131. Sent in Reply to Censor Ts’ao on Passing Through Hsiang County
132. Picking Cherries and Presenting Them First to Layman Yuan and Later to Taoist Master Chu at Looking for Immortals Pavilion on South Tower
133. With Master Hao-ch’u Looking at Mountains: Sent to Loved Ones back in the Capital
134. Climbing Liuchou’s Oshan Mountain
135. To Wei Heng
136. Planting Orange Trees at the Northwest Corner of Liuchou
XX. Camel Kuo, the Tree Planter
137. South Office Sent a Notice It Plans to Compile a Watershed Map and Include Local Customs and Stories
138. Sent from Liuchou to a Dear Friend in the Capital
139. Waking up Alone
140. Joking about Planting Willows
Liu Tzu-hou’s Epitaph by Han Yu
Acknowledgments
ILLUSTRATIONS
Portrait of Liu Tsung-yuan
Where the Hsiang (on the right) meets the Hsiao
Yuhsi (Janhsi) River near Cookpot Pool
Yuhsi River upstream
Yuhsi River map with Liu Tsung-yuan sites
Looking toward west shore of Hsiao River
View of Hsiao River looking south from West Mountain
Former site of Huang River shrine
Liu Tsung-yuan shrine built on the site of his former Yuhsi River home
Liuchou city gate looking out on the Liuchiang River
Liuchiang River as it flows through Liuchou
Immortal Peak (Hsienjenshan)
Statue of Liu Tsung-yuan
Liuchou and Liuchiang River from Immortal Peak with Oshan in the distance
Oshan
Liu Tsung-yuan memorial grave in Liuchou
Liu Tsung-yuan shrine in Liuchou
CHINA C. 800 AD
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