7

Papyrocracy

No poet in the world can ever have enjoyed greater contemporary popularity as Po.

Arthur Waley, Bai [‘Po’] Juyi’s twentieth-century translator and biographer.⁴³

In the eighth century, Chang’an, China’s imperial capital, was the most fabulous city in Asia, if not the world. Laid out like a chessboard, as one of its poets put it, the great city (now called Xi’an) was home to a million inhabitants and filled with the wealth, beauty, intrigue, commerce and clamour of one of the most cosmopolitan and cultured metropolises on earth. Only Constantinople and Baghdad could rival it.

China’s divided north and south had been reunified in AD 581 and an age of prosperity had followed. At its heart was Chang’an, a city that teemed with merchants. Chang’an’s markets lay in nine separate areas and the Eastern Market alone had 220 lanes, each one dedicated to its own product, such as meat, iron, clothes, steamed buns, bridles, saddles, fish or gold jewellery. Persian stores stocked semi-precious stones, precious metals, elephant tusks, gems, sacred relics and pearls. Rugs came from Bukhara and from Persia as tribute to the imperial court. One Tang empress acquired a couch made from ivory which sat in a tent covered with gold, silver, pearls and jade. Its covers were made of rhinoceros horn, its cushions of sable, its mosquito felt and its ‘dragon whisker’ or ‘phoenix pinion’ mats were woven with reeds.

The markets sold clothes stamped with multicoloured patterns. Stalls offered cloves for bad breath and ‘barbarian body odour’ treatments. Women could buy skin rubs, blackhead removers, face creams, cosmetics, skin gloss and beauty marks in the form of a bird or the moon. They plucked their eyebrows and painted in new ones with tinctures, applied rouge to their cheeks and cinnabar glosses to their lips. Women’s cosmetics, ornaments and clothing were represented – such were their availability and social importance – by six gods, one each for ointments, eyebrow dyes, face powders, glosses, jewellery and gowns.

Public holidays were common and by the middle of the eighth century the government marked twenty-eight such days, as well as a further forty-eight sanctioned days of leave for officials. At festival circuses, acrobats walked in pyramids along a rope and fencers fought, while others juggled swords or pillows or pearls. There were pole acts in which an acrobat danced on a crossbeam attached to a sixty-foot-high pole carried on the head of another performer who walked around the stage. Daoist priests set up tall ladders for one of their number to climb up barefoot and brandish his sword against epidemics – a spiritual approach to mass vaccination. Others danced. Palace women and the new civil service graduates played a sport akin to football on the Cold Food Festival on the fifth day of April. One emperor destroyed the ancestral temple built for his predecessor’s daughter to make way for a ‘football’ pitch. In China it was often military officials who played a game like football with a leather ball. Polo was, then as now, an elite sport, but in China each team had sixteen riders and a band usually performed during matches.

Amid all these glamorous displays, paper was ubiquitous. Gate gods were painted onto papers stuck to the lintels of doorways as protection against malign spirits. There were no glass panes for windows, but oiled paper worked well if silk was too expensive. Lanterns, made from light bamboo frames, were panelled with paper too. During the three-day Lantern Festival, the curfew was lifted and residents could walk with their lanterns under the full moon. Wealthy citizens spent to impress, and in 713 the emperor ordered a 200-foot-tall lantern to be stood outside one of the city gates, covered in brocades and silk gauze. Paper had begun to replace the traditional loo sticks (the sticks used to clean yourself after defecation), and when an area east of the capital was plundered in 767 by the troops of a returning military governor, so much booty was taken that local mandarins had to wear paper clothes.⁴⁴

However, it was written papers which lay at the heart of cultural life in China’s new golden age. Even in times of war, men of learning would draw on their readings to help them through the hardships, and they sought to protect important works of literature. This age of scholarship allowed high officials and literary enthusiasts to enjoy a way of life facilitated by paper, whether in public administration or privately written poems. (More than 40,000 poems, composed by more than 2,000 Tang poets, survive today – Ezra Pound, Father of the Imagist Movement in the twentieth century, would look to the simplicity of form and expression achieved by the Tang poets as a model to follow.) China, at peace after reunification in 581, had grown in prosperity, and bookmanship had blossomed as a result. (A reunified China also meant paper correspondence could travel much further.)

Paper (often manufactured in and around Chengdu in China’s south-west) was now inexpensive enough for private owners to record more and more of their lives on its surface. For the first time it becomes possible to follow a private life closely on paper, or at least to follow the life of a man who inhabited a paper world. More than that: it makes it possible, centuries later, to access that most hidden of stories – the inner life of an individual. Of course, only so much access is possible and, even then, there are only a handful of individuals for whom the paper trail is long and deep enough. But it is extraordinary to read such personal insights and experiences of men who lived in China twelve centuries ago.

One man in particular stands out as worthy of just such a focus, a man whose life was lived out on paper through poetry, politics, religion, administration and letters. Thanks to his political vocation, his personal hobbies and friendships, his exceptional mind, his social concern and his poetry, his life displays, as few lives could, the ubiquity of paper in the lives of eighth-century China’s educated elite. Yet his life also shows how paper was not simply used for functional forms of writing, such as government administration, exams and official correspondence. Instead, through his letters, poems and diaries, we are invited into his experience of life too, whether it is the pain of personal loss, the pleasure of intimate friendship, frustration over government corruption, anger at extremes of wealth inequality, spiritual epiphanies or moments of intense communion with nature. The sheer volume of his writings, the range of his subjects, the frequently intense expression of mood and the risks he sometimes took with political criticism have left us with something unprecedented in China before his time. Only paper could have delivered us such a legacy.

Credit 7.1

10 Text as process: Northern Qi Scholars collating classic texts. An exceptional example of early Chinese figurative painting, Yan Liben’s eleventh-century work combines elegant forms with clumsy incident, capturing a moment of discord (the scholar centre-front suddenly preparing to leave, being grabbed by a fellow scholar who has dropped his instrument, and knocking a plate of food on to the platform) in what is otherwise a carefully composed harmony. It has often been thought to recall the moment when, in 556, Emperor Wenxuan invited twelve Confucian scholars (Yan depicted just five) to collate copies of the Chinese classics for the crown prince’s education. But their drinking, their state of semi-undress and their casual posture suggests instead an independent gathering, free of official constraints, one more in tune with nature than politics. The scholar to the right is wearing a red, nomadic gown and sitting on a ‘nomad seat’. Around him, the servants have various roles in the creation of the written work: one handles the paper, another prepares a new brush, a third holds a roll of spare paper, another reviews the writing and a maid brings an official girdle (symbol of rank) to the scholar-scribe. (Photograph copyright © 2014 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

Given the interests that would define his life, Bai Juyi was born sixty years too late, in 772, as wars and famine were unravelling China’s golden age. China’s registered population, numbering 50 million two decades earlier, had dropped to just 17 million by the year 764. A rebellion, famine and invasions to north and south had made the rest of the eighth century a struggle across China. Danger stalked the countryside and the government had to sell Buddhist ordination licences and civil service examination certificates to replenish its emptied coffers.

Bai’s family were poor scholar-officials who lived in the old heartlands of the country. He and his brother were brought up by their maternal grandmother and Bai later claimed to be able to read a few characters when still a baby. At the age of five or six he was composing verses, and by nine, he later wrote, he had mastered rhymes and tones. Years afterwards, he wrote to his nieces and nephews to encourage them to pursue learning too.

Life swindles those who cannot read;

I am blessed with knowledge of brush and script.

Life swindles those who lack position;

I am blessed with government office.⁴⁵

In 783 the emperor was forced out of the capital by rebel armies, but by the autumn of 784 his dynasty, the Tang, had been re-established. The following year, however, drought dried up the wells of the capital and the fields that supplied it with food.

The history of China could be written as a tale of waters. It begins with the gods separating the seas and the land, then shifts to the appearance of farming and irrigation, to Daoist geomancy (feng shui, literally ‘wind-water’), to the Grand Canal that took southern produce north, to the problems of Beijing’s desert-side dryness, to the communist hydro-dams of the twentieth century and the Pharaonic South–North Water Diversion Project of the twenty-first.

For Bai’s family, the unrest brought on by the drought forged a division and they scattered. Bai was taken to live in cities in the Yangzi Delta to the south-east, a refugee fleeing northern unrest. His first dated poem, written on cheap paper, according to the last line, is from this time and it replays the old Chinese theme of absence.

Banished from my old home, what use my longing?

Chu River and the hills of Wu lie between us.

Yet today a kind friend helps me send my brothers

A few lines of wistful remembrance, brushed out on a scrap.

By 788 Bai was sending poems to Gu Kuang, whose verses were famous across China. But Bai was working too, probably as a clerk or copyist in a local office. In fact, his family was approaching poverty. Thus, when his father, a minor official, died in 794 Bai was forced to postpone taking the civil service exam. Besides, in keeping with Confucian tradition, he had to mourn for three long years before taking on any official work again.

In 799 he travelled to the eastern capital, Luoyang, to bring money to his mother, who was ill. But before crossing to the north bank of the Yangzi, Bai stopped at a small town to take his provincial civil service exam. The poems he brushed out proved both his knowledge of the classics and his skills as a wordsmith and he passed through to the final round in the capital, due the following spring. In 800, at the age of twenty-eight, Bai passed China’s biggest exam in the top tier, his papers putting him in fourth place out of nineteen new Advanced Scholars.

The civil service examination had come of age under Empress Wu at the end of the seventh century. The examiners of the Ministry of Personnel grew powerful and the exams began to undermine class stasis in the capital. However, in 737 the Ministry of Rites took over and the power of the examiners declined. Senior officials in the Tang were not usually top exam graduates and, even among those who were, most had found an influential patron who could make their case to the examiners in person. Bai sent a fawning letter to the official in charge of the imperial tombs but nothing came of it. He must have excelled in at least the four disciplines that mattered most: manners, eloquence, calligraphy and knowledge of the law (though he claimed in his writings that he knew very little of calligraphy).

At the final stage, there was a choice of two exams, one classical and one literary, and candidates had to marry Confucian moral principles with the pragmatics of policy-making. The classics exam was a test of rote learning and of memory, requiring candidates to recount state-sanctioned interpretations of the classics. Bai chose the literary exam, the product of a new age of belles-lettres that had begun in the 690s. Among the new questions, many asked for answers written as eulogies, rhyme-prose or poetry. The most successful men in the empire were wordsmiths, and the exam they took was the talent-spotter for the most advanced form of government in the world. Bai happened to take his exam the year a reformer was attacking corruption in the exam system and he brushed his way to fame with answers on Confucius–Laozi paradoxes, the mechanics of nature and the proposed revival of harmonized purchase to stabilize the grain market. He wrote ‘Parting from my fellow candidates’ before his departure, a few weeks later, to mourn his grandmother’s death in Luoyang.

Full ten years, all my days in books;

But now at least the honour’s won.

Success is not great prize to me,

Pride comes when parents hear the news.

Six or seven fellow students

See me off from the capital

…

Flutes and strings send parting songs.

…

Wine smooths out the road ahead:

Horse hooves move at lightning pace

Through the spring day, and on to home.

When Bai turned twenty-nine (thirty by Chinese reckoning) he was unemployed and, as he morosely put it, thirty is almost a third of a hundred. His hope lay in the official employment test, writing his answers in a stylized form. Bai’s answers bulged with allusions and old proverbs as he proposed solutions to a fistful of social disputes and injustices. He passed with seven others and became a collator in the palace library.

Bai was now a minor clerk and his job took up just two days of each month. His life was placid and he had a salary. In time, he travelled home to live beside the River Wei, returning to the capital just once or twice a month. Yet the palace library was proof that paper and ink lay at the heart of the Chinese empire. Anyone seeking senior officialdom had to be skilled at organizing and maintaining paper records. But the classics and calligraphy were just as important in securing paper’s ascendancy, and their popularity was spreading to new segments of society.

Such was the ubiquity of learning in the capital that, even in the emperor’s harem, women studied the classics, writing, law, poetry, mathematics and chess. They grew mulberry trees for paper and raised silkworms to supply palace silks. Imperial decrees written on yellow paper were sent around the empire. Army officers provided a stand covered with a purple cloth, a magistrate rested the official decrees on it and two legal mandarins read out each decree alternately.

Libraries spread quickly. The palace library held more than 200,000 volumes, representing an array of beliefs. By Bai’s time, there were even translations of many Christian works, including the Sutra of Jesus the Messiah, which argued Christianity was no threat to Chinese culture but that Jesus was a saviour for all the nations, spurring Emperor Taizong to build a Nestorian church and monastery in the capital. Even in the furthest corners of the empire to the north-west, local government drafted its own paper documents. (In the Sui dynasty, during the sixth century, the civil service provided one emperor with 300,000 copies of an edict denouncing his rival.)

In 806 Bai Juyi had to study for another imperial examination, as a new emperor had come to the throne. As in previous exams, he prepared by sifting through the classics and commentaries on them as well as dynastic histories. But he studied for his exams in the library of Huayang, a Buddhist monastery – the flowering of Buddhism under the Tang saw new libraries spring up in monasteries and temples around the country, proof of the growing role played by paper in religious life as well as of the impact that written scholarship was enjoying on religious culture and priorities. Bai studied alongside his greatest friend, Yuan Chen. Each man had to explain the dynasty’s decline and what should be done. Bai argued for low taxes before drifting into generalities about how a moral government should persuade the rebels to put down their weapons.

Yuan, however, proposed a new civil service exam system as the solution: first an exam on Tang laws and on the classics, then a second exam with answers written as prose-poems, as poems – and always in a more stylized format – were used for evaluating candidates. In the first exam, markers would give rote memorization a low priority in their marking scheme. In the second, markers would remember that this only showed literary ability, not policy knowledge or mandarin ability. There would be no further placement exam to allocate people to positions. In short, Yuan argued for a meritocracy not weighed down by classical thought and systems. Yuan came out at the top of all examinees, but his proposals never moved beyond answers on a page. Bai took second place.

Both had studied in a Buddhist library and read works by Confucians, Legalists, Buddhists and Daoists. Yet, as Bai grew older, his Confucianism began to dissolve and he turned increasingly to Buddhism and its sutras.

There was a priest who brushed out sutras,

His body pure, his purpose clear,

…

When the sutra was finished, he was named ‘Sacred Monk’…

On a white screen is Mr Chu’s calligraphy,

It’s black as bold as the day it dried.

By the time of Bai, China’s Buddhist clergy had become an elite of its own, second only to the state’s secular hierarchy. This second elite had bred textual specialists, improved its own literacy and had passed new levels of literacy on to much of the Buddhist laity too. It was exempt from tax, pulled people from family commitments, undermined class distinctions and allowed women to take part in its ceremonies. It even diluted the country’s Sinocentrism and yet the government during the first half of the Tang dynasty was eager to incorporate it into Chinese culture.

In the early Tang period, Buddhist monasteries had the largest libraries in China beyond the major cities. Their clergy was one of the most educated and literate groups in society and there may have been as many as a million Buddhist clergy in the mid-Tang. Nor were they merely holy men and women marooned in their monasteries; instead, many were deeply engaged in society – and in the marketplace. In fact, Buddhist institutions often were wealthy, thanks in part to slavery (during its persecution of Buddhism in 845, the government would confiscate 150,000 Buddhist slaves; many were sold, enlisted into the army or taken in by officials to work as their own slaves),⁴⁶ pawnshops, tax breaks, land grants and their commercial lending businesses.

In 705 the emperor introduced exams for clergy. They had to answer questions and memorize passages from several texts, among them the Lotus Sutra. The 758 rebellion spurred the emperor to build a protective layer of Buddhist temples on China’s five holy mountains and to appoint trainee monks. Each monk had to learn at least 500 pages of Buddhist texts – some sources suggest the number was closer to 700. Later in the eighth century, clerical exams were divided into disciplines and expanded to include hermeneutics as well as memorization. Monks also studied Confucian texts in their monasteries from no later than the fourth century. Monastic teachers taught calligraphy to their students too.

Even junior monks had to read and memorize a number of texts, and the youngest entrants, the six-year-old ‘crow chasers’, must have been taught to read. The Mahayana sutras repeatedly encourage people to read, recite, study and copy the scriptures. At the end of the seventh century, one temple in north-west China kept fifty-five copyists in work. The capital itself was surely home to several thousand copyists, working in its many monasteries.

The upper classes (and poorer civil servant families like Bai Juyi’s own) received a Confucian education, but Buddhists probably focused on providing education in the villages. Some young students stayed in Buddhist monasteries to learn to read and write although many monasteries also commissioned murals to teach Buddhist beliefs to the unlettered masses.

A steady stream of sutras from India kept the shelves well stocked. Monasteries were producers of texts too, their monks doubling as scribes and often receiving government sponsorship to produce large collections of Buddhist texts. Aside from sutras, they also compiled histories of their orders and even copied many secular texts. Some of these they held simply to argue against: the court often sponsored lectures on the three teachings (Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism) on the emperor’s birthday and debates were common at such events. In the early seventh century, almost a million Buddhist scrolls were copied on imperial orders in the course of a decade-and-a-half.

Some, like Bai in 806, came to browse and to study a few of the thousands of scrolls stacked on the shelves of these monastery libraries as they prepared for their civil service exams. Chang’an alone had ninety-one Buddhist monasteries in the eighth century, almost a third of them for nuns. Even in seventh- and eighth-century Japan, monastic libraries held a number of Confucian works as well as thousands of Chinese Buddhist sutras and commentaries.

I wander along

Trailing my green bamboo stick

And whistling the Daoist Yellow Court Sutra.

But Buddhism’s greatest gift to literacy in China was neither libraries nor schools: it was reproduction. Monasteries had trouble producing Buddhist texts quickly enough, especially given the complexities of the Chinese script. In the cities shopkeepers would copy sutras too, selling them, alongside statues, to lay Buddhists. Buddhism, unlike Confucianism, did not set great store by fine calligraphy; its focus was on copying the words alone.

—

Bai’s knowledge of the Confucian classics, his love for Buddhism, his service in imperial government and libraries and his poetry set him at the heart of China’s paper culture in its golden age. His relationship with paper was not only one of the era’s most productive, but one of its most enlightening and arresting. Bai was neither an emperor nor an official historian, yet it was his mix of inside knowledge and independent reflection that allowed the paper page to make his name live on down the centuries. Very few lives outside the imperial family were recorded in such detail, and almost none with such candour and emotional intelligence. In this sense, Bai stands as an exceptionally early example of an author using paper to describe his inner life and sometimes the details of his daily experience. Other available surfaces were too expensive, too rigid in format and too tied to old subjects and forms to promote a blossoming of such new forms of writing.

Yet it was Bai’s literary loves that made him unlikely to appreciate paper’s greatest partner technology, despite its appearance during his own lifetime. And even if Bai did not see printing as an important part of his own life, it was certainly crucial to the fortunes of paper before his death.

For at least two millennia intaglio seals (on which the image or character is cut out of the stamp) had been a mark of authority and identity in China. Emperor Shi (the ‘First Emperor’) had owned the first imperial seal, carved in jade, and Daoists had carved charms on wooden blocks to leave impressions in sand or clay, in order to expel evil spirits. By the time of Bai, seals were no longer intaglio (intaglio seals produce reversed images, like photograph negatives); instead, they were carved in relief such that the stamped image appeared on the page just as if it had been printed with a wooden printing block.

Credit 7.2

11 The calligrapher Yang Xin’s personal seal, which appears on all his works. The culture of seals and of ink rubbing were both influential in the development of printing.

Bai himself probably used a stamp of his own on his poetry, a mark of his moral authority on the page. Daoists and Buddhists alike, and Bai knew plenty of each, also used seals on their writings. Bai would have seen plenty of rubbings too. Throughout Chinese history, hundreds of thousands of characters have been carved in stone and then – sometimes almost immediately, sometimes not for centuries – ink rubbings have been taken of the stone slabs on paper, creating a negative image of the text.

Reproduction has a rich history in China, from Shang dynasty bronzes to the script Emperor Shi standardized, to off-the-peg Ming porcelain to the tick-tock production of today’s Chinese factories.⁴⁷ But mass reproduction was not part of Bai’s own way of life, even if he saw it on his doorstep. Bai was a poet and for him, therefore, writing was brushed – a physical, idiosyncratic skill that expressed the character and emotions of its master. It took instead an ambitious empress to see where the future of mechanized copying might best be employed.

The first print run might have been a Buddhist project – the release of all Buddhist slaves in the ninth century had made hand-copying far less viable as a way of meeting demand for texts. But this project was not aimed at readers, nor would its deification of the empress have much impressed Bai Juyi. And yet the two lands where Bai won such large readerships in his own lifetime were (together with Korea) printing’s heartlands: China and Japan.

In China, Empress Wu sent Buddhist texts to her favourite holy mountains, arming them with tales of the healing powers they carried. She ordered embroidered copies of 5,000 scrolls produced, more than 20,000 scrolls written as karma for her late parents, and several million amulets. In her palace, the women of the powerful Liu family were dyeing delicate patterns onto textiles in the early eighth century and eventually the empress was given a print-dyed garment of her own.

Wu used sutras not as texts to be read but as charms to propel her image, and the project of mass production on which she embarked may have sparked the transfer of printing from fabrics to the paper page. In fact, the oldest surviving printed paper in the world was not even designed primarily to be read: a Chinese Daoist invocation or charm, probably printed in China, but on Korean paper, in 751. Its purpose was as a spiritual talisman as much as a medium for words.

The earliest known print run was a political stunt too. In 770, the Japanese Empress Shotoku supposedly (and perhaps actually) had a ‘million copies’ of a Buddhist word-charm printed on miniature sheets of white hemp paper. Each was placed in a tiny stupa and sent to temples across the islands to bless her reign. Bai the civil servant would have been unimpressed; he might even have composed a poem to undermine such vanity. Yet Bai was a Buddhist too, latterly, and the world’s first printed book, which appeared just twenty-two years after his death, might have pleased him. After all, this one was actually designed to be read.

In 868 the Diamond Sutra was carved onto wooden blocks in Chinese characters. The blocks’ faces were covered with ink and pressed onto a series of sheets. The first sheet of paper was imprinted with a woodcut illustration, showing Sakyamuni Buddha himself surrounded by a cartoon crowd of followers. The printer placed this sheet at the front of the sutra scroll, pasting its left margin to the first sheet of text so that the scroll was read from right to left. After the sheets of paper had been made, they were dyed with berberine, a dye which turned them yellowish and kept insects at bay. They were then printed onto with durable, carbon-based ink before being glued together to form the single scroll that survives today. Unrolled, this copy of the Diamond Sutra stretches more than sixteen feet. It was, of course, a crucial departure from the handwritten scroll, whose identity could not be separated entirely from the scribe who had brushed the characters out on its surface. Nevertheless, printing grew out of those same obsessions that had propelled the written text to become so widespread in Tang society: a love for paginated knowledge and reflection, whether in government papers, religious instruction, philosophy or poetry.

—

Buddhism brought printing to East Asia, but it failed to exploit its potential. From the mid-ninth century, the religion declined in China, falling victim to popular waves of Chinese nationalism and xenophobia, as well as to state-led persecution, the destruction of monasteries and an end to tax breaks. Thus it fell to the civil service bureaucracy to adopt printing for itself and the Imperial Records Office did indeed begin to expand, producing ever more papers of state. Mandarins in the Tang period already needed to excel in managing paper records but printing delivered new productive capacities, especially for the Song dynasty, which succeeded the Tang in the early tenth century.

Even before printing enjoyed its full impact, the volumes of papers and expectations of written reports were central to the life of a civil servant. In 808 Bai Juyi told a state archivist of his own monthly paper load – 200 sheets – in a 1,000-character poem. Bai said that he had written it drunkenly and with a ‘racing brush’:

In time receiving two hundred sheets of protest paper monthly,

Ashamed at my salary of 300,000.

Two years earlier Bai had worked as the Director of Administration in a provincial town in the centre of northern China. In 807 he became a proof-reader in the Hall of Assembled Worthies, where he helped to compile excerpts from the classics as well as commentaries on them. It was a minor role but the emperor began to notice Bai. The same year a eunuch came to his house to tell Bai he had been appointed a Hanlin scholar, one of the most prestigious positions available at court.

As a Hanlin scholar, he worked as a private secretary to the emperor, drafting and preparing documents for him to read, approve and then stamp with his vermilion seal. More than 200 of these papers survive. Bai found close friends among his peers, all of whom were chosen for their writing and drafting skills. As Bai entered the Hanlin Academy, its membership was undergoing a cleavage between the new wave who wanted to stem the power of the eunuchs, and those who wanted no such fight. Bai was one of the reformists, eager to restore power into trained hands.

In 808 he was appointed one of six Imperial Censors to the Left, who formed part of the Imperial Chancellery. The position was not especially senior in terms of rank (he was now in the third class of the eighth grade) but the job itself was privileged. It allowed Bai to write ‘memorials’ (official records) for the emperor to read but also to approach the emperor in order to criticize his deeds, words or proclamations and to suggest reforms to government practice. It was the closest he would ever come to the world of policymaking. Bai believed that his poetry was the reason the emperor had chosen him over several of his peers. He also believed in the possibility of the emperor improving the lives of the poor, although sometimes the emperor’s actions came far too late.

The emperor published his wise decree on white hemp paper,

For the district to be free of taxes for a year…

But for every ten families, nine had already paid…

Bai was only meant to criticize the emperor’s own actions, but he had seen destitute farmers in northern China as well as corruption at the palace among eunuchs, mandarins and the emperor’s own wives. In his new position he had legal immunity and did not have to produce any evidence to back up his reports. In one of his poems, malign wives and silver-tongued ministers are like pretty wisteria that twists itself round a tree before strangling it. In another, good officials are like lotuses in a pond that is so filthy they can’t even produce their fragrance. Bai had been a politically active reformer for years already and he hoped to point the emperor to the true problems beyond the palace gates. In 809 he explained his role in verse. Brushes from Xuancheng in central China were, Bai wrote, expertly assembled, their creators choosing ‘one strand from a thousand’ from the hares they caught for the purpose. A warning follows:

Designed for court, these brushes must not

Be carelessly employed by emperor or advisers;

They are best used by censors and historians

To uproot evil men, or to capture

The happenings of the time;

Censors and historians alike must see

These brushes as invaluable, employing them

Not to censor trivial faults, or to recount

The cheap wording of a minor command.

The same year, Bai advised the emperor to revive the practice of collecting folk songs. A millennium earlier, in the Zhou dynasty, the Folk Song Collector travelled through China to write down popular folk songs and in this way popular feeling would, it was hoped, reach the throne.

…those songs still sung

Beneath the altar all praise

The emperor; poems and prose

Extol him, whereas good advice

And disapproval is, these days,

Absent; mandarins employed to deliver

Counsel keep their mouths shut

Avoiding word or deed;

The Great Drum, for petitioners

To beat, hangs beyond reach…

I pray the emperor hears me now.

If he hopes to appreciate

What the people think and feel,

He should ask those equipped to criticize

To cage their thoughts in poems.

Bai did just that, and warned the emperor that the manipulation practised by the palace eunuchs, the wilful disloyalty of regional governors and the rural poverty that they caused would lead to the downfall of the Tang dynasty. He argued that the value of a copper coin was greater when melted down than when used as money. He advised that all copper containers should be confiscated to control the price of money, since fluctuations in purchasing power were harming the poor, but his proposal was ignored. As farm produce dropped in price, Bai complained to one friend that agricultural taxes did not, such that the rural poor suffered. He even wrote a poem condemning the annual tribute of dwarfs sent to the court by officials in Hunan, far to the south. (Tributes arrived in the capital from various vassal states as part of a patronage system and often included the products for which an area was renowned. Dwarfs from the south were just one of these tributes – human curios to amuse the emperor.)

These years were Bai’s most political and patriotic, and he lived out his views and moods on paper throughout. He was thirty-seven years old, residing in a quiet area of the capital with the woman he had married a year earlier. In one poem, he described a typical morning. He rose before dawn to greet the emperor, walked to the Silver Gate Terrace along the banks of the serpentine river, travelled three miles north on horseback in a bitter wind, and then waited for the water clock outside the city gate to chime as his moustache gathered ice. At the end of the poem, he intimated his own future when he imagined his friend Chen still sleeping under furs until the sun was far overhead.

In addition to the emperor’s trust, Bai also received the support of the man appointed as prime minister in 808. Bai’s friend Yuan Chen was given a senior appointment by the new prime minister too. Throughout 809 Bai’s poetry was turned to politics and the few personal poems he penned were usually about or for his friend Yuan. But one day, as he crossed the city, Bai ran into him unexpectedly. Yuan had just been exiled, the result of accusing a recently deceased but popular official of tax corruption and illegal property confiscations, stirring resentment against him among other officials. So it was that Bai rode south with his friend for some time before he had to turn back. But he used the official messenger service (which spread across the empire over the course of the Tang dynasty, utilizing both land and water routes) to deliver a scroll of twenty new poems to his departing friend. Bai’s letters of protest to the throne failed to reverse Yuan’s exile, however.

Bai quickly found enemies among the eunuchs and the older bureaucrats, yet he continued to take risks with his advice. When a matter was too sensitive even for him to raise directly, he would write a poem about it and distribute it anonymously, in the hope it would grow popular enough across the capital to reach the emperor’s ears. (His most famous English-language translator, Arthur Waley, called this his ‘letter to The Times‘.) In one of these poems, Bai pictured men from the Board of Punishments and Justice Ministry enjoying a party together one evening, unconcerned that inmates at one of their prisons were freezing to death.

In some ways, Bai was just one of many concerned scholar-officials looking for ways to criticize imperial policy without losing his job or his life. Through imperial China’s history, poetry became the most popular way to do this, and a reference to a flower in bloom, an emperor from ancient times or changes in the weather could all be used as political satire. The educated class was eager to read Bai’s poems, after all. But it was a high-risk game.

Bai’s 3,000 surviving poems stand as the work of an Everyman, and of someone eager to help and appeal to the peasant farmer. According to a later poet, Bai would read all his poems to his washerwoman before publication to ensure they were properly understood. But when it came to officialdom, his illustrations were often damning, as in one poem he wrote in 809 about the trouble officials took to find the best carpets to please the emperor.

A few feet of this carpet

Needs a thousand taels of silk;

Floors do not feel the cold.

Best not to rob the clothes

Off the people’s backs

Simply to lay them on the floor.

In 810 Bai asked to be moved to a better-paid position that would allow him to look after his ill mother. In the autumn he left on sick leave and stayed away until the end of the winter. As he spent time in the hills, he began to wonder whether nature and rural living were his vocation. Moreover, Bai’s mother drowned in a well the following year, so he gave up work to carry out the Confucian three-year mourning, leaving the capital in 811. Bai’s letters at this time suggest that his political hopes had started to fade. He even began to speak of his career in the past tense.

In 811 Bai’s child, a girl called Golden Bells, died at the age of three while he and his family were living close to a western tributary of the Yellow River. Bai’s Confucianized view of women seems to be on the point of unravelling as he writes of his daughter’s death:

A daughter can snare your heart;

And all the more when you have no sons.

Her clothes still hang on the pegs,

Her useless medicine lies by her bed.

We saw you off down the village street

And watched them pile the earth on your grave.

Do not say you’re just a mile away –

Between us now lies eternity.

Bai returned to the capital in 814 as adviser to the crown prince, but the following year he was banished for writing two poems that were seen to lack filial piety, a foundational Confucian virtue. More importantly, the political poems in hisNew Music Bureau collection had criticized too many senior officials, thus offering negative commentary on the emperor too. These poems complained of the imperial harem of fifty years before in order to make a comment on the size of the present one. Bai disliked the way women were confined to the harem for life without a future, a family or a husband. He had suggested that tax levels and harem numbers be reduced and the emperor agreed to his request – the rains that followed were thought to prove Bai’s Confucian rectitude.

In 814 Bai had written to Yuan Chen that their hearts were fused in their debates about writing and that his sleeves were filled with writings. The following year Bai sent his old friend a thirty-page letter about poetry, proof again of the depth of self-expression that paper had handed such men. (Such letters were a remarkable feature of Tang life for officials and literati, following the development of the dynasty’s postal service. Moreover, the Tang postal system was crucial for the spread of poetry, enabling the emergence of poetry groups and allowing contemporary poets more immediate geographical reach.⁴⁸)

In his letter to his friend, Bai said he had come across the twenty-six scrolls of Yuan’s writings and, as he read their contents, it had felt as though Yuan was with him. He claimed the Confucian classics as the sun, moon and stars of human life, headed up by the ancient Book of Songs which crystallized the feelings of the people in verse. But a bad crop of poets had since written about nature for nature’s sake and ignored poetry’s role in politics; even Li Bai and Du Fu, two of the greatest, wrote only occasionally about politics.

It was then that I came to this conclusion: the duty of literature is to serve the writer’s generation; that of poetry to influence public affairs.

In the letter Bai recounted the many meetings on his travels with people from the capital who knew his poems: singing girls, schoolmasters, Buddhist priests, government officials. He found his poems written on the walls of taverns and the sides of ships, and recited by mandarins, monks, old widows and young women. Bai wrote that his fame had balanced out his suffering. His new focus was to collate his poems, splitting them between didactic, reflective, sorrowful and miscellaneous. (He complained that people only remembered the fourth kind.) He went on to remind Yuan (who he calls Weizhi) that their whole friendship had been carried on in verse (he might have added ‘on paper’) before ending the letter intimately, referring to himself by his more familiar name, Letian (meaning something like ‘happy-go-lucky’).

Picture me this evening, brush in hand, paper laid out before me, as I sit by the lamp. Silence surrounds me. As thoughts materialize, I set them down, not seeking to order them. This long and garbled letter is the outcome…But Weizhi! You know my heart well enough! Letian bows twice.

In 817 Bai built a small cottage below Incense Burner Peak, close to the Forest Temples at one of the five holy mountains of China, and limited himself to four wooden couches and two screens, as well as a small collection of Confucian, Daoist and Buddhist books. He began to settle into quietude. Here he received several hundred poems written by Yuan Chen and decided to use them as his furniture.

Remembering you, I choose your poems for a screen,

I write and study them without distraction,

When the screen is ready, everyone will copy it,

And the price of paer in Nanzhong will soar.

In days past I sealed a letter I’d written you one night

Behind Golden Bells Pavilion as night was turning to day.

This night I seal another, but in a hut, and on Lu Mountain.

Just a couple of years later, however, Bai was recalled out of exile and back to the capital, where he filled one position after another. The following year his friend Yuan, now also back from exile, was made head of the Hanlin Academy (although the appointment was short-lived), often referred to as ‘the forest of brushes’. Bai was now transferred to become governor of Hangzhou, near the Yangzi Delta. When his friend Yuan Chen visited, their friendship was already so famous (thanks largely to Bai’s poems) that crowds gathered to see them stroll out together. (Bai and Yuan’s poems would be among the first to be mechanically printed and produced in large numbers.) As governor of Hangzhou, Bai built a flood dyke to help the farmers. He said when he left that it had been his only real achievement there, yet residents lined the streets to mourn his departure in 824. When he arrived at Luoyang, where he had a new position working for the crown prince, Bai wrote that he was growing old. He recounted how he had written more than a thousand poems on nature and on customs everywhere, but that he remained as obsessed with poetry as ever.

—

Bai saw exile, age and enemies cull his political ambitions. He had spent a decade studying the classics on paper so that he could enter the civil service. He had passed another two decades shifting paper inside it and writing poems on paper against court corruption and about the suffering of China’s farmers. Bai personified his age, flush as it was with art, learning and wealth, but he also saw that it was an age owned by aristocrats and officials. Corruption was cracking the pillars of state, and the poor were not invited to share in the Tang’s successes. Bai had finally tired of official life. Exile, among the greatest themes of classical Chinese poetry, had begun to convert him to nature and to idleness, although idleness meant poems and correspondence, especially with his beloved Yuan.

Red headers, white paper, two or three volumes;

Half are your poems, half your calligraphy;

A year of illness just passed,

Now opening them

I find bookworms have eaten them.

Yuan was a fellow graduate, official and poet, probably held back in his career by his candid poems as much as was Bai. But Bai often turned to Yuan’s scrolls of poetry when he was alone and ostracized, as he was in 815, sitting in a boat on the way to the city of his exile, Jiangzhou.

Picking up your poems to read by candlelight

I finish them, the candle now short, the night as deep as ever.

My eyes sore, I put out the light and sit in the dark;

Winds churn the waves, water strikes the ships.

Their separation was unavoidable. Chinese officials were sent to cities all over the country once they had graduated and it was rare for them to see each other again. Nevertheless, these student friendships were more highly valued than any others, and for Bai and Yuan, one another’s paper poems became a substitute for true companionship.

You brush out my poems on the temple walls,

And I fill screens just here with yours.

Dear friend, who knows when we’ll meet again,

Two floating fronds, far out at sea.

The range of experiences (censure, loss, success, love) and roles (civil servant, poet, exile, friend, mourner) that Bai lived out on paper is remarkable, even to modern readers. The Chinese characters had become the means to significance and Bai learnt them from his early youth. The Confucian classics were the only way into the civil service and Bai studied them on paper scrolls in detail. But much of his study was in a Buddhist monastery and Buddhism had begun to spread literacy more widely and to develop printing for the page. Bai worked in imperial libraries, collating the classics, collecting commentaries and writing summaries. He also recognized the poverty and suffering of farmers as well as the corruption of the court and its eunuchs and he sought to redress them with written complaints, on paper, to the emperor. He poured out his heart in poems and letters to close friends. Bai’s thousands of poems offer his readers a life expressed on paper.

While I live, I will not grow rich or win honour,

But when I die, I know my books will live.

You must forgive me this petty boasting –

Today I added Volume Fifteen to my works.

In old age, Bai learnt to love idleness. His servant would bring his bowl and comb to his bed, set his chair in the sunlight and place warm wine and poetry books on the table. He would go for walks in the mountains. When his left leg was paralysed by a stroke in 839, he revised his poetry collection. It now contained almost 3,500 poems and prose pieces. He sent copies to five different monasteries, apologizing for profaning their libraries with irreligious works.

Bai outlived most of his friends; in 831, his dearest friend, Yuan Chen, died after suffering an illness that had first struck him only the day before. Nine years later, Yuan’s memory was unexpectedly resurrected.

His poems are long since buried

Deep in cupboards and cases.

But just recently, someone was singing

And I heard a line –

Before I could make out the words,

A pain had jolted through my heart.

Although Bai loved the idleness and escape of retirement, even at seventy-three he was still concerned to have a public waterway cleared since it was a danger to river-traffic. Bai called writing poems his affliction, his obsession and his instinct; they were, perhaps, his way of remaking the world as it should have been. In 837 Bai’s daughter had a child and his last surviving poem, written in 846, has Bai in bed, still talking of his beloved poetry.

My bed is moved up the plain screen;

My stove placed in front of the blue curtains.

Grandchildren read to me from a scroll

And a servant prepares hot water.

With racing brush I answer the poems of friends,

And search through my pockets for medicine-money.

When such trivial matters are dealt with,

I lean back on my pillows, with my face to the South.