I don't want to sound pretentious or like some contrarian, so we'll stick with Li Bai. He's also known as Li Tai Bai and lived 701 to 762, Wu Zetian to Emperor Suzong. And because they had that kanji thing going on there, Li Bai was beloved in Japan as well. Being able to appreciate Chinese poetry and calligraphy in particular, those two literary arts came natural to those living in the land of the rising sun. They called him Ri Haku or Ri Tai Haku. In Vietnam and Korea, they loved him too. Their pronunciation of his name sounded about the same as in Chinese. Li Bai was born far, far away from China's central plain in what is today the nation of Kyrgyzstan in the Silk Road trading town of Suyab. This part of Central Asia, founded by some Sogdian merchant, later on became part of the Tang Empire and served as a Tang military outpost called Suyet. The city today is less than an hour's drive from the Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek. Was Li Bai Han Chinese, part Han, Central Asian? Why was he born way the heck out there? We don't know. And like more ancient history than we care to admit, we can only speculate and make the best guesses we can based on the evidence that survived the last 12 centuries. The legend of Li Bai says he ended up in Sichuan when he was five years old, not far from Chengdu, in a place called Jiangyou. There's a Li Bai Memorial Hall there if you're ever in the neighborhood, two hours to the northeast of Chengdu. As a young'un there, he exhibited amazing prospects, talented in all things, including wushu, martial arts, swordsmanship in particular. There were stories written of Li Bai not only using his skills in the martial arts to defend those being preyed upon by the rougher and tougher bettors, but killing some of these antagonists as well. All part of the early Li Bai legend. Li Bai enthusiasts will tell you straight away, aside from the vast repository of fabulous poems, over a thousand, one other thing that defined him was, well, his romanticism and absolute love of wine. He loved drinking, getting drunk, composing poetry when he was blitzed, and even writing poems about the joys of Chinese wine. And did I mention Man of the People? I indicated that. Yeah, Li Bai was one of those types that, you know, whatever he had in his pocket at the time, that's how generous he could be with his friends, hangers-on, and those he might meet on the road. He was no Van Gogh, unappreciated in his own lifetime. He was a star wherever he went. Right on the spot, Li Bai would extemporaneously say or write one poem, and instantly the aficionados gathered round knew this was the greatness they aspired to. In 725, Li Bai, in his mid-twenties, left Sichuan and did the first of what was to be several stretches of wandering around China. He went all over the country, mostly throughout the north and central part, and wherever he went, he wrote poetry that gives us a peek at what one might expect to see in a century China. He wrote of the places he saw, the people he met, or with whom he had tearful farewells. He began in Nanjing, so easily accessible from Sichuan via the Yangtze River, despite the brilliant career in the imperial bureaucracy that was his for the taking. Li Bai never bothered to take the civil service exams and therefore denied himself what could have been quite a career as a Tang official. He was never a big fan of Confucius, but he had read all the classics, knew them backwards and forwards, and was thoroughly educated in this respect. But as I said, given his personality, that wasn't the life for a guy like Li Bai. He preferred to lean pretty heavily in the direction of Daoism instead. One of the milestones in Li Bai's early bio concerns the story from 735, when his early wanderings brought him to Shanxi province. A general named Guo Ziyi was being tried in a military court for something or other, and Li Bai knew Guo and was aware of his reputation for honesty, integrity, and always doing the right thing. I read he was an historian Christian. Anyway, Li Bai used his influence to speak to someone and advocated on behalf of Guo Ziyi, and so Li Bai was able to save this Tang general from some uncertain future. And for doing Guo Ziyi such a solid like he did, much later on in 757, in the throes of the An Lushan rebellion, Li Bai is going to find himself in hot water facing execution. By that time, Guo Ziyi was one the leading Tang military leaders and would ultimately lead the dynasty to victory over the An Lushan rebels. We'll get to that later. Guo Ziyi by that time was called the great protector of the Tang dynasty and was credited with saving the dynasty from a real close call. But when Li Bai got him out of a jam in Shanxi in the year 735, Guo Ziyi still had a whole slew of battles in front of him. Later on during the period of his wanderings that brought him to eastern most Shandong, Li Bai's legend continued to grow. There in the former state of Lu, he fell in with five other Shandongers, all accomplished in varying degrees in the literary and artistic skills of the day. And Li Bai became part of this band of six who were known as the Zhuxi Dayi, the six idlers of the bamboo brook. Zhuxi means bamboo stream or brook, and Dayi, well, Yi means ease, leisure, escape, flee, withdraw from the world. Da means great, which presumes these six were a cut above your average Yi. Sort of taking a page out of the playbook of the former seven sages of the bamboo grove of the third century, Li Bai and his five merry friends all got together and had the poetic equivalent of one big long drunken jam session where everyone got liquored up to the gills, wallowed in their beautiful natural surroundings, and produced poetry that was as good as it got. And besides Li Bai's association with this group, later on Du Fu will write a poem that showcased eight other immortals of that same period, and he named Li Bai among this octet. All poets, each one with one particular thing about them that was particularly extraordinary, and he called them the Jiu Zhong Ba Xian, the eight immortals of the wine cup. And if that name doesn't say it all, I'm sure you can figure out what these literati did in between bottomless cups of Bai Jiu. Anyway, getting back to Li Bai, his big break, I guess you could say, came in 742 with the help of one of Emperor Xuanzong's sisters, Princess Yuzhan. Li Bai had gotten to know the princess and educated as she was, she knew talent when she saw it. So after striking up this friendship, Princess Yuzhan, Yuzhan Gongzhu, when she had the Xuanzong Emperor's attention one day, she went on to rave about this poet of amazing talent named Li Bai. Xuanzong was suitably intrigued, just as Joseph II probably was when his advisors first told him about this amazing Mozart from Salzburg. So Xuanzong was game, and with the royal princess's introduction, Li Bai came to the greatest city in the world, perhaps mid-8th century, Chang'an, and just wowed everyone. I'm telling you, it's not like today where people communicate digitally for everything. For so many circumstances in daily aristocratic and court life, whatever had to be said was often best said in a short poem. Some of us marvel at the ability of some artists and writers who can create one masterpiece after another. Well, so it was with Li Bai. In a society where you were judged by your poetry skills, Li Bai dazzled the crowds. Some of his poems, when people heard them for the first time, they knew they were precious gems, and Emperor Xuanzong loved them. There's a story about some gala that Xuanzong threw to honor Li Bai, and that the emperor himself grabbed the ladle from the soup tureen or some spices or seasonings and personally served Li Bai, and not everyone got that treatment. Xuanzong called for the establishment of a kind of academic institution, and he staffed it with his most brilliant court scholars and officials, and this institution that came to be known as the Hanlin Academy became the ultimate authority for all matters related to the Confucian classics, poetry, translations, and other things too. And since all the civil service exams that all budding scholars had to pass were based on these Confucian classics, the Hanlin Academy also acted as the organization responsible for the questions and correct answers. Xuanzong appointed Li Bai to this Hanlin Yuan, located in the imperial capital of Chang'an. This was a rather prestigious institution throughout the centuries. Besides Li Bai, other notable members were the great Tang poet Bai Juyi, the great scholar and statesman covered in CHP's episode 71, Ouyang Xiu, Shen Kuo, Zeng Guofan, and Cai Yuanpei, to name a few of the more famous Hanlin Academy alums. One of the things Xuanzong liked about Li Bai, who, you know, he had made a kind of unofficial Tang court poet, was that he made him so happy with all the poems he wrote special just for the emperor, and his number one favorite concubine, Yang Guifei. Yeah, this was the 740s, the Cai Yuan era, the best of the three eras that marked Xuanzong's reign. You know how in 1969 a lot of people didn't like Yoko, but John wouldn't listen. Well, the Xuanzong emperor had to go through the same thing. One contributed to the breakup of the Beatles, and the other, the fall of the Tang dynasty. The emperor's closest advisors warned him of Yang Guifei and her relatives, but not Li Bai. He was always more than happy to tell the emperor what he wanted to nice poems that celebrated Yang Guifei in some way. A career in the halls of power wasn't without its risks. Even on a good day, it was a hotbed for factionalism and backstabbing galore. Li Bai managed to run afoul of no less a person than the most powerful eunuch in Xuanzong's court, Gao Lishi. He was a holdover from the Wu Zetian era and ended up becoming Xuanzong's right and left-hand man. The story goes Li Bai, when summoned, was known to show up at the imperial palace hammered, and one time allowed the wine to get the best of him. The emperor made a remark to Gao Lishi to go assist the poet in removing his muddy boots or, you know, something that was rather insulting. Well, Gao Lishi sure didn't like that, but he complied, of course, and soon after conspired with Yang Guifei to have Li Bai accused of something or other that was an insult to the emperor. So after he was done whispering to Xuanzong, next thing you know, Li Bai fell from grace and received a penalty of banishment from the court. Xuanzong was heartbroken to see one of his court favorites leave, and it's said he loaded Li Bai up with all these parting gifts. So after this stint in Chang'an, Li Bai hit the road again and headed towards Xuanzong. This was the time when he met Du Fu, 744 and 745. They met in Luoyang, and these two greatest of all the greatest poets in Chinese history became friends for the remainder of their days. And although they only met in person a few times, they kept up a friendship, and as I mentioned last episode, they exchanged many poems. There were about a dozen poems from Du Fu to Li Bai that survived down to our day, and a few from Li Bai to Du Fu. They kept up an epic correspondence, like Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir or Catherine the Great and Voltaire. When Du Fu met Li Bai, ten years his senior, Li Bai was already a big star and renowned throughout the land for his work, not to mention his wild and crazy reputation. Wine was his god, and many a great poem was composed out of the many cups he would consume in a single sitting. Like all the lives of these great Tang poets of this era, Li Bai had to survive the An Lushan Rebellion that began in December, 755. During the shakeout when Xuanzong had to flee the capital suddenly after it fell to the rebels, during the power vacuum, Li Bai backed the wrong prince, not the one who became the next emperor, Suzong. And for putting his chips on the wrong horse, Li Bai once again found himself in a spot of trouble. And this was when General Guo Ziyi came to his rescue and got Li Bai out of that jam. This was in 757. You know, when Guo Ziyi passed in 781, aged 83 or 84, the legend says that the Jade Emperor himself looked upon Guo Ziyi and saw what a good, decent, principled person he had always been, that he walked the walk his whole life and had done so much for the Tang ruling house and for China. He declared Guo Ziyi from that point forward to be the god of wealth and happiness. So Li Bai escaped the death penalty, thanks to Guo Ziyi, but was banished to a town out in western Guizhou to a place called Yelang. Now, Li Bai took his sweet time getting to this farthest edge of China proper in Guizhou, and all along the route from Luoyang to western China, Li Bai wrote poems that gave us some beautiful imagery of these rural parts of China, these empty spaces in between the cities. By 759, well, he was having a gay old time stopping here and there and taking in the local sights and meeting other interesting people. Before he reached his place of banishment in Yelang, Li Bai had received a pardon from the Emperor Suzong, who had already stepped into his father's shoes after Xuanzong had to flee to Sichuan to escape the clear and present danger caused by the An Lushan rebellion. So with his royal pardon in hand, Li Bai went back to doing what he did best, wandering around China, through Guizhou, Jiangxi, Anhui, and again in Nanjing, stopping wherever he pleased, always composing poetry and enjoying his wine. He finally ended up living with a relative in the town of Dangtu in Anhui, and there he passed away in 762 at the age of 61. And if you visit Dangtu County today, just south of Ma'anshan, you can visit the Tai Bai Mu, or Li Bai Tomb, the great poet's final resting place. There's a version of Li Bai's death that says he was on a boat, drunk as can be and feeling no pain, and fell into the river trying to embrace or perhaps toast the reflection of the moon on the water. No one got that on video, so hard to determine the veracity of that legend. The An Lushan rebellion still had another year to go before it was finally snuffed out. The Tang dynasty continued on for another 134 more years to 907, but pretty much by the time the rebellion ended, it was never the same again. And all the experts and scholars have divided Li Bai's poetry up into all these chapters in his life, the periods when he was traveling here or there, when he was hanging out with the six idlers of the bamboo brook, or working for the emperor, or on the road to Yelang. Let's read a few of his poems. His five and seven character per line quatrains are what he's best remembered for, but throughout his life his compositions ran the whole gamut of popular styles of poetry that we discussed in the first three episodes of this series. He didn't invent any styles. He wasn't known as a great innovator. Li Bai's greatness lie in writing poetry in all the styles of the day, ancient and modern, and producing work of such quality that in his own time in the 8th century, clear through to today, people went crazy about his poetry. Let's start with one of his most famous poems. It's called Thoughts on a Still Night. Jingye Si. Anyone who went through the Chinese version of the K-12 regiment surely had to memorize this one. Chuang qian min yue guang, yi shi di shang shuang, ju tou wang min yue, di tou si gu xiang. Moonlight before my bed, perhaps frost on the ground, lift my head and see the moon, lower my head and I miss home. And here's one of the poems he wrote for Meng Haoran, someone we'll look at in part six and one of the most beloved of Tang poets from this time. It's called Sending Off Meng Haoran at Yellow Crane Tower. I've been there many times. Huanghe Lou. Yellow Crane Tower. If you ever visit Wuhan, don't miss it. The poem was written by Li Bai as he watched his friend's boat from the top of this magnificent tower as it sailed away on the Yangtze River. In Chinese this poem is called Huanghe Lou, Song Meng Haoran zhi guang ling. Gu ren xi ce huanghe lou, yan hua san yue xia yang zhou, gu fan yuan ying bi kong jing, wei jian chang jiang, tian ji liu. My old friend bids farewell to the west at Yellow Crane Tower. In the third month, flowers in the mist, he leaves for Yangzhou. Distant reflection of the lone sail on the edge of an emerald emptiness. All I see is the Yangtze River flowing as if on the verge of heaven. And here is one of Li Bai's poems to Dufu. This is another in the most popular genre of poems where one bids farewell to another person or place. This one's called A Poem Sent to Dufu Below Shaqiu City. Shaqiu cheng xia ji dufu, wo lai jing he shi, gao wo shaqiu cheng, cheng bian you gu shu, ri xi lian qiu sheng, lu jiu bu ke zui, qi ge kong fu qing, si jun ruo wen shui, hao dang ji What is the purpose of my coming here? High before me lies Shaqiu City. Beside the city, ancient trees. The sunset unites with autumn sounds. The lu wine cannot make me drunk. The songs of qi cannot mend my empty feelings. I think of you as the water of the Wen River, flowing immensely and mightily south. Here's one more and then we'll call it a day. This poem by Li Bai is called Hearing a Bamboo Flute on a Spring Night in Luoyang. Chun ye luo cheng wen di, shui jia yu di an fei sheng, san ru chun feng man luo cheng, ci ye qu zhong wen zhe liu, he ren bu qi gu yuan qing. From whose house is the hidden flute's tune coming? The sound penetrates the spring breeze, filling Luoyang City. In the middle of the nocturne, I hear the sound of a snapped willow. Who would not begin to think of home? So that's just a small taste of Li Bai, just an amuse-bouche to perhaps give those of you who never heard of him a drop of inspiration to maybe go check out more. Please refer to the show notes for links to several nice translations to his poetry and of Dufu as well. If you only read it in translation, well, like I said, no two translations are the same. Side by side, they look similar, but there's no one single authoritative definitive version of these great poets' work. You really have to drink it straight from the tap in the original Chinese to get the full flavor and enjoy all the subtleties. For those of you looking for a nice non-intimidating place to start, try Dr. James Hong's new one called An Introduction to Tang Poetry. I'll put a link to that book in the show notes. He's written several books you might be interested in as far as Tang poetry goes, and he could give you a much more in-depth and analytical intro than your humble narrator. Next episode, we'll look at the life of Dufu and read some of his poems. As you'll see, he had quite a different life experience from Li Bai, one of the great party animals from Chinese history. Dufu didn't get to enjoy half the fun Li Bai had, so please don't give up the ship just yet. Okay, let's wind things up for now. This is Laszlo Montgomery coming to you once again, just like last time, and probably next time as well, from the city of Los Angeles here in the state of confusion. I'll be waiting for you in two weeks, same bat time, same bat channel, for another poetic episode of the China History Podcast.