Li Bai

Li Bai was born on May 19, 701 CE, most likely in Suyab, a garrison town on the Silk Road in what is now Kyrgyzstan, where his family had lived for generations among traders and frontier soldiers ^[1]. The family claimed descent from the royal Li clan of the Tang dynasty itself, a claim that cannot be verified and that scholars have long treated with caution. What is better established is that around 705 the household moved east into Sichuan, settling in the region of Jiangyou, where the boy grew up ^[2].

His father, known only as Li Ke, appears to have been a merchant, a background that mattered in Tang society because sons of traders were barred from the regular civil service examinations. That barrier shaped the whole arc of Li Bai's career: unlike nearly every other ambitious literary man of his era, he could not sit the exams and climb the bureaucratic ladder, so he would have to reach office through reputation, patronage, and sheer force of personality ^[3].

By his own account he read widely as a child, absorbing the classics alongside Daoist texts, astrology, and tales of wandering knights. He also trained with the sword, and stories of his youthful brawling followed him all his life. Before he turned twenty he had climbed the sacred mountains of Sichuan and spent time with Daoist recluses, experiences that fed the imagery of flight, immortals, and moonlit peaks that runs through his mature poetry ^[2].

Around 725, in his mid twenties, Li Bai left Sichuan and sailed down the Yangzi River, beginning the restless travel that defined him. He gave away money freely, made friends in every town, and built a reputation as a prodigy who could produce dazzling verse on the spot ^[1]. In about 727 he settled for a time in Anlu, in present day Hubei, where he married the granddaughter of a former chief minister named Xu Yushi. The match gave him social standing, though not the official post he wanted ^[3].

For the next decade and a half he alternated between domestic life and long journeys through the Yangzi valley and the eastern seaboard, writing constantly and petitioning provincial officials for recommendation. The senior Daoist Sima Chengzhen, who met him early in his travels, reportedly said the young man had the bones of an immortal, and the poet He Zhizhang later dubbed him the Banished Immortal after reading his work, a nickname that stuck for the rest of Chinese literary history ^[2].

The breakthrough came in 742, when Emperor Xuanzong summoned him to the capital, Chang'an, apparently on the recommendation of the emperor's sister, a Daoist princess, and of He Zhizhang. Li Bai was given a post in the Hanlin Academy, a body of literary talents who composed poems and documents for the court. He was in his early forties, and for the first time he stood at the center of the empire ^[1].

Any account of Li Bai achievements begins with the poems themselves. Roughly a thousand pieces attributed to him survive, spanning old style verse, regulated forms, and songs written to existing tunes ^[4]. He excelled at the yuefu ballad and at short quatrains of startling clarity. His poem Quiet Night Thoughts, four lines about moonlight on the floor mistaken for frost and a traveler's longing for home, is by common consent among the most widely known poems in Chinese, recited by children before they can read ^[2].

His subjects ranged from drinking songs and farewells to laments for soldiers on distant frontiers, hymns to Daoist immortals, and landscape pieces like Viewing the Waterfall at Mount Lu, in which the cascade becomes the Milky Way falling from heaven. Critics in the Tang and after paired him with his younger contemporary Du Fu as the twin summits of Chinese poetry: Du Fu the meticulous craftsman and moral witness, Li Bai the spontaneous genius whose lines seemed to pour out unedited ^[4]. The two met in 744 and 745 and formed a friendship that Du Fu commemorated in more than a dozen poems.

His fame traveled far beyond China. His work shaped classical poetry in Japan, where he is known as Rihaku, and in the twentieth century Ezra Pound's 1915 collection Cathay, built on translations of Li Bai, helped redirect modern poetry in English ^[5]. Gustav Mahler set versions of his poems in Das Lied von der Erde in 1908 to 1909, carrying Tang imagery into the European concert hall ^[6]. Few writers of any language have had such a long international afterlife.

Li Bai married twice into prominent families, first to the Xu family of Anlu around 727 and much later to a granddaughter of another former minister, Zong Chuke. In between, sources mention two less formal unions during his years in the east. He had at least two children with his first wife, a daughter named Pingyang and a son called Boqin, and his letters and poems show real anguish at the long separations his wandering imposed on them ^[3].

Wine is inseparable from his legend, and not without reason: he wrote of drinking constantly, most famously in Bring in the Wine and in the quatrain sequence Drinking Alone Under the Moon, where he raises his cup to the moon and his own shadow to make a company of three ^[2]. Du Fu's poem Eight Immortals of the Drinking Cup pictures him asleep in a wine shop in Chang'an, ignoring an imperial summons with the boast that he was a god of wine. How much of this was performance and how much habit is impossible to untangle, but the persona of the drunken genius became central to how China remembered him.

He was also a serious Daoist. In 744, after leaving the capital, he formally received a Daoist register at a ceremony in Shandong, entering the religion's ordained ranks rather than merely admiring it from outside ^[4]. Alchemy, mountain retreats, and the search for transcendence were lifelong preoccupations, and they give even his lightest poems an undertone of escape from the ordinary world.

Court life lasted barely two years. Li Bai's independence, his drinking, and probably the jealousy of rivals made him enemies, and in 744 he was politely dismissed from Chang'an with a gift of gold ^[1]. He returned to the road, met Du Fu, deepened his Daoist commitments, and spent the following decade moving through eastern and central China as his fame grew.

Disaster arrived in 755, when the general An Lushan rose in rebellion and the dynasty nearly collapsed. In the chaos that followed, Li Bai accepted a place on the staff of Prince Yong, the sixteenth son of Emperor Xuanzong, who commanded forces on the Yangzi. When the new emperor, Suzong, declared his brother a rebel in 757, the prince's cause failed and Li Bai was arrested for treason ^[3]. He was imprisoned at Jiujiang and sentenced to banishment in Yelang, a remote region in the far southwest.

He traveled toward exile slowly, and in 759, before he reached Yelang, a general amnesty freed him. The poem he wrote at the news, Departing from Baidi in the Morning, races downriver past the monkey cries of the gorges with a joy that readers have felt ever since ^[2]. His last years were spent in the lower Yangzi region in declining health and reduced circumstances. He died on November 30, 762 CE at Dangtu, in present day Anhui, in the household of his kinsman Li Yangbing, a magistrate and calligrapher who collected his manuscripts and wrote a preface for them ^[1]. A later legend claims he drowned trying to embrace the moon's reflection in the river, a story with no early evidence but perfect fidelity to his myth.

For anyone asking who was Li Bai, the simplest answer given across a millennium of Chinese criticism is the Poet Immortal, shixian, the writer in whom talent looked like divinity. Successive dynasties printed and reprinted his collected works, beginning with the compilation Li Yangbing preserved after his death, and by the Song dynasty his pairing with Du Fu as the two supreme Tang poets was already conventional ^[4]. Later poets imitated his manner, and painters returned again and again to scenes from his life: the drunken audience with the emperor, the solitary drinker under the moon.

His reach outside China is equally striking. Japanese readers absorbed him from the Heian period onward, and Western readers met him through nineteenth century French and German versions before Pound's Cathay made Rihaku a presence in Anglophone modernism ^[5]. Translators from Arthur Waley to Burton Watson and David Hinton have kept producing new English versions, each generation finding something different in the same thousand poems ^[7]. Ha Jin's 2019 biography The Banished Immortal brought his life to a broad English readership ^[3].

In China today his memory is physical as well as literary. Memorial halls stand at Jiangyou in Sichuan, where he grew up, and at Ma'anshan near Dangtu, close to his grave, and a crater on Mercury carries his name ^[8]. Any honest Li Bai biography ends where the poems do: with a figure who turned restlessness, failure at court, and even exile into some of the most durable lines ever written, and who remains, among all Li Bai facts, most alive in the four short verses about moonlight that most Chinese speakers know by heart.