Bai Juyi

Bai Juyi (772–846), also known as Bo Juyi or Po Chü-i, was a Tang dynasty poet, politician, and musician. His courtesy name was Letian. He served as governor of three different provinces, and many of his poems draw on his official career or observations of daily life. He became well known for writing in a simple, almost conversational style that was widely admired across medieval East Asia. His work also had a lasting impact on Japanese literature, where he is often referred to by the on'yomi reading of his courtesy name, Haku Rakuten. His younger brother, Bai Xingjian, was a writer of short stories. Among Bai Juyi’s most famous pieces are the long narrative poems “Chang Hen Ge” (“Song of Everlasting Sorrow”), about Yang Guifei, and “Pipa xing” (“Song of the Pipa”).

Bai Juyi lived during the Middle Tang period, a time of rebuilding after the An Lushan Rebellion and following the poetic golden age of Li Bai, Wang Wei, and Du Fu. He lived through the reigns of eight or nine emperors, born in the Dali era of Emperor Daizong. He had a long and successful career as both a government official and a poet, though these two roles sometimes clashed. He was also a devoted Chan Buddhist.

He was born in 772 in Taiyuan, Shanxi, then a few miles from the modern city, but spent most of his childhood in Zhengyang, Henan. His family was poor but scholarly; his father was an Assistant Department Magistrate of the second class. At age ten, to avoid a war in northern China, he was sent to live with relatives in the Jiangnan area, specifically Xuzhou. His father’s death in 794 brought hard times for the family.

Bai Juyi’s education was delayed by seven years due to his father’s death. He passed the jinshi examinations in 800. He may have settled in the western capital, Chang’an, in 801. Soon after, he began a long friendship with the scholar Yuan Zhen. In 806, the first full year of Emperor Xianzong’s reign, Bai was appointed to a minor government post in Zhouzhi, near Chang’an in Shaanxi. He became a member of the Hanlin Academy in 807 and served as Reminder of the Left from 807 to 815, except for a three-year mourning period after his mother’s death in 811, which he spent along the Wei River. He returned to court in the winter of 814 as Assistant Secretary to the Prince’s Tutor, a low-ranking position he soon lost.

In 814, while a minor palace official, Bai Juyi got into official trouble. He made enemies at court, partly because of his writings. He submitted two long memorials (translated by Arthur Waley as “On Stopping the War”) criticizing a lengthy campaign against a small Tatar group, and wrote poems satirizing greedy officials and the suffering of common people. Around this time, the warlord Wu Yuanji had seized Zhangyi Circuit in Henan and sought an imperial pardon. When denied, he turned to assassination. On July 13, 815, before dawn, assassins killed Prime Minister Wu Yuanheng and attacked another official, Pei Du, who survived. The capital was in turmoil.

Bai Juyi overstepped his minor role by memorializing the emperor on this matter—a breach of protocol. His opponents also used two of his poems, “In Praise of Flowers” and “The New Well,” to accuse him of lacking filial piety, since his mother had died after falling into a well while looking at flowers. As a result, he was demoted to Sub-Prefect and exiled from the capital to Jiujiang (then called Xun Yang) on the southern shores of the Yangtze in northwest Jiangxi. After three years, he was sent as governor of a remote place in Sichuan. Traveling there up the Yangzi River, he visited his exiled friend Yuan Zhen for a few days, exploring rock caves at Yichang. He was delighted by the flowers and trees.