Li Bai

Li Bai, also known by his courtesy name Taibai and in older English books as Li Po, was a Chinese poet of the Tang dynasty and one of the most admired poets in the whole Chinese tradition. Around a thousand poems attributed to him survive, celebrating friendship, wine, mountains, the moon and solitude. His life ran from the confident high point of the Tang under Emperor Xuanzong into the catastrophe of the An Lushan rebellion, and his wandering, hard-drinking persona became a legend in its own right.

Li Bai is generally thought to have been born in 701, but where is disputed. Some place his birth in Sichuan; others in Suyab, a Silk Road town in what is now Kyrgyzstan, where his family, probably merchants, had prospered after their ancestors were displaced westward. When he was about four or five his father moved the family to the region of Chengdu in Sichuan, then called Shu, and he grew up near modern Jiangyou.

He read widely, wrote poems before he was ten and became a skilled swordsman. He wished to become an official but never sat the civil service examinations.

In his mid-twenties, around 725, he left Sichuan and sailed down the Yangtze to Nanjing, beginning a life of travel. In 727 he married into a well-connected family in Anlu, in present-day Hubei, and made his home there for about ten years. He tried without success to find a post near the capital, Chang'an, around 730, and later lived in Shandong, where he belonged to a circle devoted to literature and wine.

The Daoist priest Wu Yun, summoned to court in 742, praised Li Bai to Emperor Xuanzong, who invited him to Chang'an and gave him a place in the Hanlin Academy, which supplied scholarship and poetry to the throne. His stay was short. A well-known story, probably invented, says that the powerful eunuch Gao Lishi, humiliated at having to pull off the drunken poet's boots, turned the emperor's consort Yang Guifei against him. Whatever the cause, Xuanzong politely sent him away with generous gifts, and by 744 he had left the court to take up a wandering life again, now formally as a Daoist.

In the autumn of 744 Li Bai met the younger poet Du Fu. They travelled, hunted and drank together and met once more the next year, the only times they are known to have been together.

At the end of 755 the general An Lushan rose in revolt, beginning the An Lushan Rebellion that devastated much of northern China. Xuanzong fled and abdicated, and Li Bai joined the staff of Prince Yong, one of the emperor's sons. When the prince's forces were defeated by his brother, the new Emperor Suzong, in 757, Li Bai was captured, imprisoned at Jiujiang and condemned to death. Petitions from his wife and others, and the intervention of the general Guo Ziyi, saved him, and the sentence became exile to Yelang in the far south-west. He travelled there so slowly that a pardon reached him in 759 before he arrived.

He spent his last years mainly around Nanjing and Anhui. In 762 he went to stay with a relative who was magistrate of Dangtu, and he died there that year; the date and cause were not recorded. A later tradition says he drowned while drunk, reaching from a boat to embrace the moon's reflection in the Yangtze, but this is legend.

Li Bai's poems were included in an anthology compiled in 753, and later in the much-loved collection Three Hundred Tang Poems. Poems such as "Quiet Night Thought" are still learned by Chinese schoolchildren. In the West, Ezra Pound's Cathay of 1915 drew 11 of its 19 poems from him, shaping how English-speaking readers imagined Chinese poetry.

Our 700 map shows the Tang dynasty at about the time of his birth, and the 800 map shows the empire after the rebellion that overturned his world, reaching back towards the Silk Road lands of his family's origins.