University of Virginia Library

III

The ancestry of Li Po is traced back through the
obscurity of many generations to Li Kao of the fifth
century, who ruled the Liang State, or the western portion
of what is now the province of Kansu. The family
dwelt in exile for a period in the Mongolian desert land.
The poet himself writes of his being "Originally a cotten-clothed
of Lunhsi." That is to say, he was a plain
citizen of a district in Kansu. But he was born, according
to best authorities, in the adjoining land of
Shuh, or the present Ssuchuan—that picturesque western
province of mountains and tumbling waters which
flow into the great Yangtze-kiang.

As to the year of his birth, biographers again differ.
Some maintain it to have been as early as 699, while
others would have it as late as 705, with consequent
variation in his age, since he died, as all agree, in the
year 762. A biographical calendar, compiled by Sieh
Chung-yung of the Sung dynasty, places the poet's birth
in the second year of the Shen-lung era; while another
calendar by Wang-chi of the Ming dynasty, who edited
the complete works of Li Po, fixes the year as the first
of the Chang-an era. All evidence seems to favor the
latter date, which falls in the year of 701.

On the night of the poet's birth his mother dreamed
of the planet of Chang-keng, which is Venus, and which
is popularly known in China as the Tai-po Hsing,

meaning literally the Great White Star. Thus it was
that he was named Po (the White One), and surnamed
Tai-po (the Great White One). Later he dubbed himself
the Green Lotus Man, borrowing the name from
a Buddhist saint; and sometimes went by the self-evident
designation of the "Old Wine Genius."

When a boy of six Li Po could read, and by the age
of ten he had mastered the Confucian books of the Odes
and the History and miscellaneous classics by a hundred
writers, and was composing poems of his own. While
he was still in his teens, he retired with a recluse by the
name of Tunyen-tzu to the mountain of Min in northern
Ssuchuan. Here the two men kept strange birds
as pets and succeeded in taming them to feed from their
hands, the report of which brought to their hermitage
the local magistrate, who invited them to enter the
government service. But they declined. Our young
poet sang contentedly:

In 721 he traveled down the Yangtze to Yun-meng,
the land of seven moors, that lies to the north of the river
and the Tung-ting Lake; here he was married to a granddaughter
of a certain ex-minister Hsu, and stayed there
for three years.

Then he moved up north to Shantung, and made his
home in Jen-cheng and elsewhere. "I am thirty," he
wrote to a friend, "I make verses without tiring, while
in front of my house carts and horses go by." Years
passed without any visible achievement. One cannot
blame too harshly his first wife who, impatient of the
lack of his promotion, left him with the children. It

was during this period that he became one of the "Six
Idlers of the Bamboo Valley" who gathered in the mountain
of Chu-lai for the jolly fellowship of wine and
song. He traveled extensively, too. Once he was in
the city of Lo-yang, enjoying the lavish hospitality of
Tung Tsas-chiu, who had a special wine house built for
the poet at the Tien-tsin bridge-head, where
Later the same host invited the poet to Ping-chou near
Taiyuan-fu in Shansi, where Tung's father was stationed
as the military commander. Here the two companions
went on happy excursions, taking singing-girls out on
the river by the dynastic shrine of Chin. It was in
Ping-chou that the poet befriended Kuo Tsu-i, who was
still a young soldier in the ranks, but who was later to
become the savior of the empire as well as of the poet's
life. In the year 738 Li Po was back in Shantung when
Tu Fu, his one great and formidable rival in poetic
fame, arrived in the province and met him. At once
a warm friendship and exchange of poems began that
lasted lifelong, and that makes the happiest and most
memorable chapter in China's literary history. Tu Fu
was the younger of the two. They slept together under
one coverlet (so he tells us in one of his poems), and
went hand in hand like two brothers.[2]

Li Po traveled south to the lands of Wu and Yueh
of old to wander amid the ruins of once glorious palaces
and among the lakes of lotus lilies, and chose to

sojourn in a district called Yen, in Chehkiang, famous
for the beauty of its hills and valleys. Here he met Wu
Yun, scholar and Taoist, who on being summoned to
court took Li Po with him to Chang-an, the capital of
the empire.

It was about the year 742 that Li Po entered Chang-an,
the golden metropolis, when the long prosperous years
of the Tien-pao era had just begun, and the court of
Hsuan Tsung had reached the pinacle of brilliance.
Li Po went to see Ho Chi-chang, a guest of the crown
prince, and showed his poems. The jovial courtier was
so pleased that he bartered his gold ornament for wine
and entertained the new-comer. Moreover, he commended
the poet to the emperor. "I have in my house,"
he said, "probably the greatest poet that ever existed.
I have not dared to speak of him to your Majesty because
of his one defect, which is rather difficult to correct:
he drinks, and drinks sometimes to excess. But
his poems are beautiful. Judge them for yourself,
sire!" So saying, he thrust in Hsuan Tsung's hand a
bundle of manuscript. "Fetch me the author of these
poems!" spoke the emperor instantly—so runs one story.

But according to other versions it was Wu Yun, or
Princess Yu-chen, who introduced Li Po to the court.
At any rate, the poet was given an audience in the Hall
of Gold Bells. His discourse and ode at once won the
admiration of the emperor, so that he feasted the poet
at the Table of the Seven Jewels and assigned him to
the Han-ling Academy. That is, Li Po was placed under
imperial patronage, without any special duties but
to write occasional poems, of which the ninth piece in
the present book is an example.

He banqueted with lords and ladies in and out of the

court, and sought frequently the taverns of the city.
But who were his boon companions? A vivid portrayal
of that much celebrated company, the "Eight Immortals
of the Wine-cup," whose revels were the talk of
Chang-an, is happily preserved for us in an equally celebrated
poem by Tu Fu.

One day in spring Hsuan Tsung with Lady Yang
Kuei-fei held a royal feast in the Pavilion of Aloes.
The tree-peonies of the garden, newly imported from
India, were in full flower as if in rivalry of beauty with
the emperor's voluptuous mistress. There were the musicians
of the Pear Garden and the wine of grapes
from Hsi-liang. Li Po was summoned, for only his
art could capture for eternity the glory of the vanishing
hours. But when brought to the imperial presence,
the poet was drunk. Court attendants threw cold water
on his face and handed him a writing brush. Whereupon
he improvised those three beautiful songs[3] in rapturous
praise of Yang Kuei-fei, which were sung by the
famous vocalist, Li Kuei-nien, while the emperor himself
played the tune on a flute of jade.

But it was one of these very songs,[4] according to a
widely accepted tradition, that helped cut short the gay

and prodigal career of the poet at the court. Kao Li-shih,
the powerful eunuch, who had been greatly humiliated
by having been ordered to pull off Li Po's shoes
once as the latter became drunk at the palace, persuaded
Yang Kuei-fei that the poet had intended a malicious
satire in his poem by comparing her with Lady
Flying Swallow, who was a famous court beauty of the
Han dynasty, but who was unfaithful and never attained
the rank of empress. This was enough to turn gratitude
to venomous hate, and Yang Kuei-fei interfered whenever
the emperor sought to appoint the poet to office.
There is another tradition that Li Po incurred the displeasure
of Hsuan Tsung through the intrigue of a
fellow courtier. This story is also plausible. Li Po
was not the sort of man fitted for the highly artificial
life of the court, where extreme urbanity, tact and dissimulation,
were essential to success. He soon expressed
a desire to return to the mountains; and the
emperor presented him with a purse and allowed him to
depart. He was then forty-five years old, and had sojourned
in the capital for three years.

Once more Li Po took to the roads. He wandered
about the country for ten years, "now sailing one thousand
li in a day, now tarrying a whole year at a place,
enjoying the beauty thereof." He went up northeast
to Chinan-fu of Shantung to receive the Taoist diploma
from the "high heavenly priest of Pei-hai." He journeyed
south and met Tsui Tsung-chi, the handsome Immortal
of the Wine-cup, who had been banished from
the capitol and was an official at the city of Nanking.
The old friendship was renewed, and withal the glad
old time. It is related that one moonlight night they
took a river journey down the Yangtze from Tsai-hsi

to Nanking, during which Li Po arrayed himself in
palace robes and sat in the boat, laughing aloud, and
rolling his frenzied eyes. Was it the laughter of wanton
revelry, or of self-derision, or of haughty scorn at the
foolish world that could not fathom his soul? In 754
Wei Hao, a young friend of his, came to meet him at
Kuang-ling, Kiangsu Province, and traveled with him
a while. To him Li Po entrusted a bundle of his
poems, saying, "Pray remember your old man! Surely
in the future I'll acquire a great fame."

Next year, in March of 755, we discover him fleeing
from the city of Lo-yang amid the confusion of the war
of An Lu-shan, whose troops occupied the city and made
the waters of the Lo River flow crimson with blood. The
poet went down to the province of Chehkiang, and finally
retired to the mountains of Luh near Kiu-kiang in
Kiangsi Province. When Li Ling, the Prince of Yung, became
the governor-general of the four provinces near the
mouth of the Yangtze, Li Po joined his staff. But the subsequent
revolt and the quick fall of the Prince in 757 lead
to imprisonment of the poet at the city of Kiu-kiang, with
a sentence of death hanging over him. On examination
of the case officials were inclined to leniency. One of
them, Sung Ssu-jo, recommended the emperor not only
to pardon Li Po but to give him a high place in the government
service. But the memorial, which by the way
had been written by Li Po himself at Sung's direction,
failed to reach its destination. Then Kuo Tsu-i, now a
popular hero with his brilliant war record, came to
the rescue; he petitioned that Li Po's life might be ransomed
with his own rank and title. The white head of
the poet was saved, and he was sentenced to perpetual
banishment at Yeh-lang—the extreme southwest region

of the empire covered by the present province of Yunnan.

He proceeded westward up the river leisurely. There
seems to have been little pressure from the central government,
certainly no inclination on the part of the
poet, to expedite the journey. At Wu-chang he was welcomed
by the local governor Wei, with whom he spent
months and climbed the Yellow Crane House three times.
Further up he encountered Chia-chi, his former companion
at Chang-an, and Li Hua, a kinsman of his. These
two had also been demoted and dismissed from the
capital. The three luckless men now joined in a boat
party more than once on the Tung-ting Lake under the
clear autumn moon. That these were not so lugubrious
affairs after all is attested by their poems.[5] After such
delays and digressions Li Po sailed up the Yangtze
through the Three Gorges and arrived in Wu-shan, Ssu-chuan,
in 759, when amnesty was declared.

The old poet started homeward, resting a while at
Yo-chou and Chiang-hsia, and returning to Kiu-kiang
again. He visited Nanking once more in 761; and next
year went to live with his kinsman, Li Yang-ping, who
was magistrate of Tang-tu, the present city of Taiping
in Anhwei. Here in the same year he sickened and died.

A legend has it that Li Po was drowned in the river
near Tsai-shih as he attempted, while drunken, to embrace
the reflection of the moon in the water. This was

further elaborated into a tale, which was translated by
Théodore Pavie. This story, quoted by d'Hervey Saint
Denys, is altogether too beautiful to omit. I retranslate
the passage from the French:

"The moon that night was shining like day. Li Tai-po
was supping on the river when all of a sudden there
was heard in the mid-air a concert of harmonious voices,
which sounded nearer and nearer to the boat. Then,
the water rose in a great tumult, and lo! there appeared
in front of Li Tai-po dolphins which stood on their
tails, waving their fins, and two children of immortality
carrying in their hands the banners to indicate the
way. They had come in behalf of the lord of the
heavens to invite the poet to return and resume his
place in the celestial realm. His companions on the
boat saw the poet depart, sitting on the back of a dolphin
while the harmonious voices guided the cortège. . . .
Soon they vanished altogether in the mist."

As to Li Po's family and domestic life the curiosity
of the western mind has to go unsatisfied. The Chinese
biographers never bother about such trivialities of a
man's private affairs. The Old and the New Books of
Tang are both totally silent. Only in his preface to
the collection of the poet's works Wei Hao remarks:

"Po first married a Hsu and had a daughter and a son,
who was called the Boy of the Bright Moon. The
daughter died after her marriage. Po also took to wife
a Liu. The Liu was divorced, and he next was united
to a woman of Luh, by whom he had a child, named
Po-li. He finally married a Sung."

Hsu, Liu, and Sung are all family names of the women

who were successively married to Li Po. Of his several
poems extant, addressed to his "wife," it is difficult to
tell just which one is meant in each case. From a poem[7]
written to his children we learn that the girl's name was
Ping-yang, and the son whom Wei Hao refers to by the
unusual nickname of the "Boy of the Bright Moon," was
called Po-chin. Of the third child, Po-li, mentioned by
Wei Hao, there is no reference elsewhere. Po-chin died
without having obtained any official appointment in 793.
His one son wandered away from home; while his two
daughters were married to peasants.

Although Li Po had expressed his desire of making the
Green Hill at a short distance southeast of Taiping-fu
his last resting place, he was buried at the "East Base"
of the Dragon Hill. His kinsman, Li Hua, wrote the
inscription on his tombstone. Twenty-nine years after
the poet's death a governor of Tang-tu set up a monument.
But by the second decade of the ninth century
when another great poet, Po Chu-i, came to visit the
grave, he found it in the grass of a fallow field. About
the same time Fan Chuan-cheng, inspector of these districts,
discovered the "burial mound three feet high, fast
crumbling away"; he located the two grandaughters of
Li Po among the peasantry, and on learning the true
wish of the poet, removed the grave to the north side of
the Green Hill and erected two monuments in January
of 818.