Chinese · 1037–1101
Su Shi passed the palace examination at twenty with a essay so admired that the chief examiner said he would have to step aside for this young man. He then spent his career being exiled for opposing Wang Anshi's New Policies: first to Huangzhou after a trial for slandering the emperor in verse, where he farmed a plot on the eastern slope and took the name Dongpo from it; later to Huizhou in the far south, and finally to Hainan island, then considered a death sentence. He wrote poetry, ci lyrics, letters, travel notes, memorials and colophons, painted bamboo, practised calligraphy at the highest level, engineered a dyke on the West Lake and invented, or was credited with, a way of cooking pork. His two Red Cliff rhapsodies, written in exile on a river at night, are the most anthologised prose-poems in Chinese. He died on the way back from Hainan after a general amnesty.