A Tang poet’s plain style traveled all the way to Japan
Bai Juyi (772–846), courtesy name Letian, wrote Tang verse about office life and ordinary sights so clear that Japanese readers still honor him as Haku Rakuten. Narrative landmarks include Song of Everlasting Sorrow and Song of the Pipa.
Bai Juyi was born in 772 in Taiyuan, in what is now Shanxi, into a poor but learned family, and spent most of his childhood in Henan. At ten he was sent to relatives near Xuzhou to escape fighting in the north, and his father’s death in 794 set his studies back seven years. He passed the jinshi exam in 800, struck up a lifelong friendship with the scholar Yuan Zhen, joined the Hanlin Academy in 807, and served as Reminder of the Left.
Plain speaking cost him. He wrote memorials against a drawn-out campaign on the frontier and satirical poems on greedy officials. After warlord agents assassinated the chief minister Wu Yuanheng in 815, Bai protested to the emperor before the censors had spoken, a breach of rank. Enemies also turned two of his poems about flowers and a well against him, since his mother had died falling into a well while looking at flowers. He was demoted and exiled to Jiujiang on the Yangtze, and was not recalled until 819.
Sent out again in 822, he governed Hangzhou, where he rebuilt a collapsed dike on West Lake to irrigate drought-stricken farms and laid a walking causeway; a later causeway there bears his name. He then governed Suzhou from 825 until illness forced him to rest. In 832 he restored part of the Xiangshan Monastery near Luoyang, called himself the Hermit of Xiangshan, and after a stroke in 839 spent his last years arranging his collected works.
He wrote over 2,800 poems and had copies made to ensure their survival. Legend says he rewrote any line a servant could not follow. His long poem Song of Everlasting Sorrow retells the love of Emperor Xuanzong and the consort Yang Guifei. He died in 846, asking for a simple burial and no posthumous title, and his readers stretched from China and Japan to Korea and Vietnam.
Source: Bai Juyi
