{"id":615435,"date":"2023-03-06T18:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-03-07T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.sellorbuyhomefast.com\/index.php\/2023\/03\/06\/chinas-beloved-drunken-poet-died-centuries-ago-or-did-he\/"},"modified":"2023-03-06T18:00:00","modified_gmt":"2023-03-07T00:00:00","slug":"chinas-beloved-drunken-poet-died-centuries-ago-or-did-he","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2023\/03\/06\/chinas-beloved-drunken-poet-died-centuries-ago-or-did-he\/","title":{"rendered":"China\u2019s beloved drunken poet died centuries ago\u2014or did he?"},"content":{"rendered":"<section>\n<div>\n<header>\n<ul>\n<li><a tabindex=\"0\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nationalgeographic.com\/history\"><span>History &#038; Culture<\/span><\/a><\/li>\n<li><a tabindex=\"0\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nationalgeographic.com\/culture\/topic\/out-of-eden\"><span>Out of Eden Walk<\/span><\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div>\n<p>Meet Li Hong Bin, a former accountant in Sichuan Province who believes he\u2019s the reincarnation of the poet Li Bai.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<p>Published March 7, 2023<\/p>\n<p>10 min read<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<p><span>Qinglian, Sichuan Province, China<\/span>Li Bai, the self-taught medieval genius, remains China\u2019s abiding titan of classical poetry.<\/p>\n<p>Born in 701, Li Bai famously began composing verse at age 10, trained as master swordsman in his teens (fatally dispatching several opponents in duels), and spent much of his Byronic life wandering the Chinese countryside seeking, with indifferent success, employment in various royal courts. He married multiple times. Inspired drunkenness became so vital to his literary method that he was inducted into a sodden group of Tang Dynasty scholars called the <a href=\"https:\/\/gotheborg.com\/glossary\/eightimmortalsofthewinecup.shtml\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup<\/a>.&#8221; About a thousand of Li Bai\u2019s poems survive still. They dazzle experts and Instagrammers alike with their <a href=\"https:\/\/www.poetryfoundation.org\/poets\/li-po\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">striking imagery and doomed nostalgia<\/a>. Hundreds of millions of Chinese schoolchildren memorize Li Bai\u2019s stanzas unto this day. According to legend, the great bard perished, drowned at age 62, while tipsily trying to touch the moon\u2019s reflection in the Yangtze River.<\/p>\n<p>Li Hong Bin, a stocky and sad-faced 62-year-old former accountant, knows all these Li Bai factoids. Not because he is a merely another super-fan of China\u2019s poetic idol. But because\u2014to Li Hong Bin\u2014it\u2019s more or less autobiography. Li Hong Bin believes he is likely the living reincarnation of Li Bai.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI\u2019m confident of this,\u201d said Li Hong Bin, hunched in a derelict souvenir kiosk that he\u2019s restored as a hermit\u2019s hut at the Li Bai Cultural Center, in Qinglian, the great poet\u2019s childhood town in China\u2019s western Sichuan province. \u201cAfter 1,300 years, I\u2019m the only poet living in Li Bai\u2019s hometown who is still composing poetry. I even sign my work Li Bai.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Li Hong Bin slapped a hank of rice paper onto his makeshift table. With barely suppressed emotion, he inked a line of calligraphy to fit the moment: \u201cBe willing to give up everything\u2014Buddha.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>As indeed, Li Hong Bin had.<\/p>\n<p>He\u2019d exchanged home, family, friends, and job to pursue his muse in a seven-foot-by-seven-foot booth next to a concrete parking lot in a town of strangers. He eked out his groceries by selling \u201cmaybe not so perfect\u201d samples of calligraphy to tourist guesthouses. The guesthouse owners indulged him, with a grin, as \u201cour own Li Bai.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nationalgeographic.org\/projects\/out-of-eden-walk\/].\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">walking across the world<\/a>. Traversing continents afoot, it\u2019s impossible not to cartwheel into poetry everywhere.<\/p>\n<p>You can hear it in the songs of the Afar camel-men in desert Ethiopia. You see it in the quick finger clasps of lovers strolling blue-tiled Samarkand along Uzbekistan\u2019s old Silk Road. Some countries, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nationalgeographic.org\/projects\/out-of-eden-walk\/articles\/2015-09-republic-of-verse\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">such as Georgia<\/a>, are blessed in building more statues to their poets than to kings or warriors. In Kyrgyzstan, apprentice bards spend years committing a half-million-line national poem, the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nationalgeographic.org\/projects\/out-of-eden-walk\/articles\/2017-05-weeping-singing-roaring-rhyme\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">epic of <i>Manas<\/i><\/a>, to memory. Yet nowhere have I found poesy more embroidered into public life than in China.<\/p>\n<p>In China births, marriages, and deaths are occasions for families to compose verse. Children learn ancient rhymes in their core curriculums. The doorways of city and village homes are flanked by good-luck couplets stenciled on red paper. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.travelchinaguide.com\/essential\/holidays\/new-year\/spring-festival-couplets.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">An example<\/a>: <i>Red plum\u2019s buds endure the snowy winter\/Green willow\u2019s catkin marks the new spring.<\/i> Mao dabbled in versifying. And during last year\u2019s draconian COVID-19 lockdowns in China, robotic dogs patrolled urban sidewalks barking protocols for social distancing\u2014in rhyme. Still, an actual, full-time, working poet is a rare discovery anywhere.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMaybe I\u2019m a very small poet right now, but I\u2019m still a poet,\u201d admitted Li Hong Bin, who relied on a garden hose and bucket for his water supply. \u201cAs a poet in difficult times, it\u2019s my responsibility to stand up. We sacrifice ourselves for the people. Just like Li Bai.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Both Li Bais\u2014original and reincarnated\u2014knew sacrifice.<\/p>\n<p>Born in Central Asia and raised in present-day Sichuan, the eighth-century grand poet had ricocheted through rebellion, civil war, and a declining Tang Empire. Emperor Xuanzong expelled Li Bai from the imperial court for yanking off his muddy boots in the royal presence. Later arrested for treason, the proto-beatnik was condemned to\u2014though later recalled from\u2014exile. Wandering the Yangtze Valley into rootless late middle age, one of Li Bai\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/quotes\/9881613-quiet-night-thought-before-my-bed-the-moonlight-glitters-like\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">most famous poems<\/a> drips weary melancholy:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>Before my bed the moonlight glitters,<br \/>Like frost upon the ground.<br \/>I look up to the mountain moon,<br \/>Look down and think of home.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Li Hong Bin too had roamed China. After being laid off from a state-run sugar factory in the northeast following the tectonic reforms of the 1990s, he set out to find employment. His jobs devolved from accountant to insurance salesman to night guard. During a particularly hungry stint cleaning a Buddhist temple, he scratched out couplets for tourists for 20 yuan. (About $3.)<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI tried to sell my poems in the pedestrian tunnels under Tiananmen Square,\u201d Li Hong Bin laughed. \u201cNobody bought them.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Along the way, he began boring into Li Bai\u2019s compositions. He felt those 13-century-old meters humming in his own bones and eventually washed up at his hero-poet\u2019s youthful stomping grounds at Qinglian in 2006. Shortly after he\u2019d occupied his peeling kiosk, which was built to peddle Li Bai gewgaws at the town\u2019s sleepy Li Bai cultural park, his wife had served the divorce papers. There\u2019d been a roadside fling and other regrets. He stays in contact with his two grown children via text messages on an antique dumb phone.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI\u2019m sure about following the footsteps of Li Bai, but other parts of my life were confused,\u201d Li Hong Bin said. \u201cI\u2019m satisfied with where I am now, though. I cook. I sleep on the table. I write. It\u2019s better than before, when I slept on the ground.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Li Hong Bin took up a brush. He dabbed out another calligraphic axiom: \u201cStrong morality can carry anything\u2014Confucius.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>To reach Qinglian, I had trekked north from the megalopolis of Chengdu, through villages leveled and rebuilt since the apocalyptic quake of 2008. I had crossed warm, green rivers on footbridges where <i>sh\u016bshu<\/i>\u2014old uncles\u2014played aggressive checkers. This was late summer. The days were molten, and farmers had spread their corn to dry on the road verges. It was the sort of China that defies the global cartoon of robotic factory floors. It was a landscape that I imagined the primordial Li Bai being comfortable in. And I saw in Li Hong Bin an artist who cracked the musty stereotypes of eastern communalism and western individualist rebellion.<\/p>\n<p>Before leaving to walk the old Shu roads to the north, I asked the reborn poet what he would do if his son took up his father\u2019s arduous trade.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHe wouldn&#8217;t do that,\u201d Li Hong Bin snorted. \u201cBut if he did, I guess I\u2019d say, \u2018It\u2019s okay, but finish your schooling first.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nationalgeographic.com\/impact\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">The National Geographic Society<\/a>, committed to illuminating and protecting the wonder of our world, has funded Explorer Paul Salopek and the Out of Eden Walk project since 2013. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nationalgeographic.org\/projects\/out-of-eden-walk\/\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Explore the project here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nationalgeographic.com\/history\/article\/poet-reincarnation-ancient-china\" class=\"button purchase\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Read More<\/a><br \/>\n Paul Salopek<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>History &#038; Culture Out of Eden Walk Meet Li Hong Bin, a former accountant in Sichuan Province who believes he\u2019s the reincarnation of the poet Li Bai. Published March 7, 2023 10 min read Qinglian, Sichuan Province, ChinaLi Bai, the self-taught medieval genius, remains China\u2019s abiding titan of classical poetry. Born in 701, Li Bai [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":615436,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23793,22042,534],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-615435","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-beloved","8":"category-chinas","9":"category-financial"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=615435"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615435\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/615436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=615435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=615435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=615435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}