Poetry as a Compass in One Traveler's Journey Through China

In the New York Times Style Magazine's feature on ancient land routes along the Silk Road, poetry serves as a kind of compass for the author Anna Sherman as she travels across western China. Along her journey, Sherman is reminded of these lines by the poet Li Bo, translated by Rewi Alley: “We who live on the earth / are but travelers; / the dead like those / who have returned home; / all people are as if / living in some inn, / in the end each and every on / going to the same place.” Sherman:

I knew these landscapes from classical Chinese books; I had fallen in love late but hard with the poets of China’s Tang dynasty (A.D. 618-907), especially Wang Wei, Du Fu and Li Bo. Li Bo is one of China’s most beloved poets, even though he may not even have been Han Chinese, as the scholar Paula Varsano noted in her 2003 history “Tracking the Banished Immortal: The Poetry of Li Bo and Its Critical Reception”: Some theories suggest he was born of mixed ethnicity on the borderlands or in the nomadic regions beyond them. China’s northern and northwestern frontiers have a unique place in its classical literature, the scholar Stephen Owen explained in his 1996 book “An Anthology of Chinese Literature”: “There was the awareness of a clear division between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ Frontier poetry often speaks of the crossings and incursions such divisions create.”

Stunning photographs accompany Sherman's rich, descriptive prose. More here.