Chinese · 772–846
Bai Juyi passed the examinations in 800 and spent a long official career alternating between the capital and provincial governorships, including Hangzhou, where a causeway on the West Lake still carries his name. He wrote deliberately plain poems and, according to a story he did not deny, tested drafts on an old servant woman and rewrote anything she could not follow. His New Yueh-fu ballads attacked forced labour, the salt monopoly and the price of grain, and got him exiled to Jiangzhou in 815 after he protested the assassination of a chancellor. There he wrote the Song of the Lute, about hearing a former courtesan play on a boat at night. His Song of Everlasting Sorrow, on the emperor Xuanzong and Yang Guifei, became the most memorised narrative poem in the language. He collected and edited his own works, nearly three thousand poems, deposited copies in temples to survive him, and was read in Japan within his lifetime, where he mattered more to Heian writers than any other Chinese poet.