Chapter 16 196 Su Dongpo Tours Red Cliff

After Sima Guang came to power, many ministers who had been demoted by Song Shenzong were recalled to the court, and two of them were famous writers in the Song Dynasty—Su Shi (sound shi) and Su Zhe (sound zhe). The Su Shi brothers are from Meishan, Meizhou (now Meishan, Sichuan).When Su Shi was just in his early twenties, his father Su Xun took him and Su Zhe to the capital to take the Jinshi examination.The chief examiner, Ouyang Xiu, is paying attention to finding talented people from among the candidates.After the first exam, when he was grading papers, he saw an article and applauded with joy.

Exam papers are sealed without the candidate's name on it.Ouyang Xiu thought to himself that he must be an expert in the literary world to be able to write such brilliant articles.Ouyang Xiu knew a little about the well-known literati in the capital. Who actually wrote this article? He guessed for a while, and felt that judging from the style of the article, it was probably his protégé Zeng Gong.He originally wanted to rate this article as the first, but Zeng Gong was his student, so he rated it higher. He was afraid that people would say that he was partial, so he rated it as the second.

It wasn't until the day when the rankings were released that Ouyang Xiu knew that the one who wrote the brilliant article was not Zeng Gong, but Su Shi, a young examinee who had just arrived in the capital. After Su Shi passed the exam, he would meet Ouyang Xiu, the examiner, as usual.Ouyang Xiu talked with him for a while, and felt that he was generous and talented, and he liked him from the bottom of his heart.After Su Shi left, Ouyang Xiu said to his old colleague Mei Yaochen: "Such an outstanding talent is indeed rare, and I should really make him stand out!" (This is how the idiom "get ahead".) As soon as the word spread, some scholars were not convinced.With so many talents in the capital, could it be that they can't compare to a fledgling young man?Later, everyone had to admit defeat after reading Su Shi's brilliant poems and articles.

Su Shi became famous, and his younger brother Su Zhe, who was 19 years old, was also admitted as a Jinshi in the same year. Needless to say, their father Su Xun was very happy.But Su Xun had another feeling.It turned out that Su Xun was also good at prose.When he was a teenager, he didn't study hard. When he was 27 years old, he saw that everyone else was making progress, so he started studying hard.A year later, he failed the Jinshi examination. When he returned home, he burned the articles he had written in the past in a fit of anger. He started from the beginning and made great progress.

This time, he took his son to the capital, seeing that his son passed the exam at a young age, why didn't he feel emotional.He heard that Ouyang Xiu paid the most attention to literary talents, so he entrusted more than 20 articles he wrote over the past few years to Ouyang Xiu, asking Ouyang Xiu for advice.Ouyang Xiu saw that Su Xun's article was sophisticated and unique, so he recommended it to Prime Minister Han Qi, who also appreciated it.Later, without passing the exam, Su Xun was exceptionally appointed as the secretary of the provincial school. In this way, the father and son of the Su family were well-known in the capital at that time.Later, people called their father and son together "Sansu".

When Wang Anshi implemented the new law, Su Xun was already dead.Su Zhe worked under Wang Anshi, but later, because he couldn't get along with Wang Anshi, he was demoted to another place.Su Shi took the initiative to ask for an external transfer, and successively served as the governor of Hangzhou, Huzhou (now Wuxing, Zhejiang) and other places.Everywhere he went, he built water conservancy, reduced taxes, promoted production, and did something beneficial to people's lives. Later, Su Shi was very dissatisfied when he saw the rampant behavior of local powerful officials in Huzhou, and wrote some poems to satirize these things.Unexpectedly, these poems spread to the capital, and several bureaucrats who opposed Su Shi extracted a few words from Su Shi's poems and prose, and framed Su Shi for slandering the imperial court, which was a big treason.They removed Su Shi from his post, escorted him to Tokyo, locked him in a big prison, and tried to execute him.

Su Shi was locked up in prison for a full hundred days and was tortured.Later, because it was really not a serious crime, Song Shenzong ordered him to be released and relegated to Huangzhou (now Huanggang, Hubei). When Su Shi arrived in Huangzhou, he assumed a small empty title and actually lived a life of exile.He was so poor that he couldn't live a life. Later, with the help of his friends, he got a piece of land and cultivated it by himself.He also tidied up the site himself and built a house on the eastern hillside.He gave himself a nickname, Layman Dongpo.Later, people often referred to Su Shi as Su Dongpo.

In the days when Su Shi was frustrated in politics, he often visited mountains and rivers and wrote poems to express his feelings.Once, he found out that there was a famous scenic spot called Chibi by the Yangtze River. On a moonlit night, he invited some friends and took a boat to visit Chibi.There, he thought of the scene of the battle between Cao Cao and Zhou Yu during the Three Kingdoms period, and he was very moved by the scene.After returning, I wrote an article called "Red Cliff Fu". Su Shi is not only an expert in writing prose and poetry, but also has a high achievement in writing words.The words he wrote have a distinctive and unrestrained style.After visiting Chibi, he wrote another poem (the name of the poem), the first half of which is:

The great river goes east, and the waves scour all the romantic figures through the ages. To the west of the old fortress, the human way is Zhou Lang Chibi of the Three Kingdoms. The rocks and clouds collapsed, the waves smashed against the shore, and thousands of piles of snow were rolled up. Picturesque, a moment how many hero. Su Shi is a man of knowledge and talents, but he made a big mistake in geography.It turns out that Chibi in Huangzhou was not the place where Zhou Yu burned Cao Jun.Chibi of the Three Kingdoms is in the upper reaches of Wuhan, while Huangzhou is in the lower reaches of Wuhan.However, Chibi in Huangzhou became famous because of Su Shi's mistake.Later, in memory of this great writer, people called it "Dongpo Chibi".