Who Was Bai Juyi? The Tang Poet Who Rewrote Poems Until Ordinary People Understood

Bai Juyi (772–846) was a Chinese poet, musician and government official of the Tang dynasty, famous for writing verse in a low-key, near-vernacular style that became popular across medieval East Asia. He wrote more than 2,800 poems, and it is said that he would rewrite any part of a poem if one of his servants could not understand it. His best-known works are two long narrative poems: the "Song of Everlasting Sorrow", about the imperial consort Yang Guifei, and the "Song of the Pipa". In Japan he is better known as Haku Rakuten, from the Japanese reading of his courtesy name, Letian.

A poet of the Middle Tang

Bai Juyi came one generation after the most celebrated era of Chinese poetry, the age of Li Bai, Wang Wei and Du Fu. He lived in the Middle Tang, a time of rebuilding after the devastating An Lushan Rebellion, and his life spanned the reigns of eight or nine emperors. That timing matters. The great poets before him had seen the empire break; Bai's generation had to live in what was left and decide what poetry was for.

He was born in 772 in Taiyuan, though he spent most of his childhood in Henan. His family was poor but scholarly. At the age of ten he was sent away from home to escape a war in the north, and the death of his father in 794 brought hard years and delayed his education.

From examinations to the palace

Bai passed the highest civil service examination, the jinshi, in 800. Soon afterward he began a lifelong friendship with the scholar Yuan Zhen, one of the most famous literary friendships in Chinese history. In 806 he received a minor post near the capital, Chang'an, and in 807 he joined the Hanlin Academy and became a Reminder of the Left, an adviser whose job included pointing out the emperor's mistakes.

He took that job seriously. He wrote memorials, formal letters to the throne, against what he saw as an overly long military campaign, and a series of poems satirising greedy officials and showing the suffering of ordinary people. Those poems made him admired by readers and disliked by powerful men.

Why was Bai Juyi exiled?

In 815, assassins killed the Prime Minister, Wu Yuanheng, on his way to the palace before dawn, and the capital was thrown into panic. Bai, holding only a minor post, wrote to the emperor anyway. His enemies called it a breach of protocol, since he should have waited for officials with censorial authority to speak first.

They also found a cruel second charge. Bai's mother had died after falling into a well, apparently while looking at flowers, and two of his poems, translated by Arthur Waley as "In Praise of Flowers" and "The New Well", were used as evidence that he lacked filial piety. He was demoted and sent away to Jiujiang, on the southern bank of the Yangtze. He was recalled to the capital only in 819.

Governor of Hangzhou and the West Lake

In 822 Bai was sent out again, this time to govern Hangzhou, a thriving city at the southern end of the Grand Canal beside the West Lake. He found that the farms depended on the lake, but the old dike had collapsed and local farmers were suffering from drought. He had a stronger, taller dike built, with a dam to control the water for irrigation.

He also loved the lake itself, visiting almost every day, and ordered a causeway so people could walk across instead of taking a boat. A causeway on the West Lake was later called the Bai Causeway in his honour, although the original one he built no longer exists. Few poets leave behind both famous poems and a piece of public works; Bai did both.

The Song of Everlasting Sorrow

"Chang hen ge", the "Song of Everlasting Sorrow", is the poem most readers meet first. It tells the story of Yang Guifei, the famous consort, and her relationship with Emperor Xuanzong of Tang. Their love story ends in the chaos of the An Lushan Rebellion, and poems like this one were also a way of showing the danger China lived through in those years.

The "Song of the Pipa Player" is his other great narrative poem. Bai also wrote sharp satirical poems such as "The Elderly Charcoal Seller". Like Du Fu, he had a strong sense of social responsibility.

Why was his poetry so popular?

The answer is accessibility. Bai's poems were plain, direct and easy to understand, and he had his work copied and distributed to make sure it survived. They were extremely popular in his lifetime in both China and Japan, and are still read in both countries; they are also popular in Korea and Vietnam.

In Japan his influence was enormous. Many of his poems are quoted or referenced in The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu, and the Noh playwright Zeami quoted him and even wrote a play, Haku Rakuten, in which the Japanese god of poetry drives the Chinese poet away from Japan. A foreign poet has to be very present in a culture before anyone writes a play about sending him home.

Popularity also brought criticism. Some ninth-century writers praised him highly, while others called his work common or vulgar, and one critic complained that his lines had been written on walls and taught by parents to their children until they could not be removed from people's minds. Read today, that complaint sounds like the best possible review.

The Hermit of Xiangshan

In his last years, Bai lived in retirement near Luoyang. In 832 he repaired part of the Xiangshan Monastery at Longmen and began calling himself the "Hermit of Xiangshan"; the site is famous for tens of thousands of Buddhist statues carved into the rock. After a stroke in 839, he spent his final years arranging his collected works and presenting copies to monasteries. He died in 846 and asked for a simple burial with no posthumous title. His tomb mound still stands at Longmen.

Learn with Bai Juyi: English phrases

Phrase	Meaning	Example
plain and simple	easy to understand, without decoration	He explained it in plain and simple words.
to speak truth to power	to criticise people in authority	Bai Juyi spoke truth to power in his poems.
to fall out of favour	to lose the support of powerful people	He fell out of favour at court.
a household name	someone everyone knows	His poems made him a household name.
to leave a legacy	to leave something lasting behind	He left a legacy of poems and a causeway.

Try this: Write three English sentences about a writer you can read easily, using "plain and simple" and "a household name".