I. The Exiled Immortal

742, the first Tianbao year. Li Bai was in his early forties. At last the imperial summons arrived, and his life at the court in Chang’an began.

He Zhizhang called him an “exiled immortal.” This is not merely a later biographer’s invention: the preface to Li Bai’s Remembering He Zhizhang over Wine recalls their first encounter at Chang’an’s Purple Ultimate Palace, and He’s exchanging his golden tortoise ornament for wine. A contemporary’s delighted recognition grew into an image that would cover an entire life.

An immortal sent down to earth. Not the sage of poetry, not its Buddha. The name does not explain the whole man, but it catches a sensation his poems can produce: the voice has arrived among us while its source still seems beyond the sky.

With Du Fu, we watched reality enter poetry again and again. With Li Bai, another force often reaches us first. A sentence takes off, and the ordinary measures of rank, distance and daily life cannot keep up.

In this series’ language of carving and building, Du Fu makes the pressures of formation visible; Li Bai suggests the surge before a shape has settled. Both possessed gifts, both worked. Their poems bring different centres of gravity to the reader.

Zhuangzi’s Hundun—the not-yet-divided—can provisionally name that impression. Li Bai’s poetry sometimes takes us to a place where our categories have not quite found their footing, as though the voice arrives before its name.

II. Origins Unsettled

There are genuinely unresolved questions about Li Bai’s family and birthplace.

He and the early biographical tradition connected his family with the Lis of Longxi; Li Yangbing’s Preface to the Thatched Cottage Collection called him a ninth-generation descendant of Li Gao, ruler of Western Liang. An ancestral story survives, with links we cannot independently establish.

Suyab in Central Asia and Sichuan remain important alternatives in discussions of his birthplace. His upbringing in Sichuan is much firmer ground. A merchant background and exclusion from examinations on that account have also been proposed to explain his career; those questions remain disputed.

Some details of his beginnings disappear into the mist. His family, home and attachments do not disappear with them. Our incomplete knowledge does not make him a person who belonged nowhere.

Du Fu’s scholarly family and his wish to raise his sovereign above Yao and Shun gave his poetry a clear direction. War, hunger and separation from loved ones carried that concern far beyond a career. An appointment could not fill every absence in a life.

Li Bai, too, wanted to accomplish something in public life. He sought patrons in letters, imagined great achievements, cultivated Daoist friendships and received Daoist initiation. Between court and landscape, engagement and withdrawal, both directions genuinely moved him.

His freedom need not come from having no roots. A more compelling possibility is to have wishes, relationships and a place—and still refuse to let one place tell the whole story of who you are.

III. Laughing as He Goes Out

From 742 to 744, Li Bai spent roughly two years at court. The beginning of that experience was hope.

Leaving the Children at Nanling to Enter the Capital gives that departure a famous laugh:

I throw my head up, laugh, and leave the door—
Are people like us to remain among the weeds?

Earlier in the poem, children tug at his clothes; then he declares that he is leaving home to travel west into Qin. On the usual dating, he is answering the imperial summons, heading toward Chang’an. The laugh holds the hope of recognition, the conviction that he need no longer remain buried in the weeds.

The door still opens; the laugh still rings. But he is walking toward the place that will disappoint him. Knowing this does not diminish the poem. It adds the brightness of a future not yet disclosed.

At Chang’an he served in the Hanlin, close to the emperor but without a chief minister’s administrative authority. Li Yangbing describes consultation on affairs of state and the drafting of imperial documents; biographies also record commissioned poems. His hopes for political action did not coincide with the court position he received.

“Clouds call to mind her robes, flowers her face; a spring breeze brushes the rail, the dew glistens richly.” The Qingping Melodies set cloud, blossom and beauty reflecting one another. Yang Guifei, the Aloeswood Pavilion, drunken composition and Gao Lishi removing his boots gather into a court story across differing accounts. Its details shift, while the tension between favour and misfit remains.

Then he left with an imperial gift of gold. Li Yangbing describes colleagues’ slander and the emperor’s growing distance; the New History of the Tang also says that Li Bai requested leave for the mountains. The laughter of arrival had reached a disappointed departure. The court had not made room for all his hopes.

Du Fu’s poem presented to Vice Director Wei reads “thirteen years riding a donkey,” followed by living on others’ hospitality in the capital, knocking at wealthy doors in the morning and following well-fed horses’ dust at dusk. Here is another voice of frustrated aspiration. Li Bai’s bright anticipation and Du Fu’s appeal for patronage have their own circumstances, and each carries a hope not yet answered.

Li Bai also asks, at the end of Dreaming of a Journey to Mount Tianmu: “How could I lower my brows and bend my back to serve the powerful, denying my heart its ease?” Put that refusal beside the earlier laughter, and we begin to hear the tension between wanting to be employed and refusing to bow.

Nor did history spare his later years. In late 756 or early 757, during the An Lushan rebellion, he joined Prince Yong’s staff. After the prince’s conflict with Emperor Suzong’s government ended in defeat, Li Bai was imprisoned and subsequently sentenced to distant exile in Yelang. In 759 he received a pardon on the journey, before reaching his destination.

He made judgments and choices and bore consequences. Lightness in poetry and weight in a life remained together in one person.

The difference between Li Bai and Du Fu is therefore not that one sought office and the other never did. Faced with the distance between desire and reality, they let language assume different postures.

IV. Bring the Wine

Bring the Wine uses an inherited Music Bureau title and became one of Li Bai’s best-known drinking poems. Read the whole poem in a familiar transmitted form, and let its current run from the opening to the final line.

Do you not see the Yellow River pouring from the sky,
racing to the sea, with no return?
Do you not see, before the lofty hall’s bright mirror, grief for whitening hair—
dark silk at dawn, by evening snow?
When life grants satisfaction, let joy reach its fullness;
do not leave the golden cup empty before the moon.
Heaven brought forth my gifts: surely they have a use;
a thousand in gold, scattered, can return.
Cook the sheep and butcher the ox; let us rejoice;
at one sitting we must drink three hundred cups.

Master Cen, Danqiu, my friend: bring the wine, keep the cups moving.
I shall sing you a song; incline your ears and hear me.
Bells and drums, food precious as jade: I do not prize them;
I only wish for lasting drunkenness, never to awake.
Sages and worthies since antiquity have all been left in silence;
only the drinkers have kept their names.
Long ago the Prince of Chen feasted at Pingle,
wine costing ten thousand a measure, unbridled laughter and delight.
Why does our host speak of too little money?
Go straight out, buy wine, and pour with me.
The flower-maned horse, the thousand-gold fur coat—
tell the boy to take them, trade them for good wine;
with you I shall dissolve the grief of all the ages.

“Heaven brought forth my gifts”: we can hear self-affirmation exceeding any particular appointment. My value is not entirely for a court to approve. We might call it an affirmation of existence. The voice must first stand for itself, while still hoping its gifts will find a place in the world.

The forgotten sages are followed by remembered drinkers, then by Cao Zhi, the Prince of Chen, brought into the banquet. Exaggeration, anger, pride and disappointment are mixed in the cup. Poetry turns a familiar hierarchy upside down: what usually commands respect grows light, while the cup suddenly weighs enough to hold off the ages.

“The grief of all the ages” puts the cup on time’s scale. Water does not return; black hair turns white; a lifetime passes almost at once. Three hundred cups and the priceless coat glow within that excess. The amplitude is not absence of sorrow. Sorrow swells until the voice swells too.

When Du Fu speaks of spending the years anxious for ordinary people, we hear hunger, cold and conscription. When Li Bai would dissolve the grief of the ages, we hear passing time itself. One brings the lens close to human lives; the other suddenly draws it back toward the cosmos. These are emphases, not exclusive jurisdictions: Li Bai also wrote of war and common people; Du Fu also questioned heaven and earth.

And there is “with you.” He calls friends to drink beside him. Cosmic sorrow has not abolished the people at the table. The voice reaching toward infinity still wants someone to listen.

V. The Moon

The moon returns throughout Li Bai’s poetry with an intimacy that can be remote as the heavens or close as a bedside.

Bright moonlight before the bed—
I wonder if it is frost on the ground.
I raise my head toward the bright moon;
I lower it and think of home.

This is the widely recited later form of Quiet Night Thoughts. Earlier witnesses have “look at moonlight” and “mountain moon.” Many children first meet Tang poetry through these four lines. A raised head, a lowered head: a tiny movement lets a distant home enter the present.

He grew up in Sichuan, had a family and lived in several places. “Home” never becomes a precise address within the poem, leaving room for many people’s homesickness. We can follow the moonlight further, toward a place of return that seems beyond the earth. That is another path the poem opens to its readers.

I lift my cup and invite the bright moon;
with my shadow, the company becomes three.

Drinking Alone beneath the Moon turns a person, a moon and a shadow into a party. Yet the next lines acknowledge that the moon cannot understand drinking and the shadow merely follows his body. The poet has not forgotten the limits of these companions. Knowing those limits makes the feast both lively and lonely.

People now cannot see the moon of ancient days;
this moon once cast its light on people long ago.

Questioning the Moon over Wine lets ancient and present people meet under a single moon. People pass; the moon still hangs there, bringing that long duration before us. Beside Du Fu’s wish for rooms sheltering all the cold scholars, one voice faces a multitude while the other places human beings in time. Both begin with human finitude.

Later legend supplied a lunar ending: drunk in a boat, Li Bai reached for the moon reflected in the water, fell and drowned. Closer to the end of his life, Li Yangbing’s preface of 762 instead records severe illness and manuscripts entrusted from a sickbed. The moon on the water belongs to legend; the sickbed and poems awaiting an editor leave another kind of quiet.

Why did the legend endure? It gathered moon, wine, water and the ungraspable into a single image readers already recognized. His hand reaches not for the moon but for a reflection. That picture illuminates later imagination; it cannot replace the sick human being who needed care.

VI. Li Bai and Du Fu

In 744, usually located at Luoyang, Li Bai met Du Fu. By traditional reckoning they were forty-four and thirty-three. They travelled together, and met again in the Qi–Lu region in 745.

Much later, Wen Yiduo compared their meeting to an encounter of sun and moon. Across the distance of centuries, a literary historian could still marvel at that moment.

Travels with Gao Shi in the Liang–Song region, followed by meetings in Qi and Lu, left traces of visits, drinking, discussion of poems and the search for Daoist teachers. Du Fu’s lines about drinking deeply, singing wildly and asking for whose sake his friend was so proudly untamed let us hear both exhilaration and a question.

Then they separated. The time spent together was limited; the echoes in poems were long.

My old friend enters my dream: how constantly I remember him.
Caps and carriages crowd the capital; this man alone is worn and gaunt.
A name for a thousand autumns, ten thousand years—
but after death, what lonely business.

These lines from Du Fu’s Dreaming of Li Bai admire more than poetic talent. They fear for a friend. Enduring fame cannot shelter a living body from the wind. Du Fu sees not just an immortal, but someone who could be lost among the storms.

Fewer poems addressed to Du Fu survive under Li Bai’s name, but numbers do not weigh affection. Writing from Sand Dune City, he sends longing as broad as the Wen River toward his friend travelling south. Taking Leave of Du Fu at the Eastern Stone Gate, he asks when they will open their golden cups together again. A river of longing and the hope of another feast are not indifference.

There is also the poem traditionally attributed to him as A Playful Gift to Du Fu:

On Rice-Grain Hill I meet Du Fu,
a bamboo hat on his head beneath the midday sun.
Why have you grown so thin since we parted?
All that hard work making poems, surely.

Its attribution and wording have long been disputed. The poem makes a companionable joke of poetic labour, leaving a sunlit meeting, a hat, a question about a thin face. We can hear humour and closeness there; each man’s struggle was longer than those four lines.

Du Fu’s “Bai has no equal in poetry; his soaring thoughts stand apart” is real admiration. The longing in Li Bai’s poems has its weight too. An uneven surviving record does not confine the men to admirer and admired.

Posterity joined them as “Li–Du.” In a two-stroke drawing, one flies and one walks; one makes language rise and one makes it carry weight. A vivid drawing, provided neither person is reduced to that single side.

Yang Wanli’s Song-dynasty criticism, transmitted in such works as Jade Fragments of the Poets, calls Li divine in poetry and Du sagely in it. One seems to ride the wind, the other to carry a way of living: two different artistic attainments.

In the finest poems, work sometimes seems to disappear. Seeming to disappear is not the same as never having happened.

VII. Hundun Speaking

We can now return to Li Bai’s place in this series.

Carving and building have been our recurring terms for loosening received answers and making worlds that can be inhabited. Bring the earlier figures together once more.

Socrates questions knowledge; Confucius questions benevolence and ritual; Laozi unsettles names; Zhuangzi loosens fixed boundaries. Kant draws limits, Nietzsche carries a hammer, Wang Yangming turns inward. Shakyamuni investigates attachment; Jesus, suffering, still points toward giving.

Gödel reveals limits of formal systems; Einstein changes the physical picture of space and time. Du Fu lets reality enter verse, while the epic tradition represented by Homer carries voice toward writing. Qin Shi Huang concentrates power, Washington relinquishes it, Alexander pushes conquest outward.

Darwin studies life’s transformations; Newton describes the world through laws of motion and gravitation. Bach weaves voices; Beethoven composes after losing his hearing; Sima Qian continues history after devastating humiliation. These are silhouettes of the preceding lives, not attempts to replace a person with one verb.

Is Li Bai absent from that company?

The historical Li Bai is certainly among them. He reads, reworks inherited Music Bureau titles, chooses words, cultivates relationships, enters the court and suffers political upheaval. He builds poems and is changed by the world.

Yet in some of his lines the first thing we sense is not a tool’s mark but water suddenly welling up. As though form has not yet shut its doors and the Yellow River is already falling from the sky.

“Before the carving” names that astonishment: words have plainly been placed, one after another, yet what rushes toward us feels like water no one arranged.

Zhuangzi’s story of Hundun asks us to notice the cost of boring openings into the undivided. Li Bai’s flight lets us imagine a voice not yet held still. Two different pictures illuminate one another in the act of reading.

Hear “Heaven brought forth my gifts” again this way: before others assign my use, I have begun to speak. But speaking still needs language, older poems and listeners if it is to become a work.

Perhaps that is precisely where the craft lies: the inherited form holds the voice, while the sentence’s movement takes us by surprise. A river need not lose its banks for us to feel its force.

If we still say “Hundun itself is speaking,” let it be a reader’s astonishment. Not that genius did no work, but that the work lets us hear something as though it had never been made.

VIII. Flying

Return to the imagined bridge of this series.

Another person has arrived. But he is not standing at the bridgehead. He is above the bridge, flying.

Cracks lie beneath Qin Shi Huang; soil beneath Washington. Beethoven clenches a fist; Sima Qian’s back is slightly bent; Du Fu wears torn sleeves. Every posture carries an echo of the earlier essays.

Li Bai does not stand. Li Bai flies.

We entrust him with poetry’s lightness. He passes over planks, soil and cracks, over the others’ heads. It is not that he stands higher: one voice has suddenly found another way of travelling.

He looks down and sees Du Fu walking. Come and fly with me.

But Du Fu still carries his wish for ten thousand rooms. Benevolence is not a nail punishing him; it is an attachment he will not put down. Li Bai has attachments too. For this moment his voice has moved one step ahead of their weight.

Flight then reveals its cost. The moon seems a friend, the shadow a companion, wine lifts the voice. Yet the moon will not answer, the shadow cannot reach out to support a person, and when drunkenness ends a body must return to earth.

He looks so free, and so lonely. Yet on the roads of his life another person has sometimes reached him.

Du Fu’s solitude holds suffering in the human world that has not been heard. Li Bai’s holds the distance of a flight that cannot be shared. Between those solitudes, they once walked together and wrote poems for one another.

“I lift my cup and invite the bright moon.” Solitude does not seal him shut. It urges an invitation toward something that has not answered.

Freedom here is not the absence of relationship. It is the continuing extension of a hand when existing relationships cannot wholly satisfy a person.

The bridgehead is crowded: some stand, some bend, some clench their fists, some figures have already faded. In the sky, a man holds a cup.

He looks down and sees them all. Then he looks up and sees the moon.

He chooses the moon.

Han Qin (秦汉) · @hqinjarsy · Great Lives

Notes

Dates follow the usual 701–762 chronology. This makes Li Bai about forty-one in 742, or forty-two by traditional reckoning; the 744 ages of forty-four and thirty-three for Li Bai and Du Fu also use the traditional count. Birthplace, migration, ethnicity and a possible merchant background have different degrees of evidential support. The two Tang histories contain disagreements and shaped biographical narratives; see Nienhauser’s study of the Old History. Li Yangbing: Preface to the Thatched Cottage Collection; New History of the Tang, volume 202: Li Bai; Old History of the Tang, volume 190, lower part; William H. Nienhauser Jr.: A Reading of Li Bo’s Biography in the Old History of the Tang (2002).

The exiled-immortal name is attested in Li Bai’s preface to Remembering He Zhizhang over Wine as well as the New History of the Tang. The Hanlin account draws on Li Yangbing and the histories. Boot-removal and drunken composition are documented traditions, not sufficient evidence for every detail of a scene or a single cause of departure. Li Bai: Remembering He Zhizhang over Wine; Li Yangbing: Preface to the Thatched Cottage Collection; New History of the Tang, volume 202: Li Bai; Li Bai: Qingping Melodies, first poem.

Leaving the Children at Nanling describes travelling west into the capital, usually dated 742, not departure from the court in 744. For Du Fu’s poem to Wei, this essay follows Qiu Zhao’ao’s Detailed Annotations on Du Fu, volume 1, in reading thirteen years. That edition also records thirty in other witnesses and thirteen in Lu’s commentary. This is an editorial choice between transmitted readings, not a correction of an unattested typo. The poem concerns seeking patronage, not expulsion from court. Li Bai: Leaving the Children at Nanling to Enter the Capital; Qiu Zhao’ao: Detailed Annotations on Du Fu, volume 1.

The conventional sequence is entry into Prince Yong’s staff in late 756 or early 757, punishment after his defeat, a subsequent sentence of exile, and pardon on the road in 759. Accounts of motive, rescue and judgment differ. Li Yangbing’s 762 preface describes serious illness and manuscripts entrusted from a bed. The drowning while reaching for the moon is later legend; no medical cause of death is diagnosed here. Li Yangbing: Preface to the Thatched Cottage Collection; New History of the Tang, volume 202: Li Bai; Old History of the Tang, volume 190, lower part.

Bring the Wine is given in full, including Cao Zhi’s Pingle feast, the host’s lack of money, and the horse and fur exchanged for wine. Chinese readings vary, including ‘cups/you must not stop’ and several forms of ‘not wake’; this essay uses 杯莫停 and 不愿醒 without claiming a uniquely original text. Quiet Night Thoughts follows the widely recited later bright-moon wording and acknowledges earlier ‘look at moonlight’ and ‘mountain moon’ readings. Li Bai: Bring the Wine, with variant readings; Li Bai: Quiet Night Thoughts, transmitted versions; Li Bai: Drinking Alone beneath the Moon; Li Bai: Questioning the Moon over Wine.

The playful verse to Du Fu remains a disputed attribution. The online notes to Xia Shaohui’s study of the friendship were consulted alongside Li Bai’s two substantial farewell/remembering poems and Du Fu’s Dreaming of Li Bai. Surviving quantities do not measure affection. Wen Yiduo’s sun-and-moon comparison is retrospective; Yang Wanli’s divine/sagely distinction is transmitted in Jade Fragments of the Poets, volume 14. Du Fu: Dreaming of Li Bai, two poems; Li Bai: To Du Fu from Sand Dune City; Li Bai: Taking Leave of Du Fu at the Eastern Stone Gate; Jade Fragments of the Poets, volume 14: Yang Wanli on Li and Du; Xia Shaohui: A study of the friendship of Li Bai and Du Fu (2013), online notes.

A poem’s speaker, hyperbole and images are not a line-by-line autobiography. Flight, Hundun, carving and building, and the bridge assembly are this series’ literary interpretation. They are not applications of scientific theorems and do not divide talent from labour or human grief from cosmic sorrow. All English and other foreign-language verse renderings were newly drafted from the classical Chinese for this essay, without adopting modern published translations. Li Bai: Dreaming of a Journey to Mount Tianmu.