Su Shi in Exile: How the Song Dynasty Poet Su Dongpo Turned Banishment Into His Best Work

Su Shi was exiled because his poems were read as attacks on the government: he opposed the reforms of the chancellor Wang Anshi, his critics accused him of insulting the emperor, and after the Crow Terrace Poetry Trial of 1079 he was banished to Huangzhou, where he wrote many of the poems now considered his best. He was later sent even farther away, to Huizhou and then to Danzhou on the island of Hainan. Su Shi (1037–1101), also known by his art name Su Dongpo, was a poet, essayist, calligrapher, painter and food lover of the Song dynasty, and one of the most loved writers in Chinese history. His life shows something unusual: the worse his career went, the better his writing became.

A gifted family from Sichuan

Su Shi was born in 1037 in Meishan, near Mount Emei in Sichuan, into a family of writers. His father was Su Xun and his younger brother was Su Zhe, and both are famous names in Chinese literature too. His given name, Shi, means the crossbar at the front of a chariot. According to the story his father told, the crossbar is essential but low and modest, and Su Xun hoped his talented, outspoken son would learn self-restraint. As we will see, the son did not fully take that advice.

He was first taught by a Daoist priest at a village school and later studied at home with his mother and then his father. The two brothers stayed close all their lives, and many of Su Shi's most moving lines were written for Su Zhe.

Instant fame at nineteen

In 1057, at the age of nineteen, Su Shi and his brother both passed the highest level of the imperial civil service examination and earned the jinshi degree, the qualification needed for high office. Their success caught the attention of Emperor Renzong and of Ouyang Xiu, the leading literary figure of the day, who became Su Shi's patron. Overnight the brothers were celebrities.

For the next twenty years Su Shi served in posts across China. In Hangzhou he was responsible for building a causeway for pedestrians across the West Lake, and it still carries his name today: the Sudi, or "Su Causeway". As governor of Xuzhou in 1078, he wrote a report to the throne warning about economic trouble and the risk of armed rebellion in an important iron-producing district. He was not only a poet, but also a working official who cared about roads, water and the lives of ordinary people.

Poems that became evidence

The problem was politics. Su Shi was often in conflict with the reformist faction led by Wang Anshi, and he once wrote a poem criticising Wang's reforms, especially the state monopoly on salt. When the reformers dominated the court, they had him charged with political crimes, claiming that he was criticising the emperor himself. His politically charged poetry led to the Crow Terrace Poetry Trial of 1079.

There is a human twist to the story. Wang Anshi himself played no part in the case; he had retired in 1076 and was on friendly terms with Su Shi. And the scientist and statesman Shen Kuo, an ally of Wang, had earlier sent some of Su's poems to the court with the worry that they were hostile to the government, yet the two men remained friends. Song politics could be bitter, but personal relationships did not always follow party lines.

Su Shi later wrote that prison changed even the way he thought about food. Before, he said, he could not resist certain dishes such as clams; after his imprisonment, having felt like a chicken waiting in the kitchen, he no longer wanted to cause any creature fear and pain just to please his taste.

Huangzhou and the Eastern Slope

His first exile, from 1080 to 1086, was to Huangzhou in today's Hubei province. He held a title but received no salary, so he lived in poverty, and during this time he began practising Buddhist meditation. With a friend's help he built a small house in 1081 and farmed a plot of land called Dongpo, which means "Eastern Slope". He took his famous pen name, Dongpo, from that farm.

It is a wonderful detail. The name by which millions of Chinese readers know him today came from a piece of farmland he worked as a disgraced official. Huangzhou turned out to be his most productive period. There he wrote the two Red Cliff prose poems, inspired by the great naval battle of the Three Kingdoms era fought in 208, and the ci lyric "Remembering Chibi". His most famous piece of calligraphy, the Han Shi Tie, also comes from these years.

A bold new voice in poetry

About 2,700 of Su Shi's poems and 800 of his letters survive. He wrote in many forms, but his roughly 350 ci, poems written to fixed tune patterns, are the core of his poetic reputation. He is seen as a pioneer of the haofang, or "bold and unrestrained", style of ci. He widened the range of the form with subjects drawn from his own life, bringing in hunting, Buddhist ideas, politics and reflections on ageing and death.

One of his best-known poems, written to the tune "Shui diao ge tou", remembers his brother Su Zhe at the Mid-Autumn Festival. Another short poem about Mount Lu contains an idea that people still quote: he cannot see the true shape of the mountain because he is standing inside it. In Chinese this line has become a common way of saying that we often cannot see a situation clearly when we are part of it.

His prose made him one of the Eight Great Prose Masters of the Tang and Song, and as a calligrapher he is counted among the Four Masters of the Song. As a painter he loved bamboo and weathered rocks and argued that a painting should capture the spirit of a thing rather than just its outward appearance.

Recalled, then banished again

In 1086 a change of government brought Su Shi and other exiled statesmen back to the capital. The return did not last. From 1094 to 1100 he was banished a second time, first to Huizhou in the far south and then to Danzhou on Hainan, which in his time was the edge of the Chinese world. His companion Wang Zhaoyun followed him into exile in his old age and died of illness at Huizhou in 1095. In 1098 the Dongpo Academy was built on Hainan on the site of the house where he lived.

In 1100 he was pardoned and given a post in Chengdu, but he died in Changzhou in 1101, at the age of sixty-four, while travelling to his new assignment. His brother Su Zhe buried him beside his second wife, Wang Runzhi, as he had wished.

Dongpo pork: a legend on a plate

Su Shi is also remembered as one of China's four classical gastronomes. Today his name lives on in Dongpo pork, a Hangzhou dish of pork belly that is pan-fried and then slowly red-cooked. A popular legend says that during his poor years in Huangzhou he simmered cheap pork for hours with yellow wine, rock sugar and soy sauce, and that he wrote an "Ode to Pork" about it. But this is a legend, and there is no firm evidence that he invented the dish; a well-known book on Chinese cooking says simply that the dish is named after him "for unknown reasons". The story is still delicious, as long as we label it honestly.

Why he is still loved

After his death Su Shi became even more popular. People collected his calligraphy, painted him, carved stone inscriptions at places he had visited and built shrines in his honour. His influence reached beyond China, too: the Japanese Zen master Dōgen wrote at length about one of his Buddhist poems. In English, his poems have been translated by Arthur Waley, Burton Watson and Stephen Owen.

Perhaps readers love him because he failed in such a human way. He lost his job, his salary and his place at court, but he kept writing, cooking, farming and joking. For a language learner, his poems are also a good reminder that a few simple words, about the moon, a mountain or a brother far away, can carry a lifetime of feeling.

Learn with Su Shi: English phrases

Phrase	Meaning	Example
to fall out of favour	to lose the support of powerful people	Su Shi fell out of favour at court.
a blessing in disguise	something bad that turns out to be good	His exile was a blessing in disguise for his poetry.
can't see the wood for the trees	too close to a problem to understand it	When you're inside it, you can't see the wood for the trees.
to speak your mind	to say honestly what you think	He always spoke his mind, even in poems.
to make the best of it	to do as well as possible in a bad situation	In Huangzhou he made the best of it and farmed.

Try this: Write three English sentences about a difficult time that turned out well, using "a blessing in disguise" and "to make the best of it".