by Ha Jin
Li Bai’s father is called Li Ke, a name that to Chinese ears sounds unusual and exotic. Ke in Chinese means “guest,” and very few people of that time and place would have gone by a name that connoted “stranger” and “outsider.” In fact, we are not even sure if his family name, Li, was genuine. It has been argued that such a surname might have been invented by Bai’s father when he came back inland. Self-invented surnames were common at that time—people often associated themselves with powerful clans as a way of self-promotion and protection. Throughout his life, Li Bai asserted that he belonged to the royal clan, because the emperors and princes had the same family name. Although the emperors of the Tang dynasty did all have the name Li, the royal family had also altered their history to make their pedigree appear more authentically Chinese. The first Tang emperor, Taizu, had had foreign blood through his mother, a Sien-pi, a Tartar from southern Hebei. But later, the emperor and the court historians claimed that the royal family was originally from Guanlong, an area in between Gansu and Shanxi provinces—for in Hebei the Lis were a minority clan, whereas the Lis of Guanlong were prestigious and powerful, authentic Chinese from the central land. This might partly explain why the royal family never denied that Li Bai was one of them—their genealogy seemed to allow room for self-invention.
Li Ke was an astute and calculating man. According to Li Bai’s own account in a preface to a poem,4 his father was well learned (most likely self-taught) and familiar with the classics, which he taught to his children. Li Ke told others that his family had lost its genealogy book on their journey back inland, but that they were nonetheless descended from the great general Li Guang (184–119 BC), who had been garrisoned in the western lands more than eight centuries before. Li Guang was a legendary figure who had guarded the outlying region against the aggression of the foreign forces—mainly the Huns—from Central Asia. Many poems and stories celebrate his bravery and deeds. One poem declares, “So long as the Flying General is here, / The barbarians’ horses dare not cross Mount Yin.” Mount Yin was a passageway from the western lands to inland China, and “the Flying General” was the name that the Huns had given Li Guang because of the swift, unpredictable movement of his troops. A story, recorded by the historian Sima Qian, relates that Li Guang and his bodyguards once caught sight of a tiger in a forest. The general shot an arrow at the beast. The next day, when his men went over to fetch the kill, they found it was not an animal but a brown rock in which the weapon was lodged—the general’s strength was capable of embedding an entire arrowhead in rock. Try as they might, they couldn’t pull the arrow out. Despite Li Guang’s victories and loyalty to the Han court, he was never properly rewarded by the central government, nor was he allowed to return inland. He was so disillusioned by the mistreatment he suffered at the hands of his superiors that he eventually cut his own throat.
Li Ke’s claim of blood relation with the renowned forebear, as one of the sixteenth generation of Li Guang’s line, could not be refuted, since it was known that the general had indeed left behind a branch in the western reaches of China. There was more to be said about Li Ke’s claim, however. The Tang royal clan’s revised genealogy indicated that its members and General Li Guang shared the same ancestors who had once lived in Guanlong in the central plain, so Li Ke’s family, by his own claim, must have also been related to the Tang rulers by blood. Moreover, by this lineage, Li Ke in fact was descended from an earlier generation of this family tree, well ahead of the royal family. This is why Li Bai later implied that Xuanzong, the current emperor, was by genealogy a grandnephew of his.
Self-inventions of this kind could be confusing. What is more complicated is that Li was a widely used name, reputable and made prestigious by the association with the royal family. (Today there are approximately one hundred million Lis in the world.) Whenever Li Bai traveled, he would encounter people with the same surname. Out of habit and courtesy he would acknowledge a blood relationship with them, especially powerful officials, and would call them “cousin” or “nephew” or “uncle” and even dedicate poems to some of them. As a result, he had “relatives” everywhere, and there is no telling who was actually connected by blood.
Li Bai was five years old when his father uprooted the family from Suyab and moved them back inland. They crossed a chain of the Tianshan Mountains and then deserts, and reached Sichuan more than half a year later. Li Bai must have remembered the arduous trek, as his poetry often displays an immense wilderness uniquely his own. “The Mountain Moon,” one of his most celebrated frontier poems, begins with a description of such a vast landscape:
明月出天山 蒼茫云海間
長風幾萬里 吹度玉門關
《關山月》
The moon rises from Tianshan Mountain,
Sailing in an ocean of clouds.
The wind, tens of thousands of miles long,
Is blowing through the Yumen Pass.
Having entered Sichuan, the Lis settled in Changming County (modern Jiangyou) and set up their homestead in Qinglian Village. The village was about twenty miles north of the county seat, and the landscape there had a mystic air to it. Yellow flowers hung on trees, interspersed with bamboo bushes, and the area was enclosed on the south by the Fu and Jian rivers, their waters sending up steam and mist that obscured the land and sky.5 It was a remote, isolated place, and the entire county had no more than a few thousand households. Why would Li Ke relocate his family to such a distant village? Surely this would not have been convenient for his business or wholesome for his children’s upbringing. The answer remains a mystery. Some scholars speculate that the move might have been a way to avoid dangerous fallout from a feud or some serious trouble with local officials.6 Jiangyou was the starting point of the Silk Road, so Li Ke must have been to this area before on his business travels and would have been familiar with its surroundings and the local people. In other words, his choice of location—far-off but still connected with the outside world—seems to have been carefully made.
Li Ke and his sons resumed trading in Sichuan and along the Yangtze. Wealthy and shrewd, he also loaned money to others. Soon he began to work on behalf of Daming Temple, a well-known Buddhist site of the time, perhaps clandestinely serving as its front man to lend money and collect interests and debts, because temples were not supposed to be overtly active in trade and business. He continued to prosper and gradually became a local power of sorts.
It was conventional wisdom that a large, affluent household should send its sons into varying professions. This was a way to expand the family’s influence, to ensure its prosperity, and to secure protection for its members and property. Such diversification could also help a family weather setbacks and social upheavals. Li Ke followed this course with his sons: some joined him in the trade down the river, but he wanted Bai to become a government official—the boy had an energetic mind and a powerful memory and could excel in an official career. To achieve that goal, Li Bai needed to study books and acquire extensive schooling. This also meant that Li Ke had to spend much more on Bai’s education than on his other sons’.
At the time, businesspeople belonged to the lower strata of Chinese society. At any moment the state could—and still can—seize people’s personal wealth and even turn them into criminals, regardless of whether any crime had been committed. Whenever the government lacked funds, it would fleece businesspeople and property owners, leaving them no space for safety or growth. As a result, wealth was not viewed as an effective means of self-protection. For millennia, the best way to safeguard one’s interests in China has been to affiliate oneself with political power—to befriend high officials and even join their occupation. The Li family’s arrangement for Bai’s career seems to have followed such a convention. His father must have had other purposes in mind as well—to enhance the family reputation and to put Li Bai in a position to accomplish significant deeds that could give him a lasting name.
/> Although the civil-service examination system had been in place for more than a century, the way to join officialdom was still narrow and extremely competitive. As a merchant’s son, Li Bai was not allowed to enter for the exam. Businesspeople were viewed as dishonorable elements of society, so their sons were not eligible for civil service. Only young men from official and aristocratic families or from an agricultural background could take the exam. At that time, China had slightly more than ten thousand officials, but each year only around thirty were actually appointed through the examination. Worse still, a candidate was not judged by the results of the tests alone. He also had to have an advocate, usually an official of considerable rank, to support his candidacy. Because of this, many scholars, though intelligent and erudite, never could find a way to an official career.
However, there was another, older way of becoming an official: zhiju, which meant through recommendations and interviews. Ever since the Qin dynasty (221–206 BC), high officials had been obliged to recommend capable talents to court. The emperor would interview them individually to assess their abilities. If the ruler was impressed and satisfied, the candidate would be granted a significant post. (This method continues today in state programs like “The Plan for a Hundred People” and “The Plan for a Thousand People,” which have been designed to recruit experts in various fields from all over the world.) The Tang government needed to secure as many talented men as possible to consolidate its power and strengthen its rule. A candidate undergoing the process of recommendation and interview had to be extraordinarily well learned and acute—ideally, a successful candidate would go on to become a linchpin of the country. Having no access to the civil-service examination, Li Bai would pursue this older path to officialdom, which required mastery of several key areas of knowledge: statecraft, philosophy, classics, writing, swordsmanship.
By age ten he had studied most of the classics available; he was mainly taught by his father and at tutorial schools, each of which had four or five pupils. Sichuan was far from the central land and had not yet been penetrated by the prevailing bureaucratic culture that reflected the imperial order of the time. As a result, education lagged in the region, placing more emphasis on older books written in the era of the Warring States (475–221 BC), when seven states fought over the control of the central land so as to unify China under a single government. Li Bai did not find the Confucian classics appealing—his recalcitrant character was at odds with the rules and rites associated with governance. One of these classics, the Book of Rites, describes the ancient rites and social forms and court ceremonies; another, Spring and Autumn, is a volume of historical records of the State of Lu. The classics also teach official manners and decorum, as shown in the Book of Documents, and together the Confucian texts—the Four Books and Five Classics—provide an education in the official culture. Bai found them boring. He did not like historical books either, especially those written by court historians. He preferred the Daoist texts, particularly Chuang Tzu, a book of writings by the philosopher Zhuang Zhou (369–286 BC).
Bai was inspired by Zhuang’s boundless imagination, and would indulge in his own wild reveries. He often alluded to the beginning passage in Chuang Tzu, in “Xiaoyao you” (“Free Wandering”), which reads, “There was once a fish in the north sea, named Kun. Its size was so immense that it stretched a thousand miles. Later the fish changed into a bird, which was named Peng. Peng’s back was so vast that it was a thousand miles long. When it soared, its wings moved like clouds over the horizon. This bird followed the swells of the ocean to the south sea, which is a big natural pool.” The bird, Peng, refers to a legendary roc—an enormous bird of prey—to which Li Bai compares himself in one of his early rhapsodies, “The Great Peng.” In the poetic essay he expresses his aspiration, like the roc in flight, “to make heaven tilt with the bird’s soaring while the mountains are quaking and the oceans churning and surging below.” Later, in another rhapsody, he again identifies himself as a mystical roc, dreaming of flying and scanning the human world from above. It was Zhuang Zhou that first fired his imagination.
The genre of rhapsody, or fu, is an ancient kind of prose poetry that, thanks to its structure and unlimited length, has more room for dramatization, description, and exposition. Li Bai loved the rhapsody: in one of his poems, he extolls his own talent in the form, saying, “At fifteen I began to read rare books / And surpassed Xiang-ru in writing rhapsodies” (“For Zhang Xianggao”). “Xiang-ru” refers to Sima Xiang-ru (179–117 BC), a court official and a man of letters who is regarded as one of China’s greatest writers of rhapsody. (Although Li Bai loved the form, rhapsodies are a minor part of his literary output. He was much more at home with verse poetry and displayed extraordinary talent in poetic composition at an early age.) Throughout his youth, Li Bai viewed Sima as an exemplary model to follow—a man who was also from Sichuan and had excelled in both his official career and his literary accomplishments.
Like most pupils at the time, Li Bai memorized many ancient poems and essays and went on to emulate them. One of the texts he studied was an old anthology titled Zhaoming Selected Masterpieces compiled in 526, comprising more than seven hundred canonical poems and essays. Li Bai is said to have imitated every piece in the book three times. He often threw away attempts that he believed were not good enough, and grew impatient with his slow progress. One day he came upon an old woman on the side of a brook in his hometown. She was grinding an iron bar on a rock, and he asked her what she was doing. She replied that she was making a needle out of the iron bar. How could that be possible? he wondered aloud. As long as she went on grinding, she said, she would one day reduce the bar to a needle with which she could make embroidery. He was so struck by her answer and her will to persevere that from then on he studied harder and more patiently. Today in Qinglian Town, Jiangyou County, there still flows a creek named the Needle Grinding Brook.
Li Bai’s father encouraged him to compose poems. Although poetry was not a skill required of officials, it could enhance one’s career to be adept in the art. There were great examples of poets from modest family backgrounds who became significant officials without passing the civil-service examination. Chen Zi’ang (661–702), another Sichuan poet just a generation prior to Li Bai, had been appointed a court counselor not through the exam but through the sponsorship of Empress Wu (624–705), the current emperor’s grandmother. Chen’s poems were known everywhere, and people would chant his lines: “The sky is green and the wilderness endless. / When the wind blows, the grass dips revealing herds of cattle and sheep” (“Song of Ascending Youzhou Terrace”).
Poetry had been a major source of entertainment for more than a millennium, both in palaces and in cities and towns. Poems were composed orally or in writing on many kinds of occasions. Court officials were usually vain and proud of their ability to produce poetry, and their sovereigns often invited them to improvise verses at festive gatherings. A particularly outstanding poem would be set to music, and the new song would then be added to the court’s repertoire. Over the centuries, however, poetry composed at court had become hackneyed and routine, though occasionally a genuinely well-crafted poem still emerged. Two centuries before Bai’s time, in the Kingdom of Liang (present-day Henan Province), a general named Cao Jingzong (457–508) had led troops to war and defeated the army of Wei, an enemy kingdom. At the court’s celebratory banquet, King Liangwu had pairs of rhyming words distributed among the courtiers for them to compose poems. Cao was not given any words because he was a warrior and thought unlikely to know how to make verse. He requested a pair of words from King Liangwu three times, and finally was granted the last two: jing (“compete”) and bing (“illness”). This was a very odd pair, nearly impossible to rhyme due to their semantic disconnection, and people were ready to laugh at Cao. After thinking a moment, he wielded a brush and wrote out this poem:
去時女兒悲 歸來笳鼓競
借問行路人 何�
�� 霍去病
When we were departing, our children grieved.
Now we are back, flutes and drums are competing.
My soldiers, tell me
Were you as brave as Huo Qubing?
Huo Qubing (140–117 BC) had been a valorous general centuries before, famous for his victorious battles against the Huns. Cao’s poem amazed the entire banquet hall, and King Liangwu was so impressed that he promoted him to duke. Afterward the poem was set to music and became a classic. How many poets since have envied Cao for the permanent mark he left on Chinese letters by happenstance.
