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Su Shi

Given / Temple NameSu Dongpo

The all-round literary genius who, demoted again and again, made a poem of his life

Vessels of the Civilization · Pathfinders & Historians
The Eight Masters of Tang and SongThe bold-and-unrestrained ciThe Recluse of the Eastern Slope

Who they are

Su Shi passed the examinations at twenty-two and shook the capital, but his career thereafter was a map of demotions: opposing the new laws he was sent out to Hangzhou and Mizhou, jailed for a hundred and thirty days in the Crow Terrace poetry case and nearly killed, and banished to Huangzhou; when the old party took power he could not stomach the wholesale repeal of the new laws either, and was demoted again to Huizhou and Danzhou — ever farther, all the way to Hainan Island. Yet the history of Chinese literature reached its summit along his very route of exile: at Huangzhou came "Remembering the Red Cliff" and the two Red Cliff rhapsodies, at Huizhou "eating three hundred lychees a day," at Danzhou a school that produced Hainan’s first presented scholar. Master of poetry, ci, prose, calligraphy, and painting alike — and inventor of Dongpo pork — he lived a scholar-official’s frustration into the most open-hearted personality in Chinese culture.

Key stories

The Crow Terrace poetry case

In 1079 officials of the Censorate combed Su Shi’s poems and prose, pinning "mockery of the court" on line after line, and arrested him from his post at Huzhou and hauled him to the capital, into the Censorate (the "Crow Terrace") prison for a hundred and thirty days, where he once thought death certain and arranged with his son that a gift of fish would be the secret signal of it. The Grand Empress Dowager pleaded for him from her sickbed, and the retired Wang Anshi memorialized, "How can a sage age put a talented scholar to death?" Shenzong in the end did not kill him, demoting him to deputy military trainer of Huangzhou. It is one of the most famous literary inquisitions in Chinese history — and an extreme test of the Song’s bottom line of "not killing scholar-officials."

Neither storm nor shine

In his third year of exile at Huangzhou, Su Shi and friends were caught in the rain on an outing; the others were miserable, but he walked slowly on a bamboo staff in straw sandals, and on returning wrote "Calming the Wind and Waves": "Heed not the rain beating the leaves through the wood; why not chant softly and walk on at ease… Look back to where the bleak wind blew, and go home — neither storm nor shine." From condemned prisoner to farmer (he cleared land and farmed at the Eastern Slope, styling himself the Recluse of the Eastern Slope), he left later scholars a complete art of surviving frustration: whatever fate gives, make a poem of it.

Relationships

Nemesis
🌱Wang Anshi　Rose and fell for half a life opposing the new laws, and met him with a smile in old age

Appears in

The Two SongsThe Xining Reforms
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