Su Shi: The Incorrigibly Optimistic Proto-Renaissance Man

Today, we’ll look at the life and times of one of the most revered and prodigious figures in Chinese culture. He was so prolific in so many different fields that he is often considered as a proto-Renaissance man, though he was born four centuries before Leonardo da Vinci.

Transcript

Su Shi: The Incorrigibly Optimistic Proto-Renaissance Man

Today, we’ll look at the life and times of one of the most revered and prodigious figures in Chinese culture. He was so prolific in so many different fields that he is often considered as a proto-Renaissance man, though he was born four centuries before Leonardo da Vinci.

The 19th Asian Games held in Hangzhou in October have successfully concluded, leaving behind many wonderful moments. For example, the Digital Torchbearers, composed of over 100 million “digital humans” participating in the digital torch relay, left a lasting impression. On September 23, the main torch of the Hangzhou Asian Games was lit in front of a massive audience, with the Digital Torchbearers donning Liangzhu cultural totems, riding on waves, and dazzling the world.

During the closing ceremony, the Digital Torchbearers made another appearance, ultimately transforming into a sky full of stars, marking a romantic end to the games. This creative concept highlights the fusion of tradition and modernity, technology, and culture, making the digital torchbearers once again a topic of widespread discussion.

For example, a “digital human” refers to a virtual character created using digital technology, simulating human features and existing in the non-physical world. In recent years, digital humans have become widespread in various industries and fields, with initial applications in digital reading, digital music, news broadcasting, online live streaming, digital cultural and tourism experiences, and more. The term digital human was recognized as one of the top ten new words of the year in the “Chinese Language Highlights of 2022.”

Digital humans can achieve the visual representation of traditional culture, marking a beneficial exploration of cultural digitization. In September of 2022, Zhonghua Book Company officially unveiled the “3D Hyper-realistic Digital Human – Su Dongpo.” The creative team used over 7 billion characters of ancient texts to capture textual descriptions related to Su Dongpo’s appearance. 

They also conducted image searches on hundreds of artworks from the Song to Qing dynasties featuring Su Dongpo to form a preliminary understanding of his authentic historical appearance. To faithfully represent the spiritual authenticity of this literary giant, Zhonghua Book Company established the “Su Dongpo Specialized Database” and developed various dimensions of “Su Dongpo-themed knowledge maps” to infuse depth into the digital character Su Dongpo.

Su Shi, who later adopted the name of Su Dongpo, is a poet, painter, calligrapher, statesman, and engineer of the Song Dynasty, which existed from the year 960 to 1279. He is recognized as one of the Eight Great Masters of the Tang and Song dynasties, a household literary term hailing his unparalleled status. His poems and prose have become embedded in Chinese culture, inspiring landscape paintings throughout the Ming and Qing dynasties. His calligraphy and paintings have been studied and collected for centuries. He was also such an avid foodie that there’s even a classic dish named after him – Dongpo Pork.

Su Shi was born into a literary family in the year 1037 in Meishan in southwest China’s Sichuan Province. His father Su Xun was a famous writer best known for his essays. His younger brother Su Zhe also made remarkable achievements in literature. The three of them were later revered as the Su Trio among the Eight Great Masters of the Tang and Song dynasties.

Su Shi grew up under one of the best emperors of the Song Dynasty, Emperor Renzong. The Song Dynasty was a key turning point in Chinese history, witnessing an explosion in population, significant increase in economic capacity, rising levels of education, and peaking achievements in literature and arts. Under Renzong’s reign, the Song is generally believed to have come closer than ever before to the Confucian ideal of just government. But it was also during his reign that two political and philosophical groups developed into factions, leading to bitter infighting that affected much of Su Shi’s adult life.

He proved to be a prodigy, passing the highest level of the imperial examination at the age of 20. His eloquent essay on simplicity in government administration impressed chief examiner Ouyang Xiu, who was himself a prominent scholar official and writer. With Ouyang’s endorsement, Su Shi quickly gained celebrity status among scholar officials in the court.

Just as Su Shi was to begin his political career, news came that his mother had passed away. By Confucian traditions, he had to return home and observe a 27-month period of mourning. When the mourning period ended, he was appointed as assistant magistrate of the present-day Baoji, northwest China’s Shaanxi Province in year 1061.

Five years later, his father died. Again, he had to resign his position and observe the mourning period. After its completion, he again returned to the capital in year 1069. By that time, Wang Anshi had risen to power as vice prime minister under the reign of Emperor Shenzong.

Wang initiated a series of radical reforms with the main concern being to increase the government’s revenue. To this end, one of the reforms mandated that peasants must borrow money from the government instead of the landlords. Loans were made at planting time and repaid at harvest time with interest rates ranging from 20 to 40 percent. During the eight years of reforms, peasants either had floods and drought with famine, or had to turn over good crop yields to the government for taxes and interests. 

These reforms also created rivaling political factions in the court. Su Shi was in the opposition party against Wang Anshi, nor did he fully agree with the leanings of his fellow conservatives. The party strife lasted virtually till the end of the Northern Song Dynasty in the year 1127. Su Shi was thus compelled to tread lightly in the turbid political waters throughout his life.

After criticizing Wang’s reforms in various essays and poems, Su Shi was persecuted by the reformers. He left the capital and took up a position in the present-day Hangzhou in east China’s Zhejiang Province, in the year 1071. Over the following decade, he served several other positions in prefectures including the present-day Huzhou in east China’s Zhejiang Province and the present-day Huangzhou in central China’s Hubei Province.

In the year 1079, Su Shi was transferred to Huzhou. He wrote a thank you letter to Emperor Shenzong for the appointment, with lines that read, “Your Majesty knows that I am stupid and behind the times, unable to keep up with the young upstarts…” Wang Anshi had already retired by this time, but his supporters continued to implement new reforms, and they interpreted the letter to be a veiled criticism of those reforms. They accused Su Shi of “great irreverence towards the emperor” and brought him to the capital for trial. Fortunately, he had a number of ministers pleading for him, including even Wang Anshi himself. After spending 130 days in jail, he was sentenced to exile in Huangzhou.

The four years in Huangzhou from year 1080 to 1084 proved to be a major turning point in Su Shi’s life. He came away a different man. Previously, he was a free and high-spirited personality, but after his narrow escape from the death penalty, he became more introspective and was more inclined to shy away from politics.

It was a period of simplicity and relative poverty. With his salary cut off, he had to live on his savings. He received ten acres of land to the east of the city as a grant from the government, where he built a farm and began to call himself “the Recluse of the Eastern Slope”. Eastern slope, literally dong po in Chinese, also became the source of his literary name.

He had to work hard on the land, but he also took simple pleasures in what life had to offer in nature and books. He spent a lot of time on the lake and in the surrounding mountains. He also befriended temple monks and began to study Buddhism. He began to reflect on the beauty of nature and consider in earnest the meaning of human existence. The tension and anger, characteristic of his previous writings, were now gone. And it was during this period that he produced many of his most admired pieces, including Ode to the Red Cliff.

It was also in Huangzhou that Su Shi is said to have created the classic recipe for Dongpo Pork. He first braised pork belly cubes in soy sauce, yellow wine, ginger and other spices, and then stewed it slowly for hours to reduce the greasiness of the fat and leave a glossy chocolate-brown coating. Later, when he supervised the dredging project of the West Lake, he gave the workers pork cubes secured with rope to thank them for their hard work. The dish was thus introduced to the working class, and to this day, some restaurants still serve the dish with rope. This tale has also been told in British gourmet Fuchsia Dunlop’s 2016 Land of Fish and Rice on recipes from the Yangtze River Delta.

In the year 1085, Emperor Shenzong died, passing the throne to ten-year-old Emperor Zhezong. But imperial affairs were in the hands of Zhezong’s grandmother, Empress Dowager Gao, who was more sympathetic with the conservative party. As the most senior among the conservatives, Su Shi was recalled to the capital. Having won the favor of the empress dowager, he experienced the most dramatic rise to power of his life – being promoted three times within eight months.

In year 1089, Su Shi was sent to Hangzhou for the second time as governor. During his tenure, he was very concerned about the suffering of the people, and his actions at that time left a lasting legacy to the city.

When Hangzhou suffered from a plague, Su Shi took the initiative to establish a hospital, treating patients for free with subsidies from the court, donations from locals, and even his own savings. This hospital is believed to be the first public-private partnership hospital in Chinese history.

To help solve the drought problem, he organized a large-scale dredging project of the West Lake, during which he worked and lived together with thousands of workers. He had the silt piled up to become a 2.8-kilometer-long causeway that spans the West Lake from north to south. To honor the governor, the local people named it the Su Causeway. And the six single-arch bridges that were built to beautify the causeway have become a signature landmark of Hangzhou to this day.

In year 1093, the empress dowager died, and Emperor Zhezong reinstated the reform party. In the following year, Su Shi was exiled once again, this time to the present-day Huizhou in south China’s Guangdong Province, and later even farther to the present-day Danzhou in Hainan Province. In the Song Dynasty, those were utterly barbarian regions, but Su Shi demonstrated the same optimism and lack of bitterness. Instead of lamenting his misfortune, he was able to reconcile himself to the southern wilderness with a sanguine philosophy. In one of his most popular poems, he wrote, “eating three hundred lychees a day, I will not resign myself to being a Lingnanese.” Lingnan refers to a large region in South China encompassing the present-day Guangdong, Guangxi, Hainan, Hong Kong, and Macao.

In the year 1100, Northern Song’s last ruler, Emperor Huizong ascended the throne and offered a general amnesty. Su Shi was pardoned and restored to a position in court. But he died the following year at the age of 64 while on the road to his final assignment.

What has endeared Su Shi to countless admirers over the millennium lies perhaps not only in his genius in so many different fields, but also in the incorrigible optimism he demonstrated in whatever circumstances. As Chinese writer Lin Yutang rightly remarks in The Gay Genius: The Life and Times of Su Dongpo, published in English in 1947, Su Shi was

…a hopeless optimist, and a great humanitarian, a friend of the people, a great writer, calligrapher, painter, experimenter of home-made wine, an engineer, a person who hated puritanism, a Yoga Buddhist, a giant in Confucianism, an emperor’s secretary, a passionate lover of wine, an honest judge, a political naysayer, a moonlit wanderer, a poet, a clown. But this is not enough to tell the whole story of Su Dongpo. More than any other Chinese poet, Su Dongpo had the richness, variety and sense of humor of a genius, with a brilliant intelligence and a childlike soul.

Well, that’s the end of our podcast. Our theme music is by the famous film score composer Roc Chen. We want to thank our writer Lü Weitao, translator Yang Guang, and copy editor Pu Ren. And thank you for listening. We hope you enjoyed it, and if you did, please tell a friend so they, too, can understand The Context.