Drunkard's Rock

Bill Porter (who uses the pen name Red Pine) wrote a wonderful account of his travels in search of places associated with ancient Chinese poetry, Finding Them Gone: Visiting China’s Poets of the Past (2016). Arriving now at these historic sites could involve encountering coachloads of people at a vast newly-built tourist site or finding nothing at all, just assurances from elderly locals or descendants that an old poet had indeed once lived in the vicinity. To take just one day and four Tang Dynasty poets as an example: leaving Xi’an to visit Wang Wei’s famous estate, Red Pine discovered it is now being used to make nuclear warheads. He then asked his taxi driver to make for the village where Liu Zongyuan had lived, but was met there with shrugs. A shrine to Du Fu was easy to find but Du Mu’s grave in a nearby village was removed by officials in the seventies and is now a pit full of trash.

Given the dense literary history of Mount Lu (which I briefly covered in a 2010 post here) you might think Red Pine would have had no difficulty seeing everything associated with its famous poets. And in Chaisang (Mulberry-Bramble) he did find a grandiose memorial and museum devoted to Tao Yuanming (T'ao Yüan-ming, 365-427), founder of the fields-and-gardens tradition. But when he attempted to see the poet’s grave he was told it was off limits, located now inside a military base, and the soldiers on guard would not let him in. 

Tao Yuanming was born at Chaisang and returned to the area ‘to dwell in gardens and fields’, as his famous poem of retreat put it. However, as Burton Watson wrote in The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry, Tao’s poetry is ambiguous – ‘exclamations upon the beauties of nature and the freedom and peace of rustic life sit uneasily alongside confessions of loneliness, frustration, and fear, particularly of death. He sought solace in his zither, his books, and above all in wine, about half of his poems mentioning his fondness for “the thing in the cup,” though in one of the poems he wrote depicting his own funeral, he declares that he was never able to get enough of it.'

Tao Yuanming in a painting by Chen Hongshou (1598-1652)

Leaving Chaisang, Red Pine's taxi drove south past the giant Donglin Buddha, heading for Wenchuan village at the foot of Lushan. On a previous visit back in 1991 he discovered Tao Yuanming’s last lineal male descendant had still been living here until his death just a few weeks before Red Pine’s arrival. Returning now, twenty-five years later, he found the village had been bulldozed and replaced with hot spring hotels. But fortunately it was still possible to see Drunkard’s Rock, where Tao met his friends and was inspired to write his wonderful account of the Peach Blossom Spring. The great eighteenth century poet Yuan Mei (1716-97) came here in 1784 and reflected on the fact that a mere ‘scrubby piece of stone / has been cherished and admired for more than a thousand years.’ Red Pine showed his taxi driver the rock and the faded signature carved into it by Confucian scholar (Chu Hsi, 1130-1200). His taxi driver, amazed, wondered why it wasn't in a museum but Red Pine was glad it wasn't and 'given its size, I didn't think it was going anywhere anytime soon.'