"A Daoist ran a wine shop in Chengdu"

A footnote about everybody's favorite drunken Tang dynasty "highest level of immortal" poet

My recently concluded series on Liebniz and the Book of Changes took me many unexpected places (including, most serendipitously, the final endpoint!) but there was one collateral discovery that I could not fit in the main text – my encounter with a riveting book that evokes the true spirit of my favorite poet, the Sichuan-raised, Tang dynasty icon Li Bai. (Or Li Bo, or Li Po.)

The book is Li Bo Unkempt by Kidder Smith and Mike Zhai, published by Punctum Books in 2021. Punctum calls it a “mixed-media poetry album,” but such a description hardly does justice to its many delights. It includes translations of Li’s poems; anecdotes about his life, snippets of Tang dynasty history, and shambolic riffs that jump the divides of space and time – notably, a remarkable version of a famous ode to drinking rewritten as if for Billie Holiday to sing:

“Bring on That Wine”

Stew the chicken, kill the goat, but to be merry

you got to drink up all three hundred cups at once.

Like Li Bai himself, Li Bo Unkempt is irreverent, joyful, and profound. It is the best thing ever.

I found it because I was so taken by Smith’s article The Difficulty of the Yijing that I was compelled to find out what else Smith had been up to. Discovering Li Bai staring back at me after months wrestling with 17th century Hohenzollerns, Jesuit missionaries, and 21st century Taiwanese semiconductor shenanigans was yet another demonstration of what Philip K. Dick might have called a-causal synchronicity. I won’t try to understand how it happened. I’m just going to relish it.

A taste:

A Daoist ran a wine shop in Chengdu. Four men with fine silk hats and goosefoot staffs used to visit. Each time they’d drink dipper after dipper of wine until they had drunk more than a thousand liters, and they’d always pay their bill. They loved talking about Sun Simiao, King of Medicines, who’d lived a hundred years before.

Someone reported this to the magistrate, who ordered a special investigation. One day when they’d appeared, the magistrate stole over to the wine shop with a few followers. As he watched, the four men came prancing out and bowed twice, talking among themselves. They turned to look at each other, then rose leisurely into the sky, leaving only purple ashes and four staffs by their bar seats. They never appeared again.

At that time the Bright Emperor was fond of Dao, so the magistrate submitted a report on the matter. In response the Emperor issued a proclamation, calling for the late Master Sun, King of Medicines, to be summoned. When the Emperor asked him, Sun replied, “They were Li Bo and the stars of the Wine Constellation, the highest level of immortal. Whenever they come to the human realm, they go every-where drinking wine. They especially like central Sichuan.”

(Unofficial History of the Tang (Tang Yishi 唐逸 史).