Su Shithe ArenaENTP

On the 28th day of the seventh month of 1079, an envoy from the capital walked into the prefect's hall at Huzhou with two soldiers. The prefect was Su Shi, 42, the most celebrated poet in China. He was too frightened to go out.

He knew why they had come. For years he had opposed the government's sweeping reforms, the New Policies, and he had done it the way Arenas often do, by making the objection funny. Friends copied his satirical verses out and kept them. That summer, censors combed years of his poems and accused him of mocking the emperor himself.

His deputy talked him into his official robe, and he stepped into the courtyard. By one account the envoy stood silent so long that onlookers imagined daggers under the soldiers' robes. Su Shi broke the silence. He expected death, he said, and asked only to say goodbye to his family.

At his door his wife and children were weeping, and he had nothing to say. Then he thought of an old story.

Long before, a hermit named Yang Pu, summoned before an emperor, was asked whether anyone had written him a poem for the road. Only my wife, he said. Her poem warned that this time they were hauling him off and it would cost him his old head. The emperor laughed and sent him home.

His wife laughed in spite of herself. Then he went out, and they tied him up and drove him off like livestock while the townspeople wept.

He believed he was going to his death, and the joke admitted it. It also carried the old story's ending, where the emperor laughs and the man comes home. It was the only gift he had left, and he gave it to the person who needed it most.

Friends who had kept his poems were stripped of rank or fined. His brother, Su Zhe, offered his own office to buy back Su Shi's life. Sure he would die in prison, Su Shi slipped a jailer two poems for his brother. In them he called his heart a startled deer, and asked to be brothers again in every life to come.

He was spared after about four months and sent under watch to Huangzhou. There he farmed a slope east of the town and took his name from it: Dongpo, East Slope, which is why many know him as Su Dongpo. The joke at his own fall became a new life.

He wrote his rhapsodies on the Red Cliff there. In 1084 he called on Wang Anshi, the retired architect of the reforms he had mocked, and the two old opponents found they could talk.

The exiles kept coming: Huizhou at 57, Danzhou on Hainan island at 60. In 1101, the year he died at 64, he wrote a few lines beside a portrait of himself. Asking himself what he had achieved in life, he named three places: Huangzhou, Huizhou, Danzhou.

Every one was a place he had been sent to be forgotten. He called them his life's work. It was a joke, and it was true.