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The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai
From the National Book Award-winning author of Waiting a narratively driven, deeply human biography of the Tang dynasty poet Li Bai--also known as Li Po
In his own time (701-762), Li Bai's poems--shaped by Daoist thought and characterized by their passion, romance, and lust for life--were never given their proper due by the official literary gatekeepers. Nonetheless, his lines rang out on the lips of court entertainers, tavern singers, soldiers, and writers throughout the Tang dynasty, and his deep desire for a higher, more perfect world gave rise to his nickname, the Banished Immortal. Today, Bai's verses are still taught to China's schoolchildren and recited at parties and toasts; they remain an inextricable part of the Chinese language.
With the instincts of a master novelist, Ha Jin draws on a wide range of historical and literary sources to weave the great poet's life story. He follows Bai from his origins on the western frontier to his ramblings travels as a young man, which were filled with filled with striving but also with merry abandon, as he raised cups of wine with friends and fellow poets. Ha Jin also takes us through the poet's later years--in which he became swept up in a military rebellion that altered the course of China's history--and the mysterious circumstances of his death, which are surrounded by legend.
The Banished Immortal is an extraordinary portrait of a poet who both transcended his time and was shaped by it, and whose ability to live, love, and mourn without reservation produced some of the most enduring verses.
In his own time (701-762), Li Bai's poems--shaped by Daoist thought and characterized by their passion, romance, and lust for life--were never given their proper due by the official literary gatekeepers. Nonetheless, his lines rang out on the lips of court entertainers, tavern singers, soldiers, and writers throughout the Tang dynasty, and his deep desire for a higher, more perfect world gave rise to his nickname, the Banished Immortal. Today, Bai's verses are still taught to China's schoolchildren and recited at parties and toasts; they remain an inextricable part of the Chinese language.
With the instincts of a master novelist, Ha Jin draws on a wide range of historical and literary sources to weave the great poet's life story. He follows Bai from his origins on the western frontier to his ramblings travels as a young man, which were filled with filled with striving but also with merry abandon, as he raised cups of wine with friends and fellow poets. Ha Jin also takes us through the poet's later years--in which he became swept up in a military rebellion that altered the course of China's history--and the mysterious circumstances of his death, which are surrounded by legend.
The Banished Immortal is an extraordinary portrait of a poet who both transcended his time and was shaped by it, and whose ability to live, love, and mourn without reservation produced some of the most enduring verses.
303 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2019
137 people are currently reading
1264 people want to read
About the author
Ha Jin
60 books840 followersHa Jin is the pen name of Jin Xuefei, a novelist, poet, short story writer, and Professor of English at Boston University.Ha Jin writes in English about China, a political decision post-Tiananmen Square.
Ha Jin grew up in mainland China and served in the People’s Liberation Army in his teens for five years. After leaving the army, he worked for three years at a railroad company in a remote northeastern city, Jiamusi, and then went to college in Harbin, majoring in English. He has published in English ten novels, four story collections, four volumes of poetry, a book of essays, and a biography of Li Bai. His novel Waiting won the National Book Award for Fiction, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Ha Jin is William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor in English and Creative Writing at Boston University, and he has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His writing has been translated into more than thirty languages. Ha Jin’s novel The Woman Back from Moscow was published by Other Press in 2023.
Ha Jin grew up in mainland China and served in the People’s Liberation Army in his teens for five years. After leaving the army, he worked for three years at a railroad company in a remote northeastern city, Jiamusi, and then went to college in Harbin, majoring in English. He has published in English ten novels, four story collections, four volumes of poetry, a book of essays, and a biography of Li Bai. His novel Waiting won the National Book Award for Fiction, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Ha Jin is William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor in English and Creative Writing at Boston University, and he has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His writing has been translated into more than thirty languages. Ha Jin’s novel The Woman Back from Moscow was published by Other Press in 2023.
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November 11, 2024
Ha Jin, award winning poet and novelist, reconstructs the life of Li Bai through Li's poems, and those of his friend and fellow poet Du Fu. Together Li and Du are China's most famous classical poets. Ancient commentary and modern research are also employed to build the biography. Ha recounts the major events of the Tang dynasty during the 8th century, inextricably linked to Li's lifetime. Born in 701, a prosperous period, Li later suffered from the violent upheavals of the time. His poetry denounced war, and celebrated friendship, wine and nature, and in particular the moon. He is said to have drowned chasing the moon into a lake while drunk, surely an apocryphal tale.
Li's first years were lived in Kyrgyzstan beyond the Tianshan mountains in a far flung western region of the empire. He was likely of mixed ancestry from a Han father and a Turkic mother. His father was a Silk Road trader specializing in paper and other Chinese goods. At an early age his family moved to Sichuan. They had several trading stations along the Yangtze River, traveled extensively and eventually became wealthy. Li claimed royal ancestors, the Han dynasty general Li Guang, who fought Huns in the 2nd century BC and was a descendant of Laozi. Tang emperors also asserted this lineage. Celebrated in poems claims such as these were not uncommon nor confirmable.
As a business man, and thus low on the Confucian ladder, Li's father wanted him to go into government. This required extensive study and investment with no guarantee of success. The son of a merchant, Li was banned from the civil service exam. Instead he pursued positions through recommendations and interviews, which required even greater learning and acuity, and could lead to still greater rewards. Versed in the Four Books and Five Classics, Li preferred the Tao Te Ching and Zhuangzi from the Taoist canon. Confucianism emphasized secular rituals and social order while Taoism was concerned with natural and universal rhythms, the way of immortals.
As a youth of 21 Li became an itinerant poet and a seeker of an elusive imperial post. From Chengdu to Chongching, through the Three Gorges to Wuhan and Nanjing, he left a trail of poems. Paying visits to powerful men he was not well received. Staying with monks at mountain retreats in Leshan and Lushan his poetry broke open the boundaries of court convention. Many are now carved in cliffs at the places they were conceived. He wrote lyrics at times in the voices of women, unheard of at the time. Throwing lavish parties he was left destitute and deserted but he gained fame for his writing. He married into a wealthy established family, a thing looked down on at the time.
Unable to secure a position and rejected by his wife's family he retreated to the mountains. He later sailed down the Yellow River to Luoyang and on to Shanxi and Shandong. At the age of 43 Li finally entered the imperial court at Xian. Writing poetry for emperor Xuanzong's beautiful consort Yang Guifei he soon fell out of favor due to court intrigue. He moved back to Shandong during 745 where he wrote and practiced Taoism until 755. The An Lushan rebellion deposed the emperor and he was banished in the periodic wars that followed. Pardoned in 759 he lived out his life in the lower Yangtze River basin near Nanjing until his death in 761. He never stopped writing until the end.
Poetry is essentially untranslatable. One can only imagine Li Bai's verses in their original meter and rhyme. "The moon rises from the Tianshan Mountains / Sailing in an ocean of clouds / The wind, thousands of miles long / Is blowing through Yumen Pass". Stranded and penniless: "Moonlight spreads before my bed / I wonder if it's frost upon the ground / I raise my head to watch the moon / And lowering it, I think of home". Li writes: "Long ago we came out of Goose Pass / And ever since have stayed in this barbarous land / Sandstorms distort the sun and the steppe / And flying snow blocks the foreign sky". The original language is lost but the strength and simplicity are not.
In Li's early poetry there was a braggadocio reminiscent of modern rap lyrics. As a young man he boasts of swordplay: "After three cups I began to play with my sword / Cutting down men like weeds" and "Walking ten steps I cut down a man / And I didn't stop for a thousand miles". On money: "A talent like mine must be put to good use / A thousand pieces of gold, once squandered will come again". Exaggerated deeds were an intrinsic part of early Chinese writing. Du Fu "drinks like a whale sucking a hundred rivers". Li's stature is mythological, like Zhuangzi's Great Peng, a bird that’s a thousand miles long: "making heaven tilt, while mountains quake and oceans churn below".
Li chronicled the feelings and trials he faced along the way; loneliness, homesickness, friendship and joy. Ha Jin does a wonderful job conveying the life and times of Li Bai. As one of China's cultural treasures, Li has been written about extensively for over a thousand years in the east. The amount of information is amazing, a testament to Li's prolific writing as well as China's literary tradition. Mao Zedong once possessed Li Bai's only existing example of calligraphy. Influences in the west include Gustav Mahler's 1908 song cycle, Ezra Pound's 1915 translations, Arthur Waley's 1950 biography and the Beat Generation poets. It is great to discover things already known.
Li's first years were lived in Kyrgyzstan beyond the Tianshan mountains in a far flung western region of the empire. He was likely of mixed ancestry from a Han father and a Turkic mother. His father was a Silk Road trader specializing in paper and other Chinese goods. At an early age his family moved to Sichuan. They had several trading stations along the Yangtze River, traveled extensively and eventually became wealthy. Li claimed royal ancestors, the Han dynasty general Li Guang, who fought Huns in the 2nd century BC and was a descendant of Laozi. Tang emperors also asserted this lineage. Celebrated in poems claims such as these were not uncommon nor confirmable.
As a business man, and thus low on the Confucian ladder, Li's father wanted him to go into government. This required extensive study and investment with no guarantee of success. The son of a merchant, Li was banned from the civil service exam. Instead he pursued positions through recommendations and interviews, which required even greater learning and acuity, and could lead to still greater rewards. Versed in the Four Books and Five Classics, Li preferred the Tao Te Ching and Zhuangzi from the Taoist canon. Confucianism emphasized secular rituals and social order while Taoism was concerned with natural and universal rhythms, the way of immortals.
As a youth of 21 Li became an itinerant poet and a seeker of an elusive imperial post. From Chengdu to Chongching, through the Three Gorges to Wuhan and Nanjing, he left a trail of poems. Paying visits to powerful men he was not well received. Staying with monks at mountain retreats in Leshan and Lushan his poetry broke open the boundaries of court convention. Many are now carved in cliffs at the places they were conceived. He wrote lyrics at times in the voices of women, unheard of at the time. Throwing lavish parties he was left destitute and deserted but he gained fame for his writing. He married into a wealthy established family, a thing looked down on at the time.
Unable to secure a position and rejected by his wife's family he retreated to the mountains. He later sailed down the Yellow River to Luoyang and on to Shanxi and Shandong. At the age of 43 Li finally entered the imperial court at Xian. Writing poetry for emperor Xuanzong's beautiful consort Yang Guifei he soon fell out of favor due to court intrigue. He moved back to Shandong during 745 where he wrote and practiced Taoism until 755. The An Lushan rebellion deposed the emperor and he was banished in the periodic wars that followed. Pardoned in 759 he lived out his life in the lower Yangtze River basin near Nanjing until his death in 761. He never stopped writing until the end.
Poetry is essentially untranslatable. One can only imagine Li Bai's verses in their original meter and rhyme. "The moon rises from the Tianshan Mountains / Sailing in an ocean of clouds / The wind, thousands of miles long / Is blowing through Yumen Pass". Stranded and penniless: "Moonlight spreads before my bed / I wonder if it's frost upon the ground / I raise my head to watch the moon / And lowering it, I think of home". Li writes: "Long ago we came out of Goose Pass / And ever since have stayed in this barbarous land / Sandstorms distort the sun and the steppe / And flying snow blocks the foreign sky". The original language is lost but the strength and simplicity are not.
In Li's early poetry there was a braggadocio reminiscent of modern rap lyrics. As a young man he boasts of swordplay: "After three cups I began to play with my sword / Cutting down men like weeds" and "Walking ten steps I cut down a man / And I didn't stop for a thousand miles". On money: "A talent like mine must be put to good use / A thousand pieces of gold, once squandered will come again". Exaggerated deeds were an intrinsic part of early Chinese writing. Du Fu "drinks like a whale sucking a hundred rivers". Li's stature is mythological, like Zhuangzi's Great Peng, a bird that’s a thousand miles long: "making heaven tilt, while mountains quake and oceans churn below".
Li chronicled the feelings and trials he faced along the way; loneliness, homesickness, friendship and joy. Ha Jin does a wonderful job conveying the life and times of Li Bai. As one of China's cultural treasures, Li has been written about extensively for over a thousand years in the east. The amount of information is amazing, a testament to Li's prolific writing as well as China's literary tradition. Mao Zedong once possessed Li Bai's only existing example of calligraphy. Influences in the west include Gustav Mahler's 1908 song cycle, Ezra Pound's 1915 translations, Arthur Waley's 1950 biography and the Beat Generation poets. It is great to discover things already known.
October 10, 2020
When I talk to my daughter on the phone, she often asks what I am reading. A few night's ago, I answered, "A biography about an 8th-century Chinese poet. I guess you could call it a niche book."
She laughed. "I think that qualifies as a niche within a niche book."
Maybe so, but I was intrigued by a review and Ha Jin, the author, is a name I knew, so what the heck. The book brings us into the Tang Dynasty, a golden era of sorts for Chinese poetry, but a time of political turmoil and infighting.
This is the story of Li Po, though Jin chooses to call him Li Bai instead. Poor Li Bai was a conflicted man---a prodigious poetic talent with concurrent political and Daoist ambitions (and that last is an oxymoron, I realize, but, in his way, so was Bai).
Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately, as it inspired his Muse), Bai was a bibulous sort. When the wine flowed, the poetry did, too. To a point, that is. There's a point where drunkenness washes out the Muse, too. But still, Jin embeds Bai's poetry throughout, as it seems the man could whip off a poem as easily as he could chug down a wine.
There's a lot of history to be learned here, too. I did not realize that the Daoists did not believe in the afterlife, thus devoting themselves instead to the creation of immortality pills. It was a bit like medieval alchemists and Ponce de Leon wishful thinking, that, and many of these concoctions they swallowed actually *shortened* their lives, but irony knows no borders, and it was alive and well in 8th-century China, too.
In addition to drinking and writing, Li Bai loved to travel. Geography, anyone? And kiss up in hopes of landing a political position with the emperor. Futility, anyone? In the end it's a bit of a sad life he lived, but at least his life is a window to a time and a place and a pantheon of other Chinese poets of note. For that, though the writing in this book is rather pedestrian, I can be thankful.
That and the fact that a good niche read is just what the doctor ordered now and then.
She laughed. "I think that qualifies as a niche within a niche book."
Maybe so, but I was intrigued by a review and Ha Jin, the author, is a name I knew, so what the heck. The book brings us into the Tang Dynasty, a golden era of sorts for Chinese poetry, but a time of political turmoil and infighting.
This is the story of Li Po, though Jin chooses to call him Li Bai instead. Poor Li Bai was a conflicted man---a prodigious poetic talent with concurrent political and Daoist ambitions (and that last is an oxymoron, I realize, but, in his way, so was Bai).
Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately, as it inspired his Muse), Bai was a bibulous sort. When the wine flowed, the poetry did, too. To a point, that is. There's a point where drunkenness washes out the Muse, too. But still, Jin embeds Bai's poetry throughout, as it seems the man could whip off a poem as easily as he could chug down a wine.
There's a lot of history to be learned here, too. I did not realize that the Daoists did not believe in the afterlife, thus devoting themselves instead to the creation of immortality pills. It was a bit like medieval alchemists and Ponce de Leon wishful thinking, that, and many of these concoctions they swallowed actually *shortened* their lives, but irony knows no borders, and it was alive and well in 8th-century China, too.
In addition to drinking and writing, Li Bai loved to travel. Geography, anyone? And kiss up in hopes of landing a political position with the emperor. Futility, anyone? In the end it's a bit of a sad life he lived, but at least his life is a window to a time and a place and a pantheon of other Chinese poets of note. For that, though the writing in this book is rather pedestrian, I can be thankful.
That and the fact that a good niche read is just what the doctor ordered now and then.
January 23, 2019
My favourite Chinese poet. An Asian existentialist in his time. Admirable.
April 3, 2019
I'd rank this more as a 2.75--I was interested by it but not enough to finish. It's a fascinating glimpse into the world of Chinese poetry but I had trouble getting a full sense of Li Bai's work, as well as struggling with an aversion to his very personality (the not-often-home, constantly striving man of genius is...not one I have an affinity for). It did make me want to learn more about Chinese history and literature, and he's an interesting subject, but the nature of the evidence remaining about him also made much of the biography feel like stretched conjecture.
February 26, 2019
I cannot help but appreciate a writer like Ha Jin for trying to bring the attention of more readers to the incredible life and poetry of the Tang poet Li Bai. After all, as I was reminded once again at a dinner party only the other night, one can be an incredibly literate Westerner and still express complete bafflement at such names as Li Bai or Du Fu. This biography was a good read and reminded me how troubled Li Bai's life was. A poet who valued and wrote much about freedom and transcendence, he was, almost to the end of his life, obsessed with obtaining a government position, something for which he was utterly ill-suited. Moreover, his compulsion to travel constantly, searching out friends (in a few cases only to discover they had died a year or more before) meant that his family, shifting frequently in its make-up, was almost always left behind and suffered. He was a poetic genius, to be sure, known throughout the China of his time, who was committed to the tranquility of Daoism, but never quite found, nor really had the personality to find, much tranquility himself. It is a remarkable life in many ways, and the very name of the author, Ha Jin, a famous writer in his own right, will attract readers. That being said, I was sometimes disappointed with this book. There are small errors—no one I have ever come across gives Sima Qian's birth as early as 154 BCE (the argument about his birth date is basically over whether it was 145 or 135 BCE), and despite Ha Jin's statement on p279 that "Li Bai was sixty-nine years old now," Li Bai in fact died at the age of sixty-one. These and other similar errors are of no great significance, but what surprised me most was the weakness of the translations. Ha Jin clearly favors a fairly loose form of translation. Fine, if he can thereby capture the exhuberance and verbal display of Li Bai's poetry, but this only rarely happens in Ha Jin's renditions. While the reader might appreciate, as I certainly did, this account of Li Bai's life, for the power of his poetry, one is advised to look elsewhere.
January 20, 2025
I learned a tremendous amount about Chinese poetry, religion, and Tang dynasty politics from this poet’s biography. Ha Jin is an extraordinary writer and researcher. I would say that the poems themselves are not apparently all that well translated. In other words, this English reader could lent quite grasp their power. However, Ha Jin provides Chinese readers with the original texts, and certainly explains and evaluates them tor those like me who don’t understand the originals. I should say that Li Bai’s life story is fascinating even if you’re not overall interested in Tang China. He was a complex man: a great and original poet, but also a religious seeker (a Daoist), a restless traveller, a comrade, a drunkard, a husband, a father, a scholar, a swordsman, and a sometimes criminally naive (but always minor) statesman.
January 18, 2020
購入作者簽名版，私心五星。
從整體閱讀體驗上來說，比較像是通識讀本+歷史小說之結合體。作者口吻輕鬆，以主觀以及歷史客觀角度交織敘述歷史。這也與讀者目標群眾有一定聯繫，對比深度研究，更像是用人人都能接受的手法向他人作出科普。
值得一提的是，書中有不少相當動人的描寫。以及——理所當然的，詩句。這也是它有些像歷史小說的一個重要原因，這些描述將氣氛烘托得恰到好處，使歷史情節扣人心弦。
題外話：實體書裝幀尚可，只是簽名跟維基上的有點不太一樣（……？
從整體閱讀體驗上來說，比較像是通識讀本+歷史小說之結合體。作者口吻輕鬆，以主觀以及歷史客觀角度交織敘述歷史。這也與讀者目標群眾有一定聯繫，對比深度研究，更像是用人人都能接受的手法向他人作出科普。
值得一提的是，書中有不少相當動人的描寫。以及——理所當然的，詩句。這也是它有些像歷史小說的一個重要原因，這些描述將氣氛烘托得恰到好處，使歷史情節扣人心弦。
題外話：實體書裝幀尚可，只是簽名跟維基上的有點不太一樣（……？
February 26, 2019
Yes! This book shows the way forward, to dramatize Chinese history and literature through the poet-hero’s life, dashing out into his community and back down into his struggles and triumphs. I have extensive notes already, and certainly I’ll return to this, the most inspiring read in a long time. It is of interest that Ha Jin uses a straight-up historian-biographer narrator voice, covering the full life with great economy of prose, and at times sacrificing dramatic moments that called for more lingering arias. One wonders what else can be done in this form...
March 16, 2019
Why do we need a life of an ancient Chinese poet, now, in English, in 2019? Why a book, not about the poetry per se, but about the life of the poet, with a little poetry thrown in for illustration? There is no lack of biographical writing for those interested in Li Bai, in Chinese, English, and other languages. Those seeking the poetry itself will find better translations elsewhere; what is provided by Ha Jin is helpful, but he is not a poet, however accomplished he may be as a novelist.
One possible answer is that Jin needs no justification because the poetry of Li Bai is timeless. We should receive it as we might a biography of King David, or a commentary on the Mahābhārata . My own particular interests led me to Li Bai and thence to this book; Jin's own very particular literary journey may have led him to a similar junction. Like Shakespeare or Sappho or Hafez, Li Bai is a giant of world literature, who wrote from within one of the great past civilizations of humanity, and has achieved that rare status of a literary figure both respected by scholars and adored by readers. We should all be more familiar with him for those reasons alone. It is not a question of why, only of when.
Another reason, more particular to our collective globalizing moment, might be that, precisely because so few of us in the West know of Li Bai or his poetry - or Du Fu, or Wang Wei, or any of the other Tang Dynasty poets - we need a good introduction. Jin states in one place that Li Bai may be not just one of the greatest of Chinese poets, but one of the greatest world poets of all time. Nothing in his text suggests that such a remark is chauvenistic. But it does suggest that, as Chinese wealth and power accrue to levels more typical of those maintained over the long run of history, a sort of reckoning is called for. A place needs to be made for a poet whose experience is so thickly enmeshed with the richest and most sophisticated society of his age. Within that society, his experience as an artist in relation to politics proves to be surprisingly relevant to our own.
This last theme is, I believe, the foremost reason why we most need this book, in English, in 2019. Li Bai's life, in the first half of the 8th century, is a case study of the risks of an intellectual blending art and politics. This, of course, has been a subject of much meditation concerning the receding 20th century. At the same time, it illustrates, for those more familiar with the Western liberal tradition, possibilities for an artistic-intellectual life in relation to politics that are relatively underdeveloped there: the posture of restraint, of silent contemplation, of disengagement, or seclusion. As forms of political experience these ancient Chinese alternatives are increasingly intriguing, especially in the age of social media and relentless, invasive, all-consuming engagement with subjects both trivial and fundamental.
Li Bai's naive and ambitious attraction to political power is a sort of negative lesson on how easily artists intellectuals may be drawn by, as his friend Du Fu put it, the shimmering image of "men in elegant dress and fancy carriages in the capital," by the lust for influence and the thrill of being by the Emperor's side. His best poetry is just the opposite: a Daoist alternative to siren calls for ceaseless agitation and the urge to act with consequence, written from within a space of natural beauty. There are analogies to the perspectives of Montaigne or Rousseau and their turn to 'nature', whose work arose when European courtly culture, after centuries-long delays, attained levels of urban concentration and power similar to that of the earliest Chinese dynasties.
The paths for upward mobility in China were not broad. Yet, it is astounding that a half-Han merchant's son from Western tribal regions managed to rise to the level he did, called on to serve the imperial court and served tea by the Emperor himself. What did he hope to accomplish there? It is not clear, and his political ideas, which Ha Jin recognizes as obsolete derivations of thousand year-old Warring States ideology, were not serviceable to the newly centralized Tang Empire. Like so many others before and after, his fortune vacillated with imperial whims. It is when he seeks refuge from courtly intrigues that he articulates the option of the recluse and Daoist renunciation of power. There is nothing quite like this in the Western political tradition.
Is this an option for political life in the West? Has it been explored sufficiently? Li Bai always had the wilderness to which he could retreat, the theater of a different, superior wisdom. It was never sufficient for him, but it was sustaining. Ultimately, it infused his poetry with the greatness that has outlasted any of the material accomplishments of the Tang Dynasty. In an age of comprehensive, encroaching digital surveillance, of relentless and covert stimulation of primal reflexes, and the fear-of-missing-out dependency cultivated by an unending stream of dramas both large and small, is there a possibility for seclusion? An option to withdraw from the polis in the pursuit of alternative ideals? Or is it now impossible for anyone to escape the shifting, maddening, and terrifying whirlpool of courtly gossip and intrigue that is our daily digital life?
This is the question, to my mind, that Ha Jin’s Li Bai leaves us with.
One possible answer is that Jin needs no justification because the poetry of Li Bai is timeless. We should receive it as we might a biography of King David, or a commentary on the Mahābhārata . My own particular interests led me to Li Bai and thence to this book; Jin's own very particular literary journey may have led him to a similar junction. Like Shakespeare or Sappho or Hafez, Li Bai is a giant of world literature, who wrote from within one of the great past civilizations of humanity, and has achieved that rare status of a literary figure both respected by scholars and adored by readers. We should all be more familiar with him for those reasons alone. It is not a question of why, only of when.
Another reason, more particular to our collective globalizing moment, might be that, precisely because so few of us in the West know of Li Bai or his poetry - or Du Fu, or Wang Wei, or any of the other Tang Dynasty poets - we need a good introduction. Jin states in one place that Li Bai may be not just one of the greatest of Chinese poets, but one of the greatest world poets of all time. Nothing in his text suggests that such a remark is chauvenistic. But it does suggest that, as Chinese wealth and power accrue to levels more typical of those maintained over the long run of history, a sort of reckoning is called for. A place needs to be made for a poet whose experience is so thickly enmeshed with the richest and most sophisticated society of his age. Within that society, his experience as an artist in relation to politics proves to be surprisingly relevant to our own.
This last theme is, I believe, the foremost reason why we most need this book, in English, in 2019. Li Bai's life, in the first half of the 8th century, is a case study of the risks of an intellectual blending art and politics. This, of course, has been a subject of much meditation concerning the receding 20th century. At the same time, it illustrates, for those more familiar with the Western liberal tradition, possibilities for an artistic-intellectual life in relation to politics that are relatively underdeveloped there: the posture of restraint, of silent contemplation, of disengagement, or seclusion. As forms of political experience these ancient Chinese alternatives are increasingly intriguing, especially in the age of social media and relentless, invasive, all-consuming engagement with subjects both trivial and fundamental.
Li Bai's naive and ambitious attraction to political power is a sort of negative lesson on how easily artists intellectuals may be drawn by, as his friend Du Fu put it, the shimmering image of "men in elegant dress and fancy carriages in the capital," by the lust for influence and the thrill of being by the Emperor's side. His best poetry is just the opposite: a Daoist alternative to siren calls for ceaseless agitation and the urge to act with consequence, written from within a space of natural beauty. There are analogies to the perspectives of Montaigne or Rousseau and their turn to 'nature', whose work arose when European courtly culture, after centuries-long delays, attained levels of urban concentration and power similar to that of the earliest Chinese dynasties.
The paths for upward mobility in China were not broad. Yet, it is astounding that a half-Han merchant's son from Western tribal regions managed to rise to the level he did, called on to serve the imperial court and served tea by the Emperor himself. What did he hope to accomplish there? It is not clear, and his political ideas, which Ha Jin recognizes as obsolete derivations of thousand year-old Warring States ideology, were not serviceable to the newly centralized Tang Empire. Like so many others before and after, his fortune vacillated with imperial whims. It is when he seeks refuge from courtly intrigues that he articulates the option of the recluse and Daoist renunciation of power. There is nothing quite like this in the Western political tradition.
Is this an option for political life in the West? Has it been explored sufficiently? Li Bai always had the wilderness to which he could retreat, the theater of a different, superior wisdom. It was never sufficient for him, but it was sustaining. Ultimately, it infused his poetry with the greatness that has outlasted any of the material accomplishments of the Tang Dynasty. In an age of comprehensive, encroaching digital surveillance, of relentless and covert stimulation of primal reflexes, and the fear-of-missing-out dependency cultivated by an unending stream of dramas both large and small, is there a possibility for seclusion? An option to withdraw from the polis in the pursuit of alternative ideals? Or is it now impossible for anyone to escape the shifting, maddening, and terrifying whirlpool of courtly gossip and intrigue that is our daily digital life?
This is the question, to my mind, that Ha Jin’s Li Bai leaves us with.
June 3, 2019
I read this wonderful literary biography of one of China's greatest poets by one of its most interesting and accomplished contemporary writers (albeit one who lives in the US and writes in English) with a sense of wonder and excitement. Ha Jin has brought the poetic genius Li Bai to life and animated his world - I have read much about the Tang dynasty but never before felt like I had grasped its social and political texture. Marvellous. One to read and reread.
October 10, 2023
I loved reading this moody and evocative book and am sad to have finished it.
February 18, 2021
So. Interesting. To. Me.
I always have to acknowledge that other people might not be whatsoever interested in: China, history, poetry, Chinese history, Chinese poets, the geography of China, historical geography of kingdoms, poems, Chinese language, poetry in translation...but! The subject of this biography, Li Bai, the incredible Tang Dynasty poet, is actually interesting and not just to me! And writer/best selling novelist Ha Jin handles all the names, places, and untranslatable metaphors wonderfully, simplifying them into a short fascinating bio.
That totally makes me want to move back to China.
side note: I fear I am a lot like Li Bai, flaws and all.
I always have to acknowledge that other people might not be whatsoever interested in: China, history, poetry, Chinese history, Chinese poets, the geography of China, historical geography of kingdoms, poems, Chinese language, poetry in translation...but! The subject of this biography, Li Bai, the incredible Tang Dynasty poet, is actually interesting and not just to me! And writer/best selling novelist Ha Jin handles all the names, places, and untranslatable metaphors wonderfully, simplifying them into a short fascinating bio.
That totally makes me want to move back to China.
side note: I fear I am a lot like Li Bai, flaws and all.
February 1, 2022
An Absorbing Biography of a Great Poet
I’ve loved Ezra Pound’s translation of “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” ever since first reading it in university, but I’d never known much more about the writer of the original poem than that his Japanese name was Rihaku, his American name Li Po, and his Chinese name Li Bai. So I eagerly listened to and learned a lot from Ha Jin’s The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai (2019).
It is hard to overestimate the importance of Li Bai (701-762) to Chinese culture. Liquor shops, temples, and factories, Ha Jin tells us, bear his name, and his poems are regularly quoted in Chinese TV dramas, children learn them by heart in school, and they appear carved in stone at tourist sites. Ha Jin acknowldges the difficulty of writing a biography of the most famous poet in Chinese history: a dearth of primary records and sources and a wealth of legends. He identifies three Li Bais: the actual man (revealed by a few records), the self-created man (projected through his poems), and the legendary man (imagined in centuries of popular episodes). Most biographers have focused on the second Li Bai, the image he created, as scholars have searched his roughly one thousand surviving poems (less than a tenth of his prodigious output) looking for clues about his life and personality. Ha Jin does that as well, but also relies on comments by Li Bai’s friends and on his own interpretations. The result is a fascinating look at the life of the Tang Dynasty super poet, nicknamed the Banished Immortal because people thought he’d begun as a star in heaven but gotten exiled to our mundane earth for some transgression. The manner and exact date of Li Bai’s death remain mysteries. A popular legend has him drowning while drunkenly embracing the reflection of the moon in a lake. Ha Jin says that the likeliest possibility is that he died of an alcohol-related disease.
The first movement of Bai’s life ran from his youth to middle age as he tried and failed to get a government position while traveling and drinking and making friends and enemies and writing poems about his travels and many other topics. His original genius at poetry, healthy ego, and impatience with fools repeatedly sabotaged his chances to get an official’s career, although he did make many friends who admired his abilities and bold personality, poetry, and calligraphy.
His fame as an original and brilliant poet finally won him what he’d thought was his life dream: a position at court. But he immediately learned that the Tang court was a den of corruption, that he could only earn money by accepting bribes for favors and access, and that he was not there to advise the emperor but to play the celebrity poet in the Imperial Academy, a menagerie of idiosyncratic entertainers, quacks, and conmen (like a self-proclaimed 3000-year-old man). Quickly making enemies of his fellow Imperial Academicians (by mocking them in a poem) and then of a powerful eunuch in charge of multiple armies and Emperor Shuenshong’s favorite consort, Bai soon had to resign and distance himself from court.
Bai spent the next phase of his life studying to become a certified Taoist monk, partly to put himself beyond the reach of his court enemies. The grueling qualification-initiation ritual permanently ruined his health.
His last years were ignominious, as he joined the losing side in a civil war of succession, resulting in his being exiled and reviled as a traitor. He was pardoned, but his final summons to return to court came after he’d already died in obscurity hoping for such a summons.
Bai was complex: he wrote wanderlust poems at home and homesick poems away from home, loved his first and second wives and kids and wrote poems for and about them but left them for long periods, and wanted to transcend the world to a heavenly plane but wrote poems about worldly concerns and cares. The biography is not a hagiography, Ha Jin calling Bai foolish and self-deluded for joining a rebel prince’s cause against his wife’s good advice. The irony of Bai’s life is that he wanted wealth, fame, and power on the one hand and transcendence on the other, failing at both and drinking too much to soothe his disappointment.
As he recounts Bai’s life, Ha Jin relates many interesting Chinese culture points, like the (still current) belief of poets, painters, and calligraphers that the best way to free up the creative powers is to get tipsy. Also interesting was China’s long history and familiarity with classics and famous figures from every period of it, such that in the eighth century Bai and his contemporaries studied and learned poetry from centuries before. Still more. During the Tang Dynasty people thought you could dramatically extend your life span by taking Taoist immortality pills (full of mercury and other poisons), the government was constantly worrying about barbarians on the borders, you could only get into the government by passing a test that only elites could sit for or by getting a connection to recommend you, and commoners couldn’t get within 100 feet of officials’ carriages.
One of the most interesting discoveries (for me) in the book is the great amount of occasional verse Bai wrote for family, friends, or officials about greeting, parting, missing, traveling, drinking, eating, thanking, apologizing, loving, requesting, as well as poems inspired by current events (like a failed war or corrupt officials), sublime views (of mountains, rivers, towers, etc.), pitiable scenes (of hardworking laborers etc.), or homesickness. Poems in the voices of women (courtesans, dancers, wives) and of soldiers on the frontier. Poems apologizing to his wife for being a bad husband or rhapsodizing about how sublime he is (a roc flying to heaven or a dragon dragged down to earth). Poems as letters, diary entries, essays, political critiques, or self-explorations. Chinese poetry must be very flexible to contain such a stunningly wide scope in content, style, and mood.
Ha Jin quotes excerpts from many famous (to the Chinese) poems by Bai, like one about his friend Haoran departing after a fine visit:
My friend is sailing west away from Yellow Crane Tower.
Through the March blossoms he is going down to Yan Cho.
His sail casts a single shadow in the distance, then disappears.
Nothing but the Yangtze flowing on the edge of the sky.
The audiobook reader David Shih is fine.
Anyone interested in Chinese history or world art and literature should find much nourishment in this book.
I’ve loved Ezra Pound’s translation of “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” ever since first reading it in university, but I’d never known much more about the writer of the original poem than that his Japanese name was Rihaku, his American name Li Po, and his Chinese name Li Bai. So I eagerly listened to and learned a lot from Ha Jin’s The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai (2019).
It is hard to overestimate the importance of Li Bai (701-762) to Chinese culture. Liquor shops, temples, and factories, Ha Jin tells us, bear his name, and his poems are regularly quoted in Chinese TV dramas, children learn them by heart in school, and they appear carved in stone at tourist sites. Ha Jin acknowldges the difficulty of writing a biography of the most famous poet in Chinese history: a dearth of primary records and sources and a wealth of legends. He identifies three Li Bais: the actual man (revealed by a few records), the self-created man (projected through his poems), and the legendary man (imagined in centuries of popular episodes). Most biographers have focused on the second Li Bai, the image he created, as scholars have searched his roughly one thousand surviving poems (less than a tenth of his prodigious output) looking for clues about his life and personality. Ha Jin does that as well, but also relies on comments by Li Bai’s friends and on his own interpretations. The result is a fascinating look at the life of the Tang Dynasty super poet, nicknamed the Banished Immortal because people thought he’d begun as a star in heaven but gotten exiled to our mundane earth for some transgression. The manner and exact date of Li Bai’s death remain mysteries. A popular legend has him drowning while drunkenly embracing the reflection of the moon in a lake. Ha Jin says that the likeliest possibility is that he died of an alcohol-related disease.
The first movement of Bai’s life ran from his youth to middle age as he tried and failed to get a government position while traveling and drinking and making friends and enemies and writing poems about his travels and many other topics. His original genius at poetry, healthy ego, and impatience with fools repeatedly sabotaged his chances to get an official’s career, although he did make many friends who admired his abilities and bold personality, poetry, and calligraphy.
His fame as an original and brilliant poet finally won him what he’d thought was his life dream: a position at court. But he immediately learned that the Tang court was a den of corruption, that he could only earn money by accepting bribes for favors and access, and that he was not there to advise the emperor but to play the celebrity poet in the Imperial Academy, a menagerie of idiosyncratic entertainers, quacks, and conmen (like a self-proclaimed 3000-year-old man). Quickly making enemies of his fellow Imperial Academicians (by mocking them in a poem) and then of a powerful eunuch in charge of multiple armies and Emperor Shuenshong’s favorite consort, Bai soon had to resign and distance himself from court.
Bai spent the next phase of his life studying to become a certified Taoist monk, partly to put himself beyond the reach of his court enemies. The grueling qualification-initiation ritual permanently ruined his health.
His last years were ignominious, as he joined the losing side in a civil war of succession, resulting in his being exiled and reviled as a traitor. He was pardoned, but his final summons to return to court came after he’d already died in obscurity hoping for such a summons.
Bai was complex: he wrote wanderlust poems at home and homesick poems away from home, loved his first and second wives and kids and wrote poems for and about them but left them for long periods, and wanted to transcend the world to a heavenly plane but wrote poems about worldly concerns and cares. The biography is not a hagiography, Ha Jin calling Bai foolish and self-deluded for joining a rebel prince’s cause against his wife’s good advice. The irony of Bai’s life is that he wanted wealth, fame, and power on the one hand and transcendence on the other, failing at both and drinking too much to soothe his disappointment.
As he recounts Bai’s life, Ha Jin relates many interesting Chinese culture points, like the (still current) belief of poets, painters, and calligraphers that the best way to free up the creative powers is to get tipsy. Also interesting was China’s long history and familiarity with classics and famous figures from every period of it, such that in the eighth century Bai and his contemporaries studied and learned poetry from centuries before. Still more. During the Tang Dynasty people thought you could dramatically extend your life span by taking Taoist immortality pills (full of mercury and other poisons), the government was constantly worrying about barbarians on the borders, you could only get into the government by passing a test that only elites could sit for or by getting a connection to recommend you, and commoners couldn’t get within 100 feet of officials’ carriages.
One of the most interesting discoveries (for me) in the book is the great amount of occasional verse Bai wrote for family, friends, or officials about greeting, parting, missing, traveling, drinking, eating, thanking, apologizing, loving, requesting, as well as poems inspired by current events (like a failed war or corrupt officials), sublime views (of mountains, rivers, towers, etc.), pitiable scenes (of hardworking laborers etc.), or homesickness. Poems in the voices of women (courtesans, dancers, wives) and of soldiers on the frontier. Poems apologizing to his wife for being a bad husband or rhapsodizing about how sublime he is (a roc flying to heaven or a dragon dragged down to earth). Poems as letters, diary entries, essays, political critiques, or self-explorations. Chinese poetry must be very flexible to contain such a stunningly wide scope in content, style, and mood.
Ha Jin quotes excerpts from many famous (to the Chinese) poems by Bai, like one about his friend Haoran departing after a fine visit:
My friend is sailing west away from Yellow Crane Tower.
Through the March blossoms he is going down to Yan Cho.
His sail casts a single shadow in the distance, then disappears.
Nothing but the Yangtze flowing on the edge of the sky.
The audiobook reader David Shih is fine.
Anyone interested in Chinese history or world art and literature should find much nourishment in this book.
February 11, 2020
I need to better educated so I can enjoy this more.
December 4, 2020
I was never really interested in Chinese lessons in school and very reluctantly had to memorize many poems from this Li Bai dude. So chancing across this book one day I decided to pick it up.
This biography was written in such a manner that it felt like a novel. We got to follow Li Bai from a kid, to young adult with huge political ambitions which he never gave up on, then to his old age where he realized he will never accomplish what he has dreamt of. Even though he did not do what he set out to do, he still became one of China's most popular historical figure because of his literary genius.
I also gained a lot of insight about the Tang dynasty throughout the story, which Li Bai lived from its golden age till the start of its decline.
Overall, a nice book that stimulates the imagination of what it was like back in ancient China through the eyes of a romantic travelling bard.
This biography was written in such a manner that it felt like a novel. We got to follow Li Bai from a kid, to young adult with huge political ambitions which he never gave up on, then to his old age where he realized he will never accomplish what he has dreamt of. Even though he did not do what he set out to do, he still became one of China's most popular historical figure because of his literary genius.
I also gained a lot of insight about the Tang dynasty throughout the story, which Li Bai lived from its golden age till the start of its decline.
Overall, a nice book that stimulates the imagination of what it was like back in ancient China through the eyes of a romantic travelling bard.
May 28, 2025
Wow Li Bai was kind of an idiot lmao like a passionate artistic idiot but still
The book clearly sets up binaries of idealism/pragmatism, earthly/heavenly as the main tensions of Li Bai’s life. On some level, it feels as if pursuing the heavenly only would have allowed for Li Bai to achieve a better life, but on the other hand, wasn’t there immense value in his love for the people? Ultimately, Li Bai’s main virtues seem to have lain in his emotional capacity. He was a bit shit at everything else.
But yes I really love biographies rn idk LOL
The book clearly sets up binaries of idealism/pragmatism, earthly/heavenly as the main tensions of Li Bai’s life. On some level, it feels as if pursuing the heavenly only would have allowed for Li Bai to achieve a better life, but on the other hand, wasn’t there immense value in his love for the people? Ultimately, Li Bai’s main virtues seem to have lain in his emotional capacity. He was a bit shit at everything else.
But yes I really love biographies rn idk LOL
February 15, 2020
Like Bai was undoubtedly one of the greatest poets in China. He left so many masterpieces that we can recite without difficulty. He was consistently torn between his political ambitions and his firm belief of Daoism. From my point of view, such a talented person like Li Bai is indeed too precious for any mudane political position.
May 16, 2020
I have long loved Li Bai’s poetry, first encountered in a collection referring to him as Li Po. Ha Jin’s biography is masterful, painting a vivid portrait of Bai the man, and of the world in which he lived.
May 9, 2021
For some reason, I didn't really enjoy it. It narrates the life story of Li Bai.
July 21, 2022
"I longed, and my longing became a dream".
April 25, 2024
A young wannabe bureaucrat perpetually tries and fails to join the system by applying to every USAJobs posting, always holding a sliver of hope that power and glory are around the next corner, yet slowly realizing no position in the capital will ever bring him ultimate fulfillment. But make it Tang dynasty. Relatable as hell.
May 31, 2019
Fascinating story about a period of Chinese history that I was not familiar with it. Li Bai's life was hard and so were his expectations. He traveled and wandered around his whole life, seaming to struggle the whole time. I wish the poems were also written in Chinese as I'm sure the beauty was lost in translation.
January 28, 2019
I have noticed some problems from the Prelude.
1. Immortal is not enough.
It is understandable to regard someone as immortal when s/he has produced significant (positive) influence to the world and is remembered by many, century after century. Li Bai is certainly qualified to be deemed immortal by all generations because of his achievements and legacy in poetry. However, the context in which this title arose is not the celebration and memory of his life and words being eternal, but the impression of being free, easy and talented he gave (to his friends) when he was alive. “Immortal” cannot aptly describe the origin of the title and the character of Li. The idea of there being some people who do not die and are thus immortal is associated with the Taoist religion. It is the life-long pursuit of the Taoists that they are free from the reality and live happily in the heaven or some remote and secluded islands and mountains. To be an autonomous and free spirit with supernatural powers is one of the major goals of the practice of Taoism, and Li sought to become such a free spirit when he was young. Taoism was prevalent in Tang Dynasty, and it was like the state religion of the Tang (Xuanzong) 唐玄宗 Court, so xianren 仙人 should be understood as free spirit, transcendent/transcendental, superhuman and so on, instead of simply immortal. As the transcendent can capture most of the meaning of xianren, “the banished transcendent” may be an adequate and better translation of the title zhe xianren 謫仙人.
Similarly, shixian 詩仙 and jiuxian 酒仙 should be translated as the “transcendent poet” and the “transcendent drinker” respectively.
2. Taibai is not his original name.
While the choosing of words to represent the title zhe xianren of Li Bai may be dismissed as a trivial disagreement arising from the differences in understanding and taste between Ha Jin and others, the misstatement of facts is fatal to this non-fictional writing. Li Bai’s another name, Li Taibai, is not, as Ha Jin claims, “his [Li’s] original Chinese name”. Taibai is Li’s zi 字 which means the courtesy name acquired after guan li 冠禮, the ceremony to mark the age of twenty of a male in ancient China. It might have been “the name his parents gave him”, but Taibai is arguably not Li Bai’s original name. The courtesy name which symbolises the adulthood of a male may be conferred by his parents or teacher or even proclaimed by himself. Ha Jin says:
The brief “Li Bai Biography” in the eleventh-century book New Tang History reads, “When giving birth to Li Bai, his mother dreamed of the star Venus, so he was named Taibai (Venus).”
The relevant sentence of “Li Bai Biography” in New Tang History goes 白之生，母夢長庚星，因以命之。The history record only states that “when Bai was about to be born, his mother dreamt of Venus, so she named him accordingly”. It does not declare to the extent that the boy was therefore named Taibai. It might well be the case that in the past “Bai” (white) was sufficient to signify Venus. Moreover, Li Bai’s mother might have a detailed plan that she would like to give Taibai as Bai’s courtesy name; in other words, she first named her little boy as Bai at his birth. After all, the New Tang History does not confirm whether Li Bai’s mother used Taibai as his courtesy name or his original given name at birth. If the truth is the latter case, then many biographies of Li Bai should not have started by “Li Bai, with courtesy name Taibai…” or “Li had the given name of Bai and the courtesy name of Taibai”.
3. Green Lotus Scholar may not be a scholar.
It is correct that jushi 居士 can be taken to mean someone who is knowledgeable and intelligent but does not become an official. In this sense, translating jushi as scholar is acceptable. Nonetheless, Qinglian Jushi 青蓮居士, the hao 號 of Li Bai (hao was usually the title given by oneself in ancient China), should be construed against the religious background of Tang Dynasty. After Buddhism was spread to China, jushi was chiefly used to referred to people who adopted religious practices at home. As I mention above, Li had been quite obsessed with Taoism in the early years of his life. It is very likely that Li, by calling himself Qinglian Jushi, intended to retain a Taoist hao to indicate his interest in Taoism. Qinglian Jushi should therefore be translated as Green Lotus Informal Taoist Practitioner rather than Green Lotus Scholar. Surely, one can defend the recognition of jushi as scholar in Li Bai’s life, but Ha Jin has not done so (in the Prelude).
1. Immortal is not enough.
It is understandable to regard someone as immortal when s/he has produced significant (positive) influence to the world and is remembered by many, century after century. Li Bai is certainly qualified to be deemed immortal by all generations because of his achievements and legacy in poetry. However, the context in which this title arose is not the celebration and memory of his life and words being eternal, but the impression of being free, easy and talented he gave (to his friends) when he was alive. “Immortal” cannot aptly describe the origin of the title and the character of Li. The idea of there being some people who do not die and are thus immortal is associated with the Taoist religion. It is the life-long pursuit of the Taoists that they are free from the reality and live happily in the heaven or some remote and secluded islands and mountains. To be an autonomous and free spirit with supernatural powers is one of the major goals of the practice of Taoism, and Li sought to become such a free spirit when he was young. Taoism was prevalent in Tang Dynasty, and it was like the state religion of the Tang (Xuanzong) 唐玄宗 Court, so xianren 仙人 should be understood as free spirit, transcendent/transcendental, superhuman and so on, instead of simply immortal. As the transcendent can capture most of the meaning of xianren, “the banished transcendent” may be an adequate and better translation of the title zhe xianren 謫仙人.
Similarly, shixian 詩仙 and jiuxian 酒仙 should be translated as the “transcendent poet” and the “transcendent drinker” respectively.
2. Taibai is not his original name.
While the choosing of words to represent the title zhe xianren of Li Bai may be dismissed as a trivial disagreement arising from the differences in understanding and taste between Ha Jin and others, the misstatement of facts is fatal to this non-fictional writing. Li Bai’s another name, Li Taibai, is not, as Ha Jin claims, “his [Li’s] original Chinese name”. Taibai is Li’s zi 字 which means the courtesy name acquired after guan li 冠禮, the ceremony to mark the age of twenty of a male in ancient China. It might have been “the name his parents gave him”, but Taibai is arguably not Li Bai’s original name. The courtesy name which symbolises the adulthood of a male may be conferred by his parents or teacher or even proclaimed by himself. Ha Jin says:
The brief “Li Bai Biography” in the eleventh-century book New Tang History reads, “When giving birth to Li Bai, his mother dreamed of the star Venus, so he was named Taibai (Venus).”
The relevant sentence of “Li Bai Biography” in New Tang History goes 白之生，母夢長庚星，因以命之。The history record only states that “when Bai was about to be born, his mother dreamt of Venus, so she named him accordingly”. It does not declare to the extent that the boy was therefore named Taibai. It might well be the case that in the past “Bai” (white) was sufficient to signify Venus. Moreover, Li Bai’s mother might have a detailed plan that she would like to give Taibai as Bai’s courtesy name; in other words, she first named her little boy as Bai at his birth. After all, the New Tang History does not confirm whether Li Bai’s mother used Taibai as his courtesy name or his original given name at birth. If the truth is the latter case, then many biographies of Li Bai should not have started by “Li Bai, with courtesy name Taibai…” or “Li had the given name of Bai and the courtesy name of Taibai”.
3. Green Lotus Scholar may not be a scholar.
It is correct that jushi 居士 can be taken to mean someone who is knowledgeable and intelligent but does not become an official. In this sense, translating jushi as scholar is acceptable. Nonetheless, Qinglian Jushi 青蓮居士, the hao 號 of Li Bai (hao was usually the title given by oneself in ancient China), should be construed against the religious background of Tang Dynasty. After Buddhism was spread to China, jushi was chiefly used to referred to people who adopted religious practices at home. As I mention above, Li had been quite obsessed with Taoism in the early years of his life. It is very likely that Li, by calling himself Qinglian Jushi, intended to retain a Taoist hao to indicate his interest in Taoism. Qinglian Jushi should therefore be translated as Green Lotus Informal Taoist Practitioner rather than Green Lotus Scholar. Surely, one can defend the recognition of jushi as scholar in Li Bai’s life, but Ha Jin has not done so (in the Prelude).
August 13, 2022
een historisch figuur die nergens paste, maar toch geliefd was, een eigenzinnig persoon met een wil om erkend te worden en toch een afkeer had voor autoriteiten en degenen die hem net zouden kunnen erkennen
May 24, 2019
I'm not sure what I wanted out of this book-- a deeper appreciation of Li Bao's poetry, maybe, and a little richer understanding of his cultural context. Maybe I wanted something of Li's legend, his happy, drunken spirit of excess? Ha Jin has his own ideas, of course, a reading of Li's life that he develops consistently, maybe almost repetitively through this book. His take on Li is that in spite of his prodigious poetic talent, Li didn't really know himself, and that he maybe never really did. The story of Li's life here is one where the poems come easy, and Li spends most of his time trying to find a way into government where his ideas on governance will really affect his society. Ha is pretty clear Li's ideas are bad, or at least anachronistic, and he doesn't seem confident Li would be effective. Li also has this sense of himself as a Daoist retreater, where he will serve and then hang up his spurs and retire. It's clear that Li never quite serves the way he dreams of, but he also seems unwilling to retire.... In terms of his public life, at least, Ha makes the case that Li is prey to his own fantasies of himself, and that they keep him unsatisfied most of his life. That's maybe not the most obvious take on Li Bao, but Ha has the receipts, as they say.
It's a little weird that a biography in 2019 doesn't really tackle Li's drinking or his relationships with the women in his life/ his role as a husband and father more deeply than this book does. There are whispers about the drinking, it's ability to soften the edges of Li's disappointment and it's likely long term health effects, but they really aren't explored. Likewise, there's a chapter about the four women in Li's life, though that is really under-explored here. Maybe these concepts don't map onto a life that took place so long ago; maybe there's nothing in the record that you could build on to say something interesting. I'm just noting that the absence of any serious remarks on these concepts is striking, striking enough that they allow for the possibility of another biography of Li in this same historical moment.
It's a little weird that a biography in 2019 doesn't really tackle Li's drinking or his relationships with the women in his life/ his role as a husband and father more deeply than this book does. There are whispers about the drinking, it's ability to soften the edges of Li's disappointment and it's likely long term health effects, but they really aren't explored. Likewise, there's a chapter about the four women in Li's life, though that is really under-explored here. Maybe these concepts don't map onto a life that took place so long ago; maybe there's nothing in the record that you could build on to say something interesting. I'm just noting that the absence of any serious remarks on these concepts is striking, striking enough that they allow for the possibility of another biography of Li in this same historical moment.
June 28, 2021
3.5 stars. This was a meticulously researched biography, but not a page-turner, of the 8th c. Tang poet, Li Po, also known as Li Bai. During his lifetime, he roamed all throughout China making friends and enemies, creating poetry and calligraphy all along the way, often as gifts for his many hosts. He and his friends would get drunk which was thought to improve the creative process along with the stimulation of constantly seeing new places and meeting new people.
Li Bai craved immortality not only as a brilliant poet but a great statesman as well, imagining heroically serving his country. His attempts at the latter were constantly foiled, in part due to lack of connections and naïveté or hubris on Lin Bai’s part. Then as now, many advisors to the emperor were more interested in amassing power more through trickery and deceit than looking out for the welfare of the populace or valuing a man of letters.
Since much of the book chronicles Li Bai’s travels and the many people he met, I would have found it helpful to have a map of both ancient and modern China to accompany the text. Similarly, a glossary of names and relations might have helped keep all the characters straight. A Chinese scholar would probably appreciate that Ha Jin documented the original poem written in Chinese and the English translation.
Toward the end of his life, Li Bai reflects on what he perceived as his failed attempt to be both a great Taoist poet and statesman:
“Trying to be prosperous and divine,
I have simply wasted my life pursuing both”
In this way, his poetry is timeless.
Li Bai craved immortality not only as a brilliant poet but a great statesman as well, imagining heroically serving his country. His attempts at the latter were constantly foiled, in part due to lack of connections and naïveté or hubris on Lin Bai’s part. Then as now, many advisors to the emperor were more interested in amassing power more through trickery and deceit than looking out for the welfare of the populace or valuing a man of letters.
Since much of the book chronicles Li Bai’s travels and the many people he met, I would have found it helpful to have a map of both ancient and modern China to accompany the text. Similarly, a glossary of names and relations might have helped keep all the characters straight. A Chinese scholar would probably appreciate that Ha Jin documented the original poem written in Chinese and the English translation.
Toward the end of his life, Li Bai reflects on what he perceived as his failed attempt to be both a great Taoist poet and statesman:
“Trying to be prosperous and divine,
I have simply wasted my life pursuing both”
In this way, his poetry is timeless.
March 21, 2020
As I read Ha Jin’s biography of Li Bai, regarded as China’s greatest poet, I was reminded of a literary character from the Western tradition: Don Quixote de la Mancha. Both men were confused romantics, wielding both the pen and the sword; both were restless and itinerant; both tilted at windmills.
Ha Jin already has a place on my bookshelf, two of his novels in the H section. Waiting is a masterpiece that tugged at my heartstrings again and again, and which I plan to re-read. His more recent novel, The Boat Rocker, has a comic-ironic “Spy vs. Spy” motif in which a Chinese-American divorced couple get caught up in their countries’ political and social differences.
Both of these novels pit the individual against society, and in Ha’s The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai, that leitmotif emerges again in a true-life story. It captivated me from the first pages and never let me down. Li Bai, also known as Li Po, who lived from 701 to 762 CE, was a study in contradictions. He had a family whom he loved but could not keep himself at home, endlessly roaming China and writing thousands upon thousands of poems about what he saw and felt. He was an iconoclast who felt a need, a duty, to serve his country but could not stomach bureaucracy. He saw holding a public office as a way to enhance his popularity as a poet, but clearly lacked the skills or the temperament to serve. People loved his poetry, but few cherished him as an individual – mostly other poets.
Li was married twice; his first wife passed away, as did his eldest child, a girl in her teens. His son lived and thrived. He remarried, but his restless spirit could not let him stay home. The man was often on the road, from town to town across China, for years at a time, seeing neither his wife nor son.
His life was writing, and through Ha’s wise biographical narrative we learn that Li Bai actually held (although he seemed to be unaware of it) the highest and most esteemed role in Chinese society: that of a poet. Bureaucrats were a dime a dozen (and still are) and therefore a man of letters – a writer – was, and remains, the most respected individual in Chinese society.
Li Bai personified the man who had it all and didn’t appreciate it. He rejected Confucius’s teachings and in later life became a Daoist (Taoist), not so much for its spiritual beliefs but to enhance his social (and perhaps political) status.
He lived through turbulent times: China was undergoing a unification under the Tang dynasty that created a more orderly governance, and thus society, and which revered poets as mentioned earlier, but was not without its internecine conflicts. The Don Quixote in Li wanted to be a soldier, to wield his sword in battle, but it didn’t happen. That was probably for the better; he was much more adept with the pen and ink.
Li Bai had an Achilles heel which would not have gone unnoticed as he wandered China: his craving for alcohol. The man loved to party. It pointed out a manner of being in the world that put many at odds with him and made political would-be benefactors dubious about giving him office. Moreover, it would have put him in grave danger on the battlefield. Li Bai was apparently a habitual sot and, if we are to believe Ha Jin’s account, spent a significant portion of his life “in his cups,” as is said in polite company.
What’s immediately evident to the reader is how utterly unsuited Li Bai was for holding office, and it makes one wonder why it held such allure for him. The sole time he was given an appointment he spent two months at it and tendered his resignation. Then regretted it for years and years. The man was a study in contradictions.
Yet all this chaos, whether inner or from life’s circumstances, seems not to have affected his poetic output. He’s rumored to have written over ten thousand poems, most of which he gave away to those whom he wrote about. (About a thousand are extant today.) In Ha’s translations, they seem rather more didactic than poetic in the Western sense, but clearly the man saw things in the people, places and things around him that he turned into slight but lovely turns of phrase. The poem he is best remembered for is this one, which was translated by another poet who was one of his Western admirers, Ezra Pound:
The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter
BY EZRA POUND
After Li Po
While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chōkan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.
At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever, and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?
At sixteen you departed
You went into far Ku-tō-en, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.
You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me.
I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Chō-fū-Sa.
Credit: The Poetry Foundation, sourced from The Selected Poems of Li Po (New Directions, 1957)
No one knows with certainty how Li Bai died. He had been quite ill and seemed to have recovered, but he was sixty-one years of age, quite an old man for those times. And he was traveling and could have fallen out of a boat or off an oxcart. Ha, in his Prelude, writes:
“By the time of his death, he had become known as a great poet and was called shexian, or Banished Immortal, by his admirers. . .. Because he was an excessive drinker, he was also called jiuxian, Wine Immortal.”
As I turned the last page, what became very clear is this. Whatever Li Bai was – or perhaps was not – he lived his life pretty much as he saw fit and never gave a thought to redemption. For that alone he has my respect.
Ha Jin already has a place on my bookshelf, two of his novels in the H section. Waiting is a masterpiece that tugged at my heartstrings again and again, and which I plan to re-read. His more recent novel, The Boat Rocker, has a comic-ironic “Spy vs. Spy” motif in which a Chinese-American divorced couple get caught up in their countries’ political and social differences.
Both of these novels pit the individual against society, and in Ha’s The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai, that leitmotif emerges again in a true-life story. It captivated me from the first pages and never let me down. Li Bai, also known as Li Po, who lived from 701 to 762 CE, was a study in contradictions. He had a family whom he loved but could not keep himself at home, endlessly roaming China and writing thousands upon thousands of poems about what he saw and felt. He was an iconoclast who felt a need, a duty, to serve his country but could not stomach bureaucracy. He saw holding a public office as a way to enhance his popularity as a poet, but clearly lacked the skills or the temperament to serve. People loved his poetry, but few cherished him as an individual – mostly other poets.
Li was married twice; his first wife passed away, as did his eldest child, a girl in her teens. His son lived and thrived. He remarried, but his restless spirit could not let him stay home. The man was often on the road, from town to town across China, for years at a time, seeing neither his wife nor son.
His life was writing, and through Ha’s wise biographical narrative we learn that Li Bai actually held (although he seemed to be unaware of it) the highest and most esteemed role in Chinese society: that of a poet. Bureaucrats were a dime a dozen (and still are) and therefore a man of letters – a writer – was, and remains, the most respected individual in Chinese society.
Li Bai personified the man who had it all and didn’t appreciate it. He rejected Confucius’s teachings and in later life became a Daoist (Taoist), not so much for its spiritual beliefs but to enhance his social (and perhaps political) status.
He lived through turbulent times: China was undergoing a unification under the Tang dynasty that created a more orderly governance, and thus society, and which revered poets as mentioned earlier, but was not without its internecine conflicts. The Don Quixote in Li wanted to be a soldier, to wield his sword in battle, but it didn’t happen. That was probably for the better; he was much more adept with the pen and ink.
Li Bai had an Achilles heel which would not have gone unnoticed as he wandered China: his craving for alcohol. The man loved to party. It pointed out a manner of being in the world that put many at odds with him and made political would-be benefactors dubious about giving him office. Moreover, it would have put him in grave danger on the battlefield. Li Bai was apparently a habitual sot and, if we are to believe Ha Jin’s account, spent a significant portion of his life “in his cups,” as is said in polite company.
What’s immediately evident to the reader is how utterly unsuited Li Bai was for holding office, and it makes one wonder why it held such allure for him. The sole time he was given an appointment he spent two months at it and tendered his resignation. Then regretted it for years and years. The man was a study in contradictions.
Yet all this chaos, whether inner or from life’s circumstances, seems not to have affected his poetic output. He’s rumored to have written over ten thousand poems, most of which he gave away to those whom he wrote about. (About a thousand are extant today.) In Ha’s translations, they seem rather more didactic than poetic in the Western sense, but clearly the man saw things in the people, places and things around him that he turned into slight but lovely turns of phrase. The poem he is best remembered for is this one, which was translated by another poet who was one of his Western admirers, Ezra Pound:
The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter
BY EZRA POUND
After Li Po
While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chōkan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.
At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever, and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?
At sixteen you departed
You went into far Ku-tō-en, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.
You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me.
I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Chō-fū-Sa.
Credit: The Poetry Foundation, sourced from The Selected Poems of Li Po (New Directions, 1957)
No one knows with certainty how Li Bai died. He had been quite ill and seemed to have recovered, but he was sixty-one years of age, quite an old man for those times. And he was traveling and could have fallen out of a boat or off an oxcart. Ha, in his Prelude, writes:
“By the time of his death, he had become known as a great poet and was called shexian, or Banished Immortal, by his admirers. . .. Because he was an excessive drinker, he was also called jiuxian, Wine Immortal.”
As I turned the last page, what became very clear is this. Whatever Li Bai was – or perhaps was not – he lived his life pretty much as he saw fit and never gave a thought to redemption. For that alone he has my respect.
March 19, 2019
A devoted reader of Li Bai's poetry I found this book to be fascinating and inspiring. As usual Ha Jin's prose is beautiful and his discussions of Li Bai, his works and his life is very much in keeping with his storytelling. The book reads like Travels with Li Bai, except that Ha Jin is sure to share with the reader and questions about some of the previous claims made about Li Bai's life. His explanations and discussion of the poems and their sittings and meanings is revealing and helpful in understanding where Li Bai got is feelings and ideas from. There is no question that Li Bai was not a great husband or father and was definitely an alcoholic, by our standards, but no the less he was a great poet...anyone interested in Chinese poetry and it poets should read this book.
November 20, 2019
This was outside of my normal reading tastes, but it was interesting to expand my mind a bit. I know nothing about Chinese poetry or Chinese history, so learning about this famous eighth century Chinese poet and the era he lived in was by turns intriguing and challenging. It is amazing how much they know about Li Bai, especially compared to what they know of notable Europeans of that time period! Some of his poetry was hard to connect with because the culture he lived in was so different, but there were several poems that were truly moving and I could appreciate the beauty in them (even though I am no poet expert!!). I did find the book to be somewhat tiresome in that it got bogged down in too many details. Or maybe I'm just not as interested in Chinese history as I should be.
February 23, 2019
Li Bai poetry is very rooted in his time and place, Tang Dynasty 8th century. Many of his poems mention friends, people of the court, and historical people of religious, military or other poets/artists that Li Bai admired. A poet with wanderlust, he made many friends and enemies. This book gives a good history of the Tang Dynasty. I would like to read more of his poetry and the poetry of his contemporaries.
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