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PREFACE

I’M SURPRISED TO BE WRITING THIS. Two years ago, I pretty much decided to stop writing books, thinking it was time to do something else, like nothing. But two years before that, while I was pouring whiskey on the graves of Chinese poets and writing Finding Them Gone, I discovered Liu Tsung-yuan 柳宗元 (Pinyin: Liu Zongyuan). I had never read much of his poetry. Other than the handful of verses included in different translations of Three Hundred Poems of the T’ang 唐詩三百首, there wasn’t much in English. And I didn’t come across any more than that in Chinese. He was better known for his prose. I only included him in my travel itinerary after reading online accounts by his descendants searching for his grave. I love looking for things and thought wandering across the countryside south of Sian 西安 would at least make an interesting excursion. And so I started reading his poems. It didn’t take long before I felt somewhat abashed that I had overlooked him. But I wasn’t alone. Ever since the Chinese started ranking their literary giants, they have ranked Liu Tsung-yuan as one of the two greatest prose writers of the T’ang, the other being his friend and colleague, Han Yu 韓愈. One reason his poetry wasn’t given equal billing was that there is so little of it. The standard edition of his complete works includes only 146 shih-style 詩 poems, a drop in the bucket for most major T’ang poets. Li Pai 李白 and Tu Fu 杜甫 each left over a thousand, and Pai Chu-yi 白居易 over three thousand. Overshadowed by the attention given to his prose, Liu’s poetry was simply overlooked. At least it was until the Sung-dynasty poet Su Tung-p’o 蘇東坡 discovered it.

If anyone is responsible for putting Liu’s poetry on an equal footing with his prose, it was Su, who wrote that the T’ang poets he would rank after Li Pai and Tu Fu would be Wei Ying-wu 韋應物 and Liu Tsung-yuan, which would make Liu one of the four greatest poets of the T’ang, in addition to being one of its two greatest writers of prose. Having previously translated Wei Ying-wu’s poems, I shouldn’t have been surprised to find myself agreeing with Su. Once I finished Finding Them Gone, I began messing around with Liu’s poems—and I never intended to do more than mess. It didn’t take long before I realized I couldn’t stop. Here it is two years later, and this is what I’ve got to show for it, instead of all those do-nothing days I had planned—and to which I hope I can now return.

In addition to being captivated by Liu’s poetry, I was impressed by the man and by how he came to write what he did. His work is unique in that he wrote nearly everything that has survived while he was living in exile in the far south of China. He spent the last fifteen years of his life a thousand miles from home and died when he was only forty-seven. It wasn’t prison, but it wasn’t home, and so he wrote. And anyone who has read what he wrote is glad he did.

For those hoping to serve as officials in ancient China, writing was a job requirement. The civil service exam demanded a high level of ability in both prose and poetry—prose for reports, memorials, inscriptions, and letters; poetry for meeting or saying goodbye, for offering congratulations or commiseration, for banquets, or for sitting alone in the moonlight, but whatever the occasion, for expressing what was in one’s heart. Still, whether they were writing poetry or prose, educated Chinese such as Liu didn’t think of themselves as essayists or poets. They were officials first and foremost. And while Liu lived and worked in the capital, he wrote like an official, about government policies and events involving the administration. And he was very good at this. People sought him out—even the emperor. But I wasn’t interested in reading the memorials on policy he wrote for presentation at court or the inscriptions he wrote for special occasions or the letters about recent goings-on. It was the poetry that drew me in. The poetry was personal. It made me want to know more about the man who wrote it. Now that I’m done, I think people who read the translations in this book will also want to know more about the person who wrote the poems, and this is what I’ve learned.

In 773, the same year Charlemagne was laying siege to towns in northern Italy, and the Indian zero was being introduced to the mathematicians of the newly built city of Baghdad, Liu Tsung-yuan was born in the Chinese city of Ch’ang-an 長安. One more mouth to feed among the city’s two million others. Two decades earlier, the An Lu-shan Rebellion 安史之 亂(755–763) had destroyed much of the city. It had recovered, but the central government had survived only by relying on foreign mercenaries and on regional military forces headed by men who paid lip service but not necessarily tax revenues to Ch’ang-an. Had it not been for the government’s control of the salt trade, which accounted for half its revenue, it would not have lasted another decade, much less 250 more years. But at least things in the capital were more or less back to normal. And at least Liu was born into a good family. His mother was a Lu 廬. The Lus of Fanyang 范陽 (just south of Beijing) were one of the five great families of the T’ang and had supplied the court with a number of chief ministers during the dynasty’s early years. They also produced the dynasty’s greatest Zen master, Hui-neng 蕙能 (638–713), whose father was a Lu, albeit a banished one.

Liu Tsung-yuan’s father also came from an important family. His branch of the Liu clan traced its ancestry back fifteen hundred years and thirty-nine generations to a man named Chan Huo 展獲 (720–621 BC). Chang spent his days sitting under a willow in the Yellow River town of Pingyin 平陰 dispensing advice, not far from where Confucius 孔子 would later do the same. People started calling him Liu-hsia-hui 柳下惠, the Wise Man under the Willow, and the name stuck. Eventually one branch of his descendants moved west from the Yellow River floodplain to where the river came down from Inner Mongolia and turned east just past the town of Yungchi 永濟. The place they chose was Pupan 蒲坂, where the Su River 涑水 joined the Yellow. Two thousand years earlier, this was also the location chosen by Emperor Shun 舜帝 for his capital. It was a strategic place, being one of only five fords on the Yellow. The move by the Liu clan was apparently prompted by the shift in the center of power at the end of the Chou dynasty 周代 from Loyang 洛陽 to Hsienyang 咸陽, where the Ch’in dynasty 秦代 established its capital in 221 BC. It was only a three-day ride west from Pupan to Hsienyang, on the north shore of the Wei River 渭河, and later on to Ch’ang-an on its south shore. In the centuries that followed, no dynasty went by without at least a few Lius serving in the higher echelons of court bureaucracy. During the long reign of the T’ang-dynasty emperor Kao-tsung 高宗 (r. 649–683), twenty-two members of the Liu family served in the Department of State Affairs 尚書省, which was where business at court got done.

The senior member of the family at that time was Liu Shih 柳奭 (d. 659), whose niece was Empress Wang 王皇后, which should have been a good thing. And it was, until Kao-tsung became enamored of a woman named Wu Chao 武曌. Wu Chao had been a concubine of Kao-tsung’s father, Tai-tsung 代宗 (r. 626–649). When an emperor died, the normal procedure was for his concubines to become nuns and to move into the western part of the palace, effectively putting them out of the reach of palace affairs. If Wu Chao became a nun, she didn’t stay a nun. Three years after Tai-tsung died, she bore Kao-tsung a son. She then murdered her own daughter—fathered by Tai-tsung—and blamed it on the empress. Kao-tsung believed her and demoted Empress Wang. He then elevated his father’s former concubine to become his new empress, Empress Wu. Empress Wang’s principal supporter had been her uncle, Liu Shih, who had served as one of the chief ministers at court for years. When Empress Wang fell, so did Liu. He was demoted and then banished and finally murdered on his way back to the capital to be tried for his “crimes.”

That marked the end of high times at court for the Lius. They continued to serve, but not at the upper level. Liu Tsung-yuan’s great-grandfather Liu Tsung-yu 柳從裕 never served higher than city magistrate, neither did his grandfather Liu Ch’a-kung 柳察躬. Liu’s father, Liu Chen 柳鎮(739–793), did a bit better, perhaps because he married a Lu. Shortly after his marriage, he too became a magistrate. In his case, the city of which he was put in charge was Ch’ang-an itself. Things were looking up for the Lius. And things looked positively rosy in 773 after Liu Chen’s wife gave birth to a son. She had already given birth to two daughters, but a family’s prestige and wealth came through its sons. Both parents were thirty-four at the time, and this was their last child. They called the boy Tsung-yuan. This was the name by which he was known to his family and friends. The formal name he acquired when he turned twenty and by which he was referred to by the public was Tzu-hou 子厚. He was also sometimes called Ho-tung 河東, after the location of his ancestral home: east of where the Yellow River comes down from North China.

At the time of his birth, Liu’s parents were living in the capital’s Chinjen ward 親仁里, which bordered the southwest corner of the city’s East Market. The market was huge, a kilometer on a side. It was where the upper class shopped and lived. Hence, it was a good place to grow up—not that such things would have mattered to a child. But this changed in 777. Liu’s grandfather, Liu Ch’a-kung, died in Suchou 蘇州, just west of the mudflats that would later become Shanghai 上海. It was a long way away, but the Lius were devoted followers of Confucian traditions, one of which required a three-year period of mourning for the death of a parent. Being the eldest of five sons, Liu’s father quit his post and traveled to Suchou to take care of funeral arrangements. After the funeral, instead of returning to Ch’ang-an, Liu Chen decided to spend the mourning period in Suchou. It turned out Liu Ch’a-kung was a local hero. Before he retired and moved to Suchou, his last post was as magistrate of nearby Teching 德清. The people of Teching were so grateful, they built a shrine in his honor, and he became their city god. The people of Teching still carry his statue through the streets every year to honor his memory.

Meanwhile, back in the capital, with her husband in mourning and not receiving a salary, Liu’s mother no longer had sufficient means to support herself and her children and moved to the countryside west of the capital to some farmland the Lu family owned on the Feng River 灃河. This was where Liu Tsung-yuan grew up and the place he later recalled in his poems when he thought of home. He was going on five, and it was also time for him to begin his education, at least the rudimentary phase. Since there wasn’t enough money for a tutor, his mother became his teacher. During their move she had neglected to bring any books with her, so she had to rely on her memory. But she was an educated woman, and what she remembered were the “Odes” in the Shih-ching 詩經, or Book of Poetry. And so Liu Tsung-yuan’s education began with poetry—poetry and messing around in the garden.

When, in 780, Liu Chen completed the three-year period of mourning, instead of returning to Ch’ang-an he asked to be appointed magistrate of Hsuancheng 宣城, south of Nanching 南京. It wasn’t any closer to the capital, but Liu Chen had lived in Hsuancheng as a teenager when he and his mother hid out there during the An Lu-shan Rebellion. Something about their time together drew him back. And at least the appointment included a salary that allowed him to provide his wife and children with the means to move back into the city. Liu Tsung-yuan was nearly eight, and his regular studies finally began, again under his mother’s guidance, but now with the help of a library of three thousand volumes his grandfather had left behind in the care of his other sons. Liu began to read the classics, be they Confucian, Taoist, or Buddhist, and by all accounts he was a precocious student.

The young Liu’s studies, however, were interrupted three years later. In the fall of 783, troops brought from western China to restore order in other parts of the country mutinied. They took over the capital, and the emperor and his court had to flee. Earlier that year, Liu’s father’s threeyear appointment in Hsuancheng ended, and he was appointed magistrate of Lingpao 靈寶, just across the Yellow River, more or less, from the Liu ancestral home near Yungchi. During the mutiny, Liu’s mother sent her son to join his father, while she stayed in the capital with her two daughters.

Once the insurrection was put down in the summer of 784, the court returned, and Liu’s father was rewarded for his service, and his loyalty. He was appointed administrative assistant to the military training commissioner for a vast region that included the areas south of the middle reaches of the Yangtze 長江. This time he took his son with him. Liu Chen’s job required him to visit all the major cities in the region, and he began with Hankou 漢口, where the Han River 漢江 joins the Yangtze. From there he proceeded south up the Hsiang River 湘江 to Changsha 長沙. While he was there, he arranged for his son, who was now twelve, to be betrothed to a daughter of the Yang 楊 family, a family that had already supplied a wife to Tu Fu and that would later supply one to Pai Chu-yi. During these peripatetic years, Liu Tsung-yuan attended local Confucian academies whenever possible, but he and his father never spent more than a year in any one place, and he often studied with tutors or on his own, under, of course, his father’s guidance.

Finally, in 788, when Liu was almost sixteen, his father was recalled to Ch’ang-an and rewarded for his service with the prestigious post of assistant censor in the Censorate 御史臺. Liu Tsung-yuan, meanwhile, began preparing for the exams he hoped would open the door to his own career as an official. As in his previous assignments, Liu’s father displayed an unwavering sense of justice. His first year at his new post, he was given charge of retrying a case and was instrumental in having the previous verdict overturned. The chief minister Tou Shen 竇參 was furious, as he had been responsible for applying the pressure that had resulted in the original verdict. For his temerity, Liu Chen was banished to the Yangtze Gorges and remained there for three years until Tou Shen himself was banished. Upon Liu Chen’s return in 792, he was rewarded for his refusal to bow to pressure and was appointed attendant censor in the Censorate, one notch higher than his previous post as assistant censor.

During his father’s absence, Liu dutifully took the imperial exams every year. But as the son of a man banished by someone as powerful as Tou Shen, it was hopeless. It was not until Tou Shen himself was banished that Liu Tsung-yuan passed, with honors. It was the second month of 793, and he was twenty-one years old.

With his son’s future looking bright and his own as well, Liu Chen decided it was time to conclude his son’s marriage to the daughter of the Yang clan to whom his son was betrothed nine years earlier. Unfortunately, Liu’s father died in the fifth month of that year—he was only fifty-four, and the marriage had to be postponed.

Although the customary three-year period of mourning prevented the young Liu from accepting an appointment in the government, it didn’t mean he had to stay home. He joined his father’s brother in the border post of Pinchou 豳州, 100 kilometers northwest of the capital. His uncle was serving there as administrative assistant to the military commissioner. During his years studying for the exams, Liu had formed relationships with a number of officials in the capital, and it hadn’t taken long for them to notice his literary skills. Even though Liu was “in mourning” and living in a military encampment in a border region, they began asking him to write compositions, including drafts of memorials they hoped to present at court. Liu was thus able to put his sabbatical to good use, which laid the groundwork for his future rapid rise through the ranks.

When the mourning period ended in 796, Liu returned to Ch’ang-an and consummated his marriage to his betrothed. He was twenty-four, and she was twenty. On his return, he also received an appointment as an assistant in the palace library. It wasn’t much of a post, but it provided an income and allowed Liu to prepare for another exam, a special one held later that year for recruiting especially talented men. Liu failed, but when the exam was held again two years later, he passed. He finally received his first real appointment. He became a proofreader in the Academy of Scholarly Worthies 集賢殿書院, which was responsible for compiling works for the palace library. It marked not only the beginning of Liu’s career as an official, but also the beginning of his literary career. His talents had already been noticed while he was a student and later while he was in mourning. He now became a sought-after writer of compositions of all kinds.

Liu was not only gaining a reputation as a writer, his reasoning abilities caught the notice of a group of reform-minded officials headed by Wang Shu-wen 王叔文 (753–806), who was chief adviser to the crown prince, Li Sung 李誦. It was also around this time that Liu and his mother moved into his grandfather’s former residence in the Shanho ward 善和里 (the name was changed to the Hsinglu ward 興祿里 in the T’ang, but Liu always refers to it by the old Sui-dynasty name). It was directly opposite the main gate of the Forbidden City and couldn’t have been a more prestigious address. But whatever joy Liu experienced in life was invariably soon balanced with sorrow. The first year at his new post, his wife had a miscarriage, and the following year she died giving birth to a stillborn infant. We don’t know much about Liu’s relationships with other women, but two years later, in 801, he fathered a daughter with an unknown woman. Perhaps she was a singsong girl Liu met at one of the parties the literati were always attending. He called his daughter Ho-niang 和娘, Happy Girl, and she lived with him the rest of her all-too-brief life.

Liu’s three-year appointment to the Academy ended the same year his daughter was born. It would have been normal for him to be sent out to the provinces then as a magistrate—to round out his experience with a local assignment. But Wang Shu-wen and the crown prince wanted to keep Liu close by—Liu later described his role in this group as its “secretary.” Wang arranged for Liu to be appointed commandant in charge of military affairs in the nearby town of Lantien 藍田. It was only 60 kilometers southeast of the capital, but Liu didn’t have to go even that far. It wasn’t a real appointment. The metropolitan governor at the time was Wei Hsia-ch’ing 韋夏卿. Wei’s authority encompassed the entire Ch’ang-an area, including Lantien, and he arranged for Liu to work in his office as a secretary so that he could continue taking part in meetings with Li Sung and Wang Shu-wen and drafting memorials for the crown prince to submit to the emperor.

Two years later, in the tenth month of 803, Liu’s Lantien appointment ended and he was “recalled” to the capital. This time he was appointed investigating censor in the Censorate. It was a major step up the bureaucratic ladder. He was joined there by Han Yu, the other great prose writer of the T’ang, and Liu Yu-hsi 劉禹錫, who would also become a major poet, as well as Liu’s literary executor. Liu Tsung-yuan wasn’t quite thirty, but already he was conferring regularly with the group of advisers gathered around the crown prince and was making friends throughout the court. A year later, in the winter of 804, Li Sung suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed and unable to speak. It changed the nature of the group’s meetings, but its members continued to draft proposals for the crown prince to give to his father, Emperor Te-tsung 德宗 (r. 780–805). Two months later, in the first month of 805, Te-tsung died, and Li Sung, despite his partial paralysis, ascended the throne as Emperor Shun-tsung 順宗. Wang Shu-wen moved quickly and had the members of their group appointed to senior positions. Liu Tsung-yuan became a vice director of the Ministry of Rites, and his friend Liu Yu-hsi a vice director of the Department of State Affairs. These were heady titles but really beside the point. As they began implementing the policies they had discussed over the previous five years with the crown prince, their influence stretched into all areas of the court.

At heart, these policies were meant to curtail—if not end—a wide variety of forms of corruption and usurpation of privilege. They were chiefly aimed at limiting the power of the regional governors and the palace eunuchs and strengthening the power of the central government. Among other things, they included dismissing and charging corrupt officials, reforming the tax code, ending collusion between local officials and state monopolies, and getting rid of “palace shopping,” whereby eunuchs or their henchmen entered shops and took whatever they wanted.

The entrenched officials at court and the more powerful eunuchs naturally opposed these policies aimed squarely at them. They conspired with other officials, who were now being left out of the decision-making process, to bring all this to an end. Things happened fast. In the fifth month of 805, less than four months after becoming emperor, Shun-tsung was forced to make his eldest son, Li Ch’un 李純, crown prince. Then in the eighth month, he was forced to abdicate, while his son became Emperor Hsien-tsung 憲宗 (r. 806–820). In addition to putting an end to the reforms, Hsien-tsung banished all those who took part, which, of course, included Liu. Wang Shu-wen had already left Ch’ang-an in the sixth month when his mother became ill. Shortly after he arrived at the family home in far off Shaohsing 紹興, she died, and he began the threeyear period of mourning. A few months later, at the beginning of the following year, he was given permission to commit suicide.

Meanwhile, in the ninth month of 805, the eight men who formed the core of the reform movement were exiled, among them Liu Tsungyuan and Liu Yu-hsi. All eight were appointed magistrates of posts in South China. Liu’s post was in Shaochou 邵州 (modern Shaoyang 邵陽) in Hunan province, and he left a week later with his sixty-seven-year-old mother, his four-year-old daughter, a nurse, two cousins, and his friend and fellow reformer Liu Yu-hsi. Because Liu Tsung-yuan’s mother was ill, they decided against the shorter, more difficult route through the Chungnan Mountains 終南山 via the Wukuan Pass 武關. Instead, they traveled east through the Hanku Pass 函谷 關 and then took the easier Hsiaokuan Pass 崤關 south. From there, the route took them overland, across the Yangtze, then across Tungting Lake 洞庭湖. While on their way, they learned that the emperor had decided he had been too lenient. Their assignments were changed. Liu Yu-hsi’s new post was actually an improvement. It was changed from far-off Lienchou 連州 to Langchou 郎州, just west of Tungting Lake. Liu Tsung-yuan, however, was ordered 100 kilometers farther south to Yungchou 永州. But the emperor’s point wasn’t the location, it was the job. They were all demoted to the mere functionary post of assistant magistrate. They would have nothing to do, which was excruciating punishment for men whose lives had been concerned with reforming the government.

After the Liu entourage crossed Tungting Lake, they continued up the Hsiang River and stopped in Tanchou 潭州 (Changsha) to visit Liu Tsung-yuan’s father-in-law, Yang P’ing 楊凭. Yang was serving not only as town magistrate but also as governor of the entire West Chiangnan Circuit 西江南道, which included Yungchou, Langchou, Chenchou 郴州, Taochou 道州, and half a dozen other outposts. Liu Yu-hsi then headed west to his post in Langchou, and Liu Tsung-yuan continued south to Yungchou, another 250 kilometers upstream to where the Hsiang was joined by the Hsiao River 瀟河.

The prefecture toward which Liu and his family were traveling included 25,000 square kilometers of forests and farmland and a tax-paying population of 150,000. It had been brought into the Chinese orbit centuries earlier, and its population consisted mostly of Han Chinese. But it also included a mixture of Chuang 壮, Miao 苗, Yao 瑤, and Tung 侗—ethnic groups that had previously occupied the river valleys but had been forced into the hills by migrations of Han Chinese. Finally, in the last month of the year, eighty days after leaving Ch’ang-an, Liu reached the Hsiao River town of Yungchou. His post not only didn’t include any responsibilities or authority, it didn’t include a place to live. Fortunately for Liu, this wasn’t a problem. His mother was a devout Buddhist, and he himself had long been interested in the Dharma. The abbot of Lunghsing Temple龍興寺 welcomed them. Liu’s two cousins later found lodging across the river, but for Liu the monastery became his home for the next five years.

Less than a month later, at the beginning of 806, the emperor announced a new reign period and a general amnesty, which extended to all exiles except the Eight Assistant Magistrates 八司馬, as they were called. It didn’t take long for Liu to realize he was going to be in Yungchou for a while, and the wind that once filled his sails died. For the first time he experienced depression. As spring gave way to summer, his mother’s illness worsened, and she died. Liu arranged for her body to be sent back and buried in the family graveyard south of Ch’ang-an on the Chifeng Plateau 棲鳳原. Now it was just himself, his daughter, and a nursemaid.

There was a bright side, though, to being an assistant magistrate. It was a forced vacation, and Liu began to take advantage of it. He spent his time hiking through the countryside, drinking with like-minded individuals, and writing whatever came to mind. Inspiring him were friends who joined him there, as well as his two cousins. Liu Tsung-chih 柳宗直 was his cousin on his father’s side and became the brother he never had. Tsung-chih had also passed the imperial exam but decided he would rather accompany his cousin than wait for the unlikely prospect of an appointment. Lu Tsun 廬遵 was his cousin on his mother’s side and was a constant companion, not only in Yungchou but also at Liu’s next place of exile. Other friends included Wu Wu-ling 吳武陵, who passed the imperial exam in 807 but was banished to Yungchou the following year, and Yuan K’e-chi 元克己, who was another regular at evening get-togethers and on excursions. Also, Liu’s maternal uncle, Ts’ui Min 崔敏, arrived and served as magistrate of Yungchou from 808 until 810. Considering the circumstances, Liu couldn’t have been better off. The group that gathered around him became so famous, it was talked about in the capital, and would-be officials came from far afield to study with him. Liu was just as famous for his calligraphy as he was for what he wrote.

Most periods of exile in China ended after two years or at the most five. When the five-year mark went by with no reprieve, Liu concluded he was never going back. Some days he identified with Ch’u Yuan 屈原 (340–278 BC), the exiled poet whose laments he knew by heart and to which he responded with his own sense of unjust banishment. Other days he identified with T’ao Yuan-ming 陶淵明 (365–427), the poet who retired from government service early enough to enjoy life as a farmer, and Liu began to plant things.

Once the five-year mark passed, Liu decided to move out of the monastery and to build a hut across the river. He didn’t exactly take up farming, but he did lead the life of a retired gentleman. Once again, just as he was getting settled, sorrow visited. His daughter, Happy Girl, succumbed to illness. Before she died, she asked her father if she could become a nun. She was only ten, but Liu arranged for her to be ordained, and she took the name Ch’u-hsin 初心, Beginner’s Mind. Another reason Liu might have moved out of the monastery was that he had formed a relationship with a local peasant woman. She became his de facto wife and gave birth to another daughter a year after Beginner’s Mind died.

The place Liu chose for his new home was on a tributary of the Hsiao. It was called the Janhsi River 冉溪, but Liu soon changed the name. He reasoned that he was living in Yungchou because he was so stupid, that it was his stupidity that had led him to oppose the eunuchs and other entrenched officials at court. He renamed the stream the Yuhsi 愚溪, or Stupid River, and he lived what had to be the happiest years of his life on or near its banks. The site of his initial residence has since become a shrine, but this wasn’t the only place he lived. At some point Liu built a second, larger residence near the mouth of Stupid River on land now occupied by the town’s Number-Seven High School. Being right next to the ferry made it easier for his friends to visit and for him to visit them. Also, it was a relatively flat piece of land and provided more room for planting things. Liu planted hundreds of trees while he was in Yungchou, especially orange trees.

Although Liu lived the life of a retired gentleman, he was not the sort of person who slept late or went to bed early. He explored every nook and cranny in the area, and he received constant requests to compose inscriptions and drafts of memorials others hoped to submit at court. While he was in Yungchou, he maintained correspondence with hundreds of people. Liu still hoped to serve in some capacity, and he wrote countless appeals to others hoping they might help put an end to the disregard, if not enmity, the holders of power felt toward him.

Finally, in the first month of 815, Liu was recalled, along with Liu Yu-hsi and three other members of the original eight—two of whom had died, and one of whom had simply retired. Liu hurried back to Ch’ang-an and arrived less than six weeks later in the third week of the second month. He arrived full of hope. But the hope didn’t last long. The long shadow that had scuttled the careers of other members of the Liu family was still at work. Their return had been orchestrated by Wei Kuan-chih 韋貫之, one of the court’s two chancellors. But the court’s other chancellor was Wu Yuan-heng 武元衡, a great-grandson of the Liu-family nemesis, Empress Wu. Wu Yuan-heng bore the group of reformers a grudge, as they had rebuffed his attempts to join them. He should have been happy he didn’t! But when the chancellor heard someone recite “The Peach Blossoms of Hsuantu Temple” 玄都觀桃花 (see poem 114 in Poems of the Masters), which Liu Yu-hsi wrote shortly after his return, about visiting a Taoist temple and seeing all the peach trees planted since he was exiled, Wu (and others) interpreted the poem as critical of the government. Three weeks after they returned, the five surviving assistant magistrates were exiled again. This time they were elevated to posts as magistrates, but their new posts were even farther from the capital than before. In Liu’s case, his new assignment was to Liuchou 柳州, just north of Vietnam.

In the middle of the third month, Liu and his friend Liu Yu-hsi left Ch’ang-an once more. Six weeks later, they said goodbye halfway up the Hsiang in the town of Hengyang 衡陽. Liu Yu-hsi continued overland across the Nanling Mountains 南嶺山 to his new post in Kuangtung province, and Liu Tsung-yuan continued up the Hsiang, then through the Lingchu Canal 靈渠 to the Kuei River 桂江 (aka Li River 漓江) and down the Kuei to the Hsun 潯江, and finally up the Hsun and Liuchiang 柳江 Rivers to Liuchou. He arrived at the end of the sixth month, more than three months after setting out.

If Yungchou was a provincial backwater, Liuchou was barely a town. The prefecture, not the town but the prefecture, had a population of 7,000 compared to Yungchou’s 150,000. And those who spoke Chinese were few and far between. Life was very different. Child slavery was common, and during his tenure Liu personally redeemed over a thousand children who had been sold to pay off debts. He continued to write, producing some of his best work. But he finally had responsibilities, and he devoted himself to carrying them out. In this, he had the support of P’ei Hsing-li 裴行立, magistrate of Kueichou 桂州 and governor of the region that included Liuchou.

Liu made a deep impression on the people of Liuchou, just as his grandfather had on the townspeople of Teching. Unfortunately, Liu’s health was failing. He was suffering from beriberi and constipation, and he contracted cholera. He struggled on for four years. Finally, in the eleventh month of 819, he was recalled once more. But the reprieve came too late. Before he could pack, he died. He was forty-seven. Knowing he didn’t have long to live, he wrote to his friend Liu Yu-hsi, asking him to serve as his literary executor. It was Liu Yu-hsi who, in 822, put together the first collection of Liu Tsung-yuan’s surviving works. Governor P’ei took care of the funeral arrangements, and Liu’s cousin Lu Tsun accompanied the body back to the family cemetery, where it was buried alongside that of Liu’s mother on the Chifeng Plateau south of the capital. Liu’s epitaph was written by his friend and colleague, Han Yu. It appears in this book after the poems. Lu Tsun also took care of Liu’s son, born shortly after Liu Tsung-yuan arrived in Liuchou, and a second son born shortly after he died. One of the sons—no one knows which—eventually passed the imperial exam and became an official, but nothing more is known about him.

Also in 822, three years after Liu died, the townspeople of Liuchou constructed a memorial grave and a shrine to honor his memory. The shrine and grave are still there, along with descendants of Liu’s ubiquitous orange trees and the pond he was fond of visiting when the heat became unbearable. Although Liu didn’t become a city god like his grandfather, he did become the city’s hero and its face to the outside world. Most people assume the town was named for him.

That pretty much sums up what I’ve learned about Liu Tsung-yuan’s life. In the notes that I’ve appended to his poems, I’ll be repeating most of it, as I’ve always been of the opinion that without understanding the background of a poem it’s impossible for a translator to do it justice, and why shouldn’t the reader share in this knowledge?

In trying to describe Liu’s poems, I defer once again to Su Tung-p’o. Su wrote, “Of those poets whose work looks lifeless but is full of vitality, whose appearance is plain but whose essence is beautiful, that would be T’ao Yuan-ming and Liu Tsung-yuan” 其外枯而中膏，似澹而實美，淵明子厚，之流也. It was a beauty in no small part born of his circumstances. At the age of thirty-two Liu was banished. He had time on his hands. What he wrote in Ch’ang-an was bureaucratic in nature. What he wrote in Yungchou and Liuchou was about life, albeit life in exile. During the fifteen years he spent a thousand miles from home, he produced some of China’s greatest literature. His essays became the model later writers sought to emulate, and the ideas he expressed became a staple of thinkers, regardless of their points of view. He wrote in every genre, and with equal skill. He was as well known for his prefaces and inscriptions as he was for his allegories and fables or his memorials and letters. He even invented a new genre, the travel journal, with which I particularly identify, having honed such literary skills as I possess by doing two-minute pieces of fluff for an English-language radio station in Hong Kong about my own journeys in the Middle Kingdom. Had I read his work earlier, I might have cut down on the fluff. Also, Liu didn’t restrict himself to the standard Confucian view of things. He was equally at home with Taoist and Buddhist ways of looking at the world. And he wrote more or less as he might have talked, free and easy, but always in a style that elevated his work above his contemporaries’.

It’s hard to know how writers come to write the way they do. Liu’s mother, no doubt, played an important role, as his father was absent from the time he was four until he turned eleven. But his father played an equally important, if different, role, as Liu accompanied him between the ages of eleven and sixteen on his missions south of the Yangtze. During this time, the young Liu studied with tutors and attended local academies, but he was often left to his own devices, and he was free to choose his own literary models. Instead of the convoluted, ornate style that had become popular with officials over the previous 1,000 years, Liu looked to writers who weren’t simply stylists but also had something to say. He modeled himself and his writing on the works of Mencius 孟子, Chuangtzu 莊子, and Ssu-ma Ch’ien 司馬遷 and the historical commentaries of the Tsochuan 左傳. Critics later labeled what he developed as the ancient, or ku-wen 古文, style and contrasted it with the p’ien-wen 駢文, or parallel, style that had dominated literary genres from 200 BC until the T’ang. Liu cast aside the formal elements that often overshadowed a work’s content in favor of communicating ideas and feelings directly; he also had fun with the language in which he did so. I can only hope my translations give some sense of the ease with which he wrote.

In the pages that follow, I’ve included 140 of the 146 regular shih-style poems Liu left behind. I’ve omitted six that have a combined length of over 500 lines and would have required a small book of notes as well as more enthusiasm than I was likely to muster. I haven’t bothered with Liu’s ten fu-style 賦 prose poems or his nine sao-style 騷 laments, as they were written in a manner that the rest of his literary output argues against: dense as mud and weighed down by endless historical references. I’ve also ordered the poems in a chronological sequence, as near as can be ascertained or guessed at. Naturally there are differences of opinion about the dates of certain poems, but such differences are almost always limited to one or two years. I’ve also interspersed the poems with twenty of the prose pieces Liu wrote about his places of exile along with a few of his more popular allegories and fables and one letter. I’ve numbered these with uppercase roman numerals.

The texts I’ve used for the poems and the prose and have reproduced in this book are those in the four-volume Collected works of Liu Tsungyuan 柳宗元集 published by the China Publishing Company in 1979 as part of its Chinese Ancient Literature Text Collection 中國古典文學基本叢書. Where I’ve chosen variants of any significance, I’ve indicated that in my notes. Also, at the end of each note, I’ve indicated in parentheses the page number where readers can find the original text in the above edition.

Lastly, in preparing this book, I’ve had the good fortune to visit the places where Liu wrote these poems and prose pieces and to spend time with local scholars who have devoted themselves to his work. I am indebted to them for much of the information in this book. I’m not a scholar, and they saved me from having to become one. For readers interested in learning more, at the back of this book I’ve listed some of these scholars’ works along with the few English-language sources available. My thanks, too, to my traveling companions, Yin Yun 殷雲 and Li Xin 李昕, who helped arrange my visits to Liu’s places of exile and who joined me on my excursions. After coming up empty searching for Liu’s grave south of Sian, I never would have guessed I would find him still alive.

Red Pine

Summer 2018

Port Townsend