Su Shi: From Meishan to the Last Exile

Su Shi was born in Meishan, in Sichuan, near Mount Emei. His family home, shared with his father Su Xun and his brother Su Zhe, was turned into a shrine in the early Yuan dynasty. At 19 he and Su Zhe both passed the jinshi examination in 1057, the key to high office. The shrine still keeps traces of the household: an old well, an ink-washing pond and a stele pavilion. The long road to exile starts in this courtyard.

Visitor guidance: The old well and ink-washing pond are among the traces preserved inside the shrine grounds.

In the summer of 1079 Su Shi was arrested and spent four months in a Kaifeng jail while officials combed his poems for insults to the emperor. The charge was "great irreverence toward the emperor", and conviction carried a mandatory death penalty. When his family followed him to Kaifeng, soldiers stopped their boat to search for incriminating manuscripts, and the women of the family burned most of his papers; even so, about 2,400 of his poems survive. Su Shi and the others accused avoided execution, and he was sent into exile. Everything that follows grows out of this trial.

Location precision: The trial is tied to Kaifeng; the source does not name a surviving building, so the pin marks the city.

Su Shi's first exile (1080–1086) sent him to Huangzhou in Hubei with a nominal post and no stipend, leaving him in poverty. In 1081 a friend helped him build a small home on a plot called Dongpo, "Eastern Slope", and he took it as his pen name. Beside the Yangtze he wrote the two Red Cliff Rhapsodies, inspired by the Battle of Chibi of 208. Silt has since left the cliff a few hundred metres from the river; most of today's pavilions date from 1868.

Visitor guidance: The park holds Qing-era pavilions and stone inscriptions; the cliff now stands a few hundred metres from the Yangtze.

Recalled from exile, Su Shi returned to Hangzhou as prefect. In 1089 he directed the building of the causeway that bears his name, running between the north and south shores of West Lake and separating the Inner Lake from the outer lake. In 1090 he asked the court to dredge the lake, the first official use of the name West Lake. He also designed the planting: one willow to each peach tree, which still lines the causeway.

Visitor guidance: The causeway runs between the north and south shores of West Lake; its trees keep Su Shi's pattern of one willow to each peach.

In 1094 the new government banished him again, to Huizhou in Guangdong, where he lived for three years. In his poem Presenting Tanxiu he compared the local Feng Lake to the West Lake of Hangzhou, the earliest record of the Huizhou lake's name. In 1096 locals built a Su Causeway and the Xixin Bridge in his memory, and that year his beloved concubine Wang Zhaoyun was buried beside the lake.

Location precision: The pin is the Wikipedia coordinate for the whole lake; the sources name no single spot for his stay.

Visitor guidance: West Lake lies in the city of Huizhou, Guangdong.

The last banishment took him to Danzhou on Hainan. In 1098 the Dongpo Academy was built on the site of the home he lived in during exile. It stands in Zhonghe town, east of Danzhou. The original was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution and rebuilt in 1982, so the buildings are modern, among them the Zaijiu Pavilion and Zaijiu Hall.

Visitor guidance: The present buildings are a 1982 reconstruction on the site of his exile home.

In 1100 Su received a pardon and was posted to Chengdu after a long period of political exile. He never arrived: he died in Changzhou, Jiangsu, on the way, in 1101, aged 64. After his death he grew even more popular, and admirers collected his calligraphy, painted his portrait and built shrines in his honour. The city pin is only the place of his death; the sources give no exact site.

Location precision: The sources name Changzhou but no building where he died; the pin marks the city.