Su Dongpo

Chinese poet and scholar

• Born: December 19, 1036
• Birthplace: Meishan, Sichuan, China
• Died: July 28, 1101
• Place of death: Changzhou, China

One of China’s most famous poets and scholars, Su Dongpo was also an important government official during the Song Dynasty. He figured prominently in the political controversies surrounding the attempted imposition of state capitalist programs.

Early Life

Su Dongpo (sew dahng-poh), born Su Shi, was the eldest son of an upper-class, landowning family living in the western part of Sichuan during the Song Dynasty (Sung; 960-1279). His clan was one of the most distinguished literary families in the history of China. He, his father, Su Xun (Su Hsün), and his younger brother, Su Zeyou (Su Tse-yu), all were famous scholars and government officials. In the eleventh century, Sichuan Province produced a high percentage of scholar-officials, noted for their cosmopolitan prose and poetry. Su Dongpo grew up in a cultured, sophisticated home that prepared its sons to take imperial civil service examinations. Success in these exams would guarantee for the family official positions and access to wealth and power.

Su Dongpo and his brother Su Zeyou were both brilliant students. Lifelong friends, their careers in scholarship and government were inextricably linked. Their personalities were different but complementary: Su Zeyou was serious, stable, and cautious, whereas Su Dongpo was impetuous, volatile, and excitable. They stayed in continuous contact with each other, even when their official duties separated them by hundreds of miles, communicating in poetry at least monthly throughout their lives.

In 1056, the brothers went to Kaifeng in northern China to take the imperial exams. This city was the metropolis of China, cloaked in imperial grandeur. The wealth, talent, and beauty of the nation centered on the court. The brothers were not dazzled by the city’s splendor, however, and passed the exams with high honors. Su Dongpo’s main examination essay, which developed the principle of simplicity and leniency in the administration of a country, caught the attention of the imperial examiner and the emperor himself. On April 14, 1057, at the age of twenty, Su Dongpo was officially designated a jinshi (the highest ranking academic honor), second in a class of 388 successful candidates. He thus achieved instant fame and recognition as one of the leading scholars of China. Normally he would have entered immediately into government service, but his mother died during the examinations and he had to go into a compulsory period of twenty-seven months of mourning. He already was known as a literary genius, however, and he emerged from the mourning ready to assume his public life.

Life’s Work

Su Dongpo’s life was notable for three reasons. First, he was a brilliant, if somewhat impetuous, scholar-bureaucrat who figured prominently in the political disputes of the early Song Dynasty. Because he took controversial stances on important issues, he frequently found himself in serious conflict with his bureaucratic superiors and opponents. Second, he was one of China’s most gifted poets and literary figures. His contemporaries compared him to China’s greatest men of letters, and succeeding generations have continued to honor his genius. He was equally versatile in prose and poetry, writing in a beautiful classical style. He experimented with a common form of poetry, the ci , which had been previously confined to love songs composed in cabarets, and turned it into a vehicle for discourse on Buddhist and Daoist philosophy. Third, he developed a theory of calligraphy and painting resembling modern impressionism. The purpose of painting, according to Su Dongpo, was to paint the inner spirit rather than the form of an object. The painting should reflect not only the spirit of the object but also the artist’s inner essence.

In the early phase of his career, from 1062 to 1079, he achieved fame as both a government bureaucrat and a poet. After a brief posting as a minor provincial official, he returned to the capital (Kaifeng) in 1064. Thereafter, he and his brother were swept into the center of a political storm surrounding the efforts of the statesman Wang Anshi (1021-1086) to reform Chinese government and society.

To most of its inhabitants, the Song Dynasty seemed peaceful, prosperous, and humane. China had agricultural wealth, busy commercial cities, and great public works such as canals, walls, and roads. Beneath the surface, however, lay chronic national difficulties. Barbarian tribes in the north and west constantly threatened invasion, forcing the Song to maintain large armies, which overtaxed the imperial treasury. Despite the country’s apparent productivity, the government rarely had sufficient revenues to meet its obligations. It was clear to many officials, if not the majority, that fundamental reform was necessary to save the dynasty. Yet the questions of the shape the reforms should take and who should lead them caused acrimonious bureaucratic conflicts.

Between 1069 and 1077, Wang Anshi served as the chief imperial adviser and initiated institutional reforms designed to change fundamental fiscal, economic, and bureaucratic practices. First, he instituted state capitalist schemes to increase government revenues. One such program, for example, provided government loans to farmers at an actual interest rate of 30 percent. Second, he levied numerous new taxes. Finally, he established methods of registration to regiment and control the people. The baojia system, for example, organized the people into groups of ten and sixty, from which able-bodied men were called up for military training and duty. Although these reforms seemed capable of resolving some of the government’s fiscal woes, the methods by which they were implemented alarmed Su Dongpo and his colleagues.

In essence, Su Dongpo contended that Wang’s methods were too authoritarian and resulted in exploitation of commoners by arbitrary central officials. Su Dongpo risked his career by writing a nine-thousand-word letter to the emperor in June, 1071, criticizing Wang’s reforms, which had been authorized by the emperor. He was particularly concerned about the farm-loan program. Participation in this was supposedly voluntary, but in order to please Wang, provincial and local bureaucrats frequently forced peasants to take out loans even if they did not need them. When Wang’s critics noted this fact, he had them demoted or removed from office. Su Dongpo’s letter argued that, contrary to what the emperor had been told, public opinion was solidly against Wang. He reminded the emperor that his power derived from the people and that he ignored their will at his peril. Unfettered dissent, he claimed, was vital to the health of the government. The emperor did not take his advice, however, and demoted Su Dongpo from the capital to the Hangzhou area, where he served as governor of three cities between 1071 and 1080. Eventually, in 1076, Wang was forced out of office, but the doctrinal disputes fired by his reform continued to plague Su Dongpo and China for the remainder of the Song era.

The years Su Dongpo spent in the Hangzhou area saw his greatest activity as a poet. His distaste for the internecine political squabbles in the capital drove him to seek solace in his poetry, in which he explored the beauties of nature and the highest reaches of the human spirit. By this time, Su Dongpo had assumed his mature temperament and appearance. From his portraits, he had a muscular build, stood 5 feet, 8 inches (173 centimeters) in height, and had a dominating face with prominent cheekbones and an imposing forehead. He wore a long, tapering mandarin beard and regarded the world through wide-set, brilliant eyes. His chief personality fault was his propensity to speak his mind too freely among people who had no loyalty to him.

He loved the Hangzhou area and wrote such beautiful poetry about it that he has been regarded ever since as the city’s poet laureate. It was there, between 1071 and 1074, that he mastered and transformed the ci form of poetry. This poetic form had originated in houses of entertainment (disguised brothels) in which female entertainers sang songs arranged in such a way that each succeeding line contained a definite number of syllables. In time, the ci became an honorable form of literary expression. Su Dongpo took the lead in transforming the ci from love poetry to a vehicle fit to express the highest sentiments of the human spirit. He freed the ci from its sentimentality and infused it with power and grace.

Yet the poet’s life was not untouched by strife in these years, for political disputes about Wang Anshi’s reforms continued to rage and Su Dongpo could not ignore them. He wrote numerous poems of protest satirizing the government officials. He did not overtly criticize the Song leadership or advocate rebellion, but his subtle satire thoroughly annoyed his enemies. In all, his poetry, whether ci or protest, crackles with life and depth. Eventually, in 1079, he was impeached for his veiled attack on officialdom, and he was exiled in 1080 to a small, poor town near Hankou on the Yangtze. By then, however, he had proved his administrative skills, saving the city of Suchou from a disastrous flood in 1077 by building huge dikes, and ruling equitably over a series of districts. His literary reputation and his commitment to virtue were also well established.

The next period of his life, from 1080 to 1093, continued this pattern of official success followed by degradation and demotion. During his periods of demotion and exile, he studied Buddhist and Daoist philosophy, which profoundly shaped his writing and thinking. He was one of the first Confucian scholars to incorporate these ideas into the official philosophy and he played a leading role in creating neo-Confucian philosophy, which dominated Chinese life into the twentieth century.

Between 1084 and 1093, Su Dongpo’s party was in power at the capital, and he rose to the post of secretary to the emperor. Nevertheless, he managed eventually to lose his job because his propensity to attack corruption even within his own party gained for him many enemies.

He remained close to the seat of power, however, until a new emperor ascended the throne in the autumn of 1093 and Su Dongpo’s enemies regained power. Thereupon, he was again dismissed from office and was eventually exiled to the far southern island of Hainan, from which he returned only in time to die in July of 1101. This last phase of his career, from 1094 to 1101, was the saddest time of his life.

Significance

The Song Dynasty was noted for its versatile intellectuals, and Su Dongpo stands out as one of the most prominent. His position in history is secured by his poems and prose and by his courageous stand for his political and ethical principles. Although he was a respected patriot and hero, his life provides a study of national degeneration through factional strife. His party’s clash with Wang Anshi set in motion the forces that undermined the dynasty, as ineffective, corrupt administrators controlled the dynasty and sapped its vitality.

He is best remembered, however, as a poet, writer, and artist. He incorporated Buddhist philosophy into Confucianism and was the central figure in the formulation of the theory of “literati painting” as a coherent body of doctrine. His fundamental contention was that a painting should be a revelation of the nature of the artist who painted it, and of his mood and feelings at the moment of creation. Under the influence of Budd hism, Su Dongpo delved into problems of the mind and the universe. He believed that nature was spiritually alive and that an artist should catch that inner spirit in painting. The essence of things had to be seized by the eye and the imagination. To paint a fish, for example, the artist must imagine swimming with it in the water and share its reactions to current and storm. Only then could he paint the salmon leaping the rapids. Su Dongpo’s theories informed the Chinese approach to painting thereafter.

Su Dongpo ranks as one of China’s greatest poets, painters, and prose writers. He also was an able administrator, containing floods, building causeways, and struggling against bureaucratic corruption. He was one of China’s greatest men of letters as well as a great man of action.

Bibliography

Bi, Xiyan. Creativity and Convention in Su Shi’s Literary Thought. Lewiston, N.Y: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003. An examination of Su Dongpo’s literary works. Bibliography and index.

Chaffee, John W. The Thorny Gates of Learning in Sung China. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Su Dongpo, like his scholar-bureaucrat friends and enemies, entered China’s governmental elite through the examination system. This book provides a social history of the examinations and details Su Dongpo’s experience with them, as both a student and a chief examiner.

Egan, Ronald C. Word, Image, and Deed in the Life of Su Shi. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994. Egan covers the life of Su Dongpo and his literary output as well as his philosophy, political activities, painting, and calligraphy. Contains translations of many of his poems.

Fuller, Michael Anthony. The Road to East Slope: The Development of Su Shi’s Poetic Voice. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990. An examination of the poetry of Su Dongpo. Bibliography and indexes.

Grant, Beata. Mount Lu Revisited: Buddhism in the Life and Writings of Su Shih. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994. An examination of Buddhism and its influence on Su Dongpo as revealed in his writings and life.

Lin Yutang. The Gay Genius: The Life and Times of Su Tungpo. New York: John Day, 1947. This classic biography of Su Dongpo is clearly written and is based on original Chinese sources. Lin feels a strong attraction for Su Dongpo but presents a balanced account of his life and ideas. An indispensable source.

Su Dongpo. Selected Poems of Su Tung-p’o. Translated by Burton Watson. Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon Press, 1994. A collection of poems by Su Dongpo, with some commentary. Bibliography.