Li Bai: The wanderer of the Chinese landscape

The Tang Dynasty poet Li Bai also known as Li Po, is close to being the national poet of China. Chinese schoolchildren learn his poems by heart, and his influence on later Chinese literature and art is as strong as Shakespeare’s influence in the West. But Li Bai’s influence was also felt in the West mainly through the American poet Ezra Pound, whose collection of translations of Chinese verse, Cathay, which included some of Li Bai’s poems, changed the course of modernist Western poetry.

Li Bai’s dominant influence was nature, particularly mountains, landscapes and the Moon, though he is perhaps most famous for his many poems about wine and the beauties of intoxication. Like Western poets, he turned his experience into metaphors that permeate his work.

In this article we examine some of these landscape influences, illustrate them with Jingwen’s new original paintings inspired by Li Bai’s poems, and explore the relevance of the poems for geoscientists.

Li Bai’s greatest poems dwell on homesickness, the challenges of travel and the difficult landscapes that separate the traveller from home

Voyager, storyteller

Quite a lot is known about the life of Li Bai. He is believed to have been born in A.D. 701 in present-day Kyrgyzstan, but as a young boy moved with his family to Jiangyou, near modern Chengdu, in Sichuan. Li Bai, a talented writer and raconteur from an early age, lived a life on the margins of the royal courts and the powerful families of Sichuan, Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Shandong in eastern and central China. His interests in literature and wine led him to join a group known as the ‘Six Idlers of the Bamboo Brook’, an informal group dedicated to drinking and poetry, but much of his life was spent wandering. Some of his greatest poems dwell on homesickness, the challenges of travel and the difficult landscapes that separate the traveller from home.

1935 map showing the extent of the Tang Dynasty (A.D. 618-690, 705-907), in China © Alamy

One of Li Bai’s most famous poems is Thoughts on a Silent Night. A note here that Mandarin characters represent concepts and things rather than words and so Chinese poetry can be translated in an almost infinite number of ways—a fact that is well illustrated by the American translator Eliot Weinberger in his book Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei. Even with this ambiguity, the images shine through and Thoughts on a Silent Night is taught to children because of its simplicity but also its effective use of imagery, sharply capturing the moment of experience of a lone man waking at night seeing the Moon and then remembering his distant home. In the poem, the Moon is an object that we can all see, giving us common experience but also capable somehow of making us feel far from home.

Thoughts on a Silent Night

A pool of light is sprinkling on my bedside,

It seems like hoarfrost upon the ground.

Eyes raised, moonlight in the sky;

Head bent, homesickness in my heart.

[Translated by Jingwen Luo and Mike Stephenson]

In Jingwen’s new painting inspired by the poem, we see the poet looking up at the Moon, his bedroom behind him and images of the fragments of dreams in the form of mountains that separate him from home – and the Moon a beacon shared by people everywhere, universal and ever reliable. This artwork was painted on long-fibre rice paper, using the methods and materials of China’s Dunhuang murals. The pigments are from natural mineral powders in keeping with a geological theme, and the Moon is depicted with silver foil treated with sulphur, giving it both the luminosity of the Moon and the faint structure of craters on its surface.

Inspired by Thoughts on a Silent Night and painted on long-fibre rice paper using the methods and materials of China’s Dunhuang murals, with pigments from natural mineral powders and silver foil treated with sulphur. © Jingwen Luo

Perilous path

Landscape and the perils of travel feature in one of Li Bai’s longer poems, The Road to Shu Is Steep, also known as The Shudao Is Hard. The ‘Shu roads’ or Shudao is a system of mountain roads linking the Chinese province of Shaanxi and Sichuan (Shu), built and maintained since the 4th century B.C. The roads included engineered sections, consisting of wooden planks on beams slotted into holes cut into the sides of cliffs, and their passage was considered a great undertaking in 8th-century China. Even though the poem is more than twelve hundred years old, it communicates the rugged terrain to us vividly, the perils of landslides and earthquakes, the sounds of rocks that ricochet off cliff walls, and the narrow passes. Here are some of the first parts of the poem describing the terrifying road to Shu:

The Shudao Is Hard 

[Extracts from the full poem]

The Shudao is so steep,

Harder than climbing to the sky!

An ancient kingdom endures here,

Its origin unknown to all!

Mountains crumbled, heroes perished

Then came the skyward ladder

And stone paths that intertwined.

As the traveller continues, he looks back thinking about his return:

When will you return from the journey to the west?

The treacherous path is too dangerous to climb.

Did you see the birds wail over the ancient trees,

Males leading females around the forest.

And hear the cuckoos weep to the moon,

echoing through the barren hills.

[Extracts translated by Jingwen Luo and Mike Stephenson]

Jingwen’s painting shows the complexity of the roads, the steepness of the mountains, the endless forests, the plank roads on the cliffs, but also the brightness and colour of the cities that the perilous roads connect. The work is on silk and shows the Shu road’s mountains in traditional Chinese ink painting style. The villages between the mountains are depicted using mineral pigments and metal foils, with elements of both traditional Chinese artistry and contemporary Chinese colour aesthetics.

Inspired by The Shudao is hard, this painting (on silk) of the Shu Road’s mountains is in traditional Chinese ink style, using mineral pigments and metal foils. © Jingwen Luo

The minds of wanderers

In The Moon over Mount Emei, probably composed around A.D 724., the autumn Moon makes another appearance as Li Bai sails the Yangtze through mountainous Sichuan, in a poem like a postcard to home, but with a note of sadness at the end.

The Moon Over Mount Emei

A crescent moon hangs over Mount Emei,

Its shadow falls into the flowing water.

Embarking from Qingxi’s night,

How I miss you: sailing past the Three Gorges’ majestic sight

[Translated by Jingwen Luo and Mike Stephenson]

In the poem Leaving the White Emperor at Dawn written around A.D. 755, we know that Li Bai had been released from exile in the town known as White Emperor City (Baidi Cheng) on the Yangtze River, and we see him yet again travelling, but this time with a feeling of the lightness and ease of travel, passing ten thousand mountains on his way.

Leaving the White Emperor at Dawn

Leaving the White Emperor where hues of morning clouds unfold,

Sailing a thousand li through canyons in a day,

Monkeys wail over the riverbanks,

My skiff has left ten thousand mountains far away.

[Translated by Jingwen Luo and Mike Stephenson. Li (Chinese: 里, lǐ, or 市里, shìlǐ), also known as the Chinese mile, is a traditional Chinese unit of distance. The li has varied considerably over time but was usually about one third of an English mile and now has a standardized length of a half-kilometre (500 metres or 1,640 feet or 0.311 miles).]

Even in these short poems and extracts, the sharpness of Li Bai’s vision communicates across thirteen centuries in a way that captured Ezra Pound’s interest and enlivened Western poets like T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden.

But for geologists and lovers of landscape, the poems are startling because they resonate with our own experience, the exotic places that we visit as geologists, the way that landscape stamps itself on our experience.

These lines from The Shudao Is Hard bring the mountains back to us sharply: that almost inaccessible outcrop, that sudden realisation of where you are when you look up from the rock, half way up a mountain, precarious, scary but exhilarating too. Li Bai is surely the geologists’ poet because he expresses the fears and fascination that we feel:

The Shudao Is Hard

[Extracts from the full poem]

Between the peak and sky is less than a foot,

Rotten pines cling precariously to the sheer cliffs.

Torrents and waterfalls vie,

Tumble down into the valleys,

Creating a thunderous symphony.

In such perilous heights, O traveller from afar,

What brings you to these treacherous paths?

[Extracts translated by Jingwen Luo and Mike Stephenson]

The precipitous ladder in Mount Hua, China. © Getty

We geologists are often the ‘travellers from afar’ and our love of landscape and its history bring us to the ‘treacherous paths’. But this vision impresses visual artists too, like Jingwen Luo and many other Chinese and Western painters, who have amplified and interpreted his imagery in the same way that painters have illustrated Shakespeare’s poetry and plays through the centuries. As Li Bai’s poetry becomes better known in the West through the internet and through the broadening of international travel and the spread of cultural interest, we expect his influence to live on in the arts—and the minds of wanderers everywhere.

Authors

Mike Stephenson, Stephenson Geoscience Consulting Ltd, Nottingham, UK

Jingwen Luo, Institute of Poetry, Calligraphy and Painting, Sichuan, China

Further reading

• Po, L., Fu, T., et al. (1973) Li Po and Tu Fu poems. Penguin Classics; 1st edition, 256 pp. ISBN-13:‎ 978-0140442724
• Pound, E. (2016) Cathay. New Directions. Centennial edition, 144 pp. ISBN-13: 978-0811223522
• Weinberger, E. (2016) Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei. W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition, 64 pp. ISBN-13‏:‎ 978-0811226202

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