For three centuries the Tang dynasty ran the largest, most confident civilization on earth — and it wrote. Its poetry is the summit of the Chinese lyric: quatrains and regulated verses in which a moonlit floor, a ruined capital, a beam of light on moss, or a staircase above a river carry the full weight of a human life. Four of its most beloved poems live here, each with its original, its meaning, and its world.
Tang poetry (Tang shi, 唐诗) is the golden age of Chinese verse the way the Renaissance is the golden age of European painting — not merely a period but the standard by which all other periods are measured. The anthology that defines it, the Three Hundred Tang Poems, sits in Chinese homes the way a Bible or a Shakespeare sits in Western ones: the first book a child memorizes from, and the last one a grandmother quotes.
The form is short — twenty or forty characters to a quatrain — and the ambition is total: a scene, a feeling, and a philosophy, fused so tightly that none can be extracted without breaking the others. The four poems gathered here are gateway poems, the ones the tradition itself hands to beginners, chosen because each opens onto the whole: homesickness, war, emptiness, and ambition — the four rooms of the Tang house.
It was written around 726 CE, when Li Bai was about twenty-five and far from the Sichuan home of his youth, lodging in the river town of Yangzhou. Nothing in the poem names the place, the season, or the occasion. That omission is the poem's entire genius: it is a homesickness so precisely emptied of detail that every reader who has ever been away from home can step into it.
In the summer of 755 CE the general An Lushan turned his frontier armies against the Tang throne, and within two years the greatest city on earth had fallen. Chang'an — a million people, the terminus of the Silk Road, th…
Somewhere in the Zhongnan mountains south of Chang'an, on the estate Wang Wei called Wangchuan — "the River Valley" — there was a deer enclosure, a lu chai (鹿柴). Around 740 CE, in the half-retirement he built fo…
At Puzhou, on the great bend of the Yellow River, stood a tower where storks nested — the Stork Tower, one of the scenic high points of the Tang empire, and a magnet for poets with something to say about distance. Around…