Of the Early Ninth Century]

The Old Men [of the Early Ninth Century] Stephen Owen Longevity is an inconvenience for literary history. Poets can live on past their most creative years characterized by poetic innovation and achievement. Secure in their fame, such senior poets often remain untouched by the new directions taken by younger poets. These old poets can join with other figures of cultural power to become a literary establishment, an enclosed world of often complacent celebrity. This more or less describes the circle of aging poets and political figures around Bai Juyi. In the case of Bai Juyi and his friends, it was a literary establishment situated in a retirement community, realized in sinecures in Luoyang, far from the hopes and perils of political life in Chang’an or the wanderings of younger poets looking for preferment. Bai Juyi enjoyed such semi-retirement, never forgetting that he was now out of public life. He had removed himself from more active public life by choice, but he celebrated his decision so frequently that it is hard not to feel that he “protested too much.” There is a genuine charm in many of the poems Bai Juyi wrote as an old man in Luoyang, but it is a charm that can be sustained only by limiting one’s reading to a few poems. In large doses these poems become repetitive, facile, and self-absorbed—and the aging Bai Juyi wrote very many poems indeed. Bai Juyi’s spontaneity and ease were a cultivated style, but in poetry these are pre- carious virtues. One can admire such poems, while at the same time under- standing why younger poets seem to have reacted against the style. Poets were always coming and going in Chang’an, where in the 830s the dominant fashion seems to have been the finely crafted regulated verse, cen- tered around figures like Yao He and Jia Dao. The other major center of poetic activity was Luoyang. The latter was the Eastern Capital, with dilapidated palaces and a substantial bureaucracy that had very little to do. No emperor had visited Luoyang for as long as anyone could remember; this fact became something of a theme in the city’s poetry. Since the succession was far from certain, positions in the crown prince’s establishment, the “Regency Office,” were already at some remove from the exercise of power, either in the present Source: “The Old Men,” in Stephen Owen, The Late Tang: Chinese Poetry of the Mid-Ninth Century (827–860), Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006, 41–88. Reprinted by per- mission of the Harvard University Asia Center, © The President and Fellows of Harvard College, 2006. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��9 | doi:��.��63/9789004380�96_040 1236 Owen or in the anticipated future. However, positions in the “Luoyang assignment” of the crown prince’s establishment were sinecures in the fullest sense; their incumbents were secure in the thought that a real crown prince would never call upon their services. In the spring of 827, at the beginning of Wenzong’s reign, Bai Juyi completed his term as governor of Suzhou. The poet was called to the capital to serve as Director of the Imperial Library. In the spring of 828 he moved up a step to Vice Minister of Justice. Up to this point in his career, Bai Juyi had been very much a part of the political world. However, in the spring of the following year, at his own request, Bai was transferred to the post of Adviser to the Heir Apparent, “Luoyang assignment.” The older as well as some of the younger holdovers of the Yuanhe generation were passing away. Around 827 Li Yi, a grand old man of letters and already a well-known poet in the last quarter of the eighth century, passed away; and around 830 Wang Jian and Zhang Ji died. More unexpectedly, on September 2, 831, Bai Juyi’s dearest friend Yuan Zhen passed away at the relatively young age of fifty-three. Yuan Zhen had been considered, together with Bai, one of the leading poets of the Yuanhe generation, though in his later years he became increasingly preoccupied with political life and had become a powerful figure. By that point Bai had moved to the post of Metropolitan Governor (yin 尹) of Luoyang, a post that required some administrative involvement. Late in 831 or early 832 Liu Yuxi, another survivor of the generation and a fellow poet and close friend, stopped over in Luoyang on his way to assume his new post as governor of Suzhou, the post Bai himself had held just five years earlier. Liu Yuxi was to fill the void left by Yuan Zhen’s death, becoming Bai Juyi’s closest poetic correspondent. In the following year Bai, complain- ing of “illness,” resigned as Metropolitan Governor and resumed his old post as Adviser to the Heir Apparent. Liu Yuxi served out his term in Suzhou, and after passing through other short stints as a prefectural governor, he arrived in Luoyang to take up Bai Juyi’s post as Adviser to the Heir Apparent. Bai Juyi was elevated to the distinguished title of Junior Mentor (shaofu 少傅) to the Crown Prince, no less a sinecure. That same year Li Shen, another well-known poet and friend, came to Luoyang to take Bai’s earlier post as Metropolitan Governor. Li Shen was to move on to other distinguished political posts, but Bai Juyi and Liu Yuxi would remain in Luoyang until their deaths, Liu dying in 842 and Bai in 846. These were all men in their late fifties, sixties, and (for Bai Juyi) seven- ties. All were famous and highly connected. Luoyang was on the most popular travel route from Chang’an, and through it passed the eminent statesmen of the day, including the very senior Pei Du, Linghu Chu, and the dominant younger .

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