Tang China's wine immortal wrote a thousand poems
Li Bai (about 701–762), courtesy name Taibai, stands with Du Fu at the summit of Tang verse—the Golden Age of Chinese poetry. Roughly a thousand poems survive; legend even claims he drowned reaching for the moon's reflection.
Called Immortal of Poetry, Wine Immortal, Banished Transcendent, and Poet-Knight-Errant, Li Bai shares the Three Wonders with Pei Min's swordplay and Zhang Xu's calligraphy. Birthplace is debated—Mianyang in Sichuan or Suyab in Central Asia (now Kyrgyzstan), where a merchant family may have prospered on the Silk Road before a secret move to Jiangyou near Chengdu when he was about five. Tradition links his Longxi Li line to Western Liang's Li Gao and thus, aspirationally, to Tang royalty. His mother allegedly dreamed of Venus—Great White—hence Taibai.
A voracious reader of classics and metaphysical texts, he skipped the civil-service exam yet composed poetry before age ten, fenced, hunted, and, by his own account, challenged great men with the sword at fifteen; before twenty he had killed several men in knight-errant fashion. Governor Su Ting called him a genius in 720. Marriage into the Xu family in 727 anchored him for a decade on Mount Bi; a later wife from the Zong clan exchanged love poems with him. Wandering the Yangzi and capitals, he joined wine-and-letters circles and befriended Daoist Wu Yun.
Wu Yun's praise brought Emperor Xuanzong's summons to Chang'an around 742. Courtiers dubbed Li the Immortal Exiled from Heaven; the emperor favored him extravagantly and posted him to the Hanlin Academy as scholar-poet and translator of at least one non-Chinese language—often drunk, still able to perform on demand. Early verse celebrates friendship, nature, solitude, and wine in pieces still taught in Chinese schools. An Lushan's rebellion darkened his later tone. Du Fu, a younger peer, outlived the chaos; Li himself never saw order restored. Yin Fan's 753 anthology and later Three Hundred Tang Poems, plus Pound's Cathay (11 of 19 versions), carried him worldwide.
Source: Li Bai
