After the death of Mao in 1976, Chinese universities reopened, and Ha Jin studied English.
At fourteen, he joined the People’s Liberation Army and was dispatched to the wilderness of the Soviet border. Born in China in 1956, Ha Jin was ten when the Cultural Revolution began. It is the first full-length biography of Li Bai in English and comes to us from a writer whose own celebrated works are banned at home. The novelist Ha Jin’s eighteenth book, The Banished Immortal, retrieves Li Bai from the legends that surround him, chronicling the life of this visionary artist in a collapsing political order. Each died convinced he’d wasted his talent, at the margins of the empire he longed to serve. Their work was startling in its artistry and breadth-and still is, in a China that is again changing rapidly. Both Li Bai and Du Fu attempted to understand the political disintegration around them by taking on subjects that normally remained outside Tang poetry. Du Fu wrote more than a dozen poems about Li Bai, and when the older poet became a pariah, Du Fu was one of the few to defend him. Both men-Li Bai a hotheaded, ungovernable Daoist Du Fu, a decade younger, a doting father and upright Confucian-became internal refugees when their country imploded in the rebellion.
Both were called to serve, very briefly, in the Tang court Li Bai was later found guilty of treason and exiled. The rebellion was put down with the costly military assistance of Uighur troops, but the Tang Dynasty never recovered its former unity.Ībout a decade before the civil war started, Li Bai and Du Fu met several times in the course of a single year, 744–745, but never again. Within seven years, two thirds of the Chinese population were dead, disappeared, or displaced.
In their middle age both suffered the horrors of the An Lushan Rebellion (755–763), a catastrophic civil war whose warning signs the government had ignored. Both poets were born during the Tang Dynasty (618–907), at the height of its sophistication and influence. Lines from their verses have been embedded in the Chinese language for more than a millennium. Landscape painting, Tang dynasty era (618–907)ĭu Fu and Li Bai, widely regarded as the two greatest poets in Chinese history, are still quoted by dictators and businessmen, students and dissidents. Werner Forman/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
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