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When a Poem Begins to Call Us to Travel | Taohuatan and a Thousand Years of Arrivals and Departures

Why Can a Poem Keep People Travelling for More Than a Thousand Years?

Some journeys begin with arrival. Others begin with a poem. The people are long gone, and so is the boat that once carried them. Yet the words remain, waiting for another traveller.

Recently, my friend An Qinglong has been travelling through China. This time, he arrived at Taohuatan in Jing County, Xuancheng, Anhui, and sent me a series of photographs together with one of Li Bai’s best-known poems, To Wang Lun:

Li Bai is about to depart by boat,
when suddenly he hears singing and footsteps from the shore.
The waters of Taohuatan may be a thousand feet deep,
yet they cannot match the depth of Wang Lun’s affection.

Almost everyone who grew up reading Chinese poetry knows these lines. The name Taohuatan — the Peach Blossom Pool — is equally familiar. Yet as I looked at the photographs arriving directly from the place itself, I found myself asking a different question: why do people still travel there today?

Li Bai’s journey ended more than a thousand years ago. That particular farewell has long since passed. But after he left, a poem remained. And somehow, that poem began to make other people travel.

The Story Begins as Li Bai Is About to Leave

Some poems are born from distant landscapes. Others emerge at the very moment of departure.

During the Tianbao era of the Tang dynasty, Li Bai travelled to Jing County. Taohuatan was only one stop in a much longer life of wandering. He stayed there for a time and became acquainted with Wang Lun. What might otherwise have been an ordinary journey gradually became a story because two people happened to meet.

Wang Lun received Li Bai warmly, but eventually the visit had to end. Li Bai prepared to board a boat and continue his travels. Curiously, the moment that entered the poem was not his arrival, but his departure.

“Li Bai is about to depart by boat.” The boat has not yet left the shore. Then, suddenly, singing can be heard from the bank. The word Li Bai uses is tage — literally “treading songs.” In the Tang dynasty, this was not a staged performance in the modern sense. People sang while moving and stamping their feet to create a rhythm. Voice, footsteps and bodily movement came together in the act of farewell.

Li Bai is on the water. Others are on the shore. The boat is about to increase the distance between them, yet the singing crosses the water and reaches the person who is leaving. Li Bai captures that moment with a single word: hu — “suddenly.” Something that would otherwise have disappeared as quickly as the sound itself is preserved.

Then his gaze turns toward the water. “The waters of Taohuatan are a thousand feet deep.” For a moment, the visible landscape becomes a measuring instrument. But in the next line, Li Bai turns that measure away from water and toward human feeling: “Yet they cannot match Wang Lun’s affection in seeing me off.”

Water has depth. Affection has no scale. Li Bai uses something visible — the depth of the pool before him — to measure something that cannot actually be measured. A thousand feet is already unimaginably deep, and still it is not enough.

An ordinary meeting and farewell found a way to remain because of a poem.

Li Bai eventually left. Wang Lun remained at Taohuatan, and the farewell itself became part of the past. What did not leave were a few remarkably simple images: a boat, a shore, and the sound of people singing as they walked.

When Lines of Poetry Begin to Grow into a Place

A poem preserves more than a story. It can rename the land and gradually allow memory to grow into a space through which people can walk.

After Li Bai left, Taohuatan was still Taohuatan. The mountains did not change because of a poem, and the old crossing continued to connect the two sides. What changed was the way later generations understood the place.

The poem offered a small set of coordinates: Taohuatan, a boat, a shore and tage. Originally, they belonged to one farewell. But as the poem continued to be read, ordinary spaces and actions gradually acquired a shared cultural meaning.

One of the clearest examples can be found on the eastern bank of Taohuatan. The old Dongyuan ferry crossing later came to be known as Tage Gu’an — the Ancient Shore of Treading Songs. According to local cultural and tourism records, a pavilion was built by the shore during the Ming dynasty and was later restored during the Qing dynasty, the Republican period and modern times. Across generations, rebuilding and preservation gave architectural form to the sound remembered in the poem.

Tage was originally an action. The singing sounded, the feet moved, and then the moment disappeared. But once tage became attached to the name of a place and was inscribed on a building, an ephemeral sound acquired a location that people could point to.

The words did not remain on the page. A single line — “suddenly I hear singing and footsteps from the shore” — eventually became a pavilion through which people can physically walk.

That is what makes the pavilion particularly interesting. It is still a passage. Walk through it in one direction and it connects with the main street of the old settlement. Walk through it in the other and you emerge toward the ferry crossing and Taohuatan. Visitors today therefore do not merely stand beside a monument and look at it. Their bodies actually pass through the structure, moving from the old town toward the historic crossing. A poem once written on paper has become a walking route.

In An Qinglong’s photographs, there are also narrow old lanes, stone paving stretching ahead between walls that bear their present-day names. They do not necessarily date from Li Bai’s lifetime, but they form part of the physical route through which people now enter and experience Taohuatan.

That distinction matters. Not everything visible today should be described as a surviving Tang-dynasty site. The cultural landscape of Taohuatan was formed in layers over many centuries, and the poem is simply one of its most persistent threads.

Wenchang Pavilion, for example, dates according to official local records to the Qianlong period of the Qing dynasty. It later became part of the literary and cultural landscape of Taohuatan, serving as a place for gatherings and views. A Tang poem, a Ming pavilion and a Qing literary building now occupy the same cultural landscape.

Cultural space is never completed all at once. Generation after generation adds meaning: someone leaves a poem, someone builds a pavilion, and those who come later continue walking along the names they inherited.

A poem, then, leaves behind far more than four lines. It gives names to places. It gives later travellers directions for what to seek. People follow the poem to the place, and the place, through its physical spaces, tells the poem once again.

Why Do We Travel to a Place We Already Know?

Some places are reached first through words. Only many years later does the body finally arrive.

For many people, the first encounter with Taohuatan takes place long before any actual journey there. Perhaps it happens in a primary-school classroom, or while memorising Tang poetry for the first time. “The waters of Taohuatan are a thousand feet deep.” Before we have ever visited, the place has already entered memory.

At that age, we may not know where Jing County is. We certainly have not stood beside Taohuatan. Yet the water, the boat and the singing on the shore have already entered our imagination through four lines of poetry. Before we are even capable of travelling there ourselves, the words have travelled there for us.

This is different from the way we often imagine travel. When we encounter an unfamiliar city or landscape, travel begins with not knowing. We go because we have never seen it before. We use our bodies to discover the world piece by piece. The unfamiliar itself becomes a reason to leave home.

Taohuatan works in almost the opposite direction. We may want to go precisely because we already “know” it. We have heard the name for years. We may be able to recite the poem without thinking. What we have never experienced is the real physical space behind those familiar words.

And so, when a traveller finally arrives, two versions of the same place begin to overlap. The Taohuatan of the schoolbook encounters the Taohuatan of reality. A place that once existed only in imagination suddenly acquires the distance of mountains, the scale of a village, the width of lanes and the texture of actual buildings.

This is also why photographs matter. My friend walked into Taohuatan and photographed its lanes, architecture and distant mountains. Many of these things do not appear in Li Bai’s poem at all. Yet precisely because of that, the photographs transform a familiar literary name back into a complex, physical place.

Travel is therefore not merely a way of confirming that “the place in the poem really exists.” Once the body arrives, it begins to discover everything the text did not record.

At that point, the meaning of the journey changes. We are no longer simply searching for Li Bai or Wang Lun. We begin with familiar words, but once we enter the actual place, we discover a world beyond them.

More than a thousand years ago, Li Bai travelled to Taohuatan, and a journey produced a poem. The poem then left the historical Taohuatan and entered the memories of countless later readers. Across different generations, those memories began sending new travellers back to the place.

A very long route was formed. Li Bai’s journey produced a poem. The poem, in turn, called generation after generation to set out again. People followed words in search of a place, then carried away new ways of seeing and remembering it. Travel, in this sense, continues to travel.

Perhaps what we seek is never merely a destination. Some places are worth reaching precisely because they have already lived within our memory for years. After travelling a thousand miles, the body finally catches up with words we first encountered long ago.

Epilogue | A Journey Never Belongs Only to the Person Who Arrives

Someone reaches a place. Someone else, through that person’s way of seeing, begins another journey from far away.

An Qinglong arrived at Taohuatan while I remained in Germany. He walked through its old lanes, saw its villages and stood in places whose names had been shaped by poetry. Then he sent the photographs to me.

Something curious happened. I had never walked into Taohuatan myself. Yet through another person’s journey, I found myself returning to the Li Bai I had first encountered as a child. Photographs taken today carried me back to a farewell more than a thousand years ago.

Travel, I realised, can move in this way too. One person physically arrives. Another observes and thinks from afar. Photographs cross geographical distance; words receive those images and carry them somewhere else.

It changed the way I think about recording a journey. Travel does not necessarily end when the traveller returns home, and photographs are more than evidence that someone once stood in a particular place. Once an act of seeing is shared, it can enter another person’s experience and grow into something its original observer never anticipated.

Sometimes a true arrival requires two people: one who walks there, and one who looks back from afar.

This also reminded me of something I did many years ago. I once put a real person’s name directly into the lyrics of a song I had written. At the time, I was simply recording a moment. I never wondered where those words might travel later.

Once a name enters a work, however, it seems to acquire another kind of time. People continue moving forward. Relationships change and may even disappear. But a name that has been written down remains at the point in time when the work was created.

People move on. A name remains in the moment in which it was written.

Li Bai left behind a poem. An Qinglong brought back photographs. They belong, of course, to completely different times and completely different kinds of journeys. Yet whenever people arrive somewhere, they take something away and leave something behind.

People leave; photographs remain. Voices fade; words remain. And one day, what has been preserved may cause someone else to set out.

Across Civilizations

Words Travel Farther Than People

King Kaolie looked through the photographs of Taohuatan and then read To Wang Lun once more. His eyes stopped at the phrase “more than a thousand years.” He seemed slightly offended. “Four lines of poetry,” he said, “and they can make people travel this far?”

I nodded. “And they are still travelling.”

The king frowned. “Li Bai is long gone. Wang Lun is gone. That boat certainly cannot still be there. So what exactly are these people going to see?”

Lord Chunshen Huang Xie answered from beside him. “They go to see what remained.”

The king turned toward him. “If the people are gone, what can possibly remain?”

Huang Xie did not answer immediately. Instead, he looked at me. “Hasn’t my lady spent the past several years looking for Chu?”

The king paused. “Chu?”

I laughed. “Exactly. Your Majesty is gone. Lord Chunshen is gone. Ying is no longer the capital you knew. And yet I keep looking for all of you.”

The king had clearly not expected a discussion about Taohuatan to circle back to himself. After a moment, he asked suspiciously, “And where exactly have you been looking?”

I began counting. “In museums. At archaeological sites. On objects. In texts.”

Huang Xie added quietly, “She writes about us too.”

The king looked at me. “Writes what?”

“How the people of Chu imagined the sky. How they understood spirits and distant worlds. How they gave form, through texts and objects, to things that could not be seen.”

The king considered this. “So you have never seen Chu, yet you think you know it?”

That stopped me for a moment. “I would not say that I truly know it. But there are places I knew through words before I ever physically reached them.”

Huang Xie nodded. “Just like Taohuatan.”

At last, the king fell silent. The Chu state of more than two thousand years ago no longer exists on any modern map. Yet the Songs of Chu remain. Objects made by the people of Chu remain. A vanished world still leaves entrances through which later generations can return.

The king continued. “And Qu Yuan?”

I looked at him. “Even worse.”

“How is that worse?”

“More than two thousand years later, people still read his writing. They study the Songs of Chu. Some even follow those texts in an attempt to find your world again.”

The king was silent for a moment. “Longer than Li Bai?”

Huang Xie nodded. “Nearly a thousand years earlier.”

The king looked noticeably more satisfied. “That is acceptable.”

I stared at him. “Your Majesty, the point is not that Chu won.”

“What else could the point possibly be?”

Huang Xie laughed. “The point is that people disappear. States disappear. Roads change. But words can continue showing the way.”

The king said nothing. He looked again at the photographs. The stone bearing the name Taohuatan was still there. Li Bai and Wang Lun had become sculpted figures. Travellers of the present walked past them and continued through the old lanes.

After a long while, the king spoke again. “So after Li Bai left, his poem stayed there in his place?”

I shook my head. “Not only there. It entered other people’s memories. It travelled away with those who read it. And many, many years later, it brought other people back.”

Huang Xie said quietly, “Perhaps the thing that travelled farthest was never the boat.”

The wind moved across Taohuatan. The boat is no longer the boat of Li Bai’s time. The shore has changed through countless generations. Yet those four simple lines still move back and forth between people and place.

People leave. Cities change. An age eventually comes to an end. But once words begin to travel, those who come later may still follow them back.

More than two thousand years ago, the people of Chu also wrote the worlds they saw into lines of text. They could hardly have known how far those words would travel.

And they certainly could not have known that one day, a Taiwanese woman living in Germany would still follow the words they left behind, returning again and again to the civilization of Chu.