Skip to main content
WalkingChina
en▾
🏛️ Cultural Pilgrim Odyssey
⬇️GPX Track

Li Bai (Li Po)李白

“From Sword-Bearing Youth to Celestial Exile: An Odyssey of Wine, Moonlight and Boundless Freedom”

Era & Span701 – 762 CE61 载行吟
Historic Stops11 StationsAcross 7 Provinces
Macro Distance4100 kmCivilizational Odyssey
Walking Pace2~3 hrs / stopMindful On-site
Bullet Train高铁全线直通Direct High-Speed
Poetic Monument1,400+ PoemsPoet-Sage Legacy
Civilizational Reality BreakdownHSR Transit + Mindful Station Walks
18% Sanctuaries36% Wildscapes46% Urban Overlays

万里山河图卷展开中...

🎙️ Story · Suyab00:00 / 00:15

“Li Bai's family had been banished to Suyab—one of the Tang's four Anxi garrison towns, today the Ak-Beshim site near Tokmok in Kyrgyzstan—after a crime at the end of the Sui. He was born there in 701 CE. In 705 his father brought the family east across thousands of miles to settle at Qinglian in Sichuan. Li Bai rarely spoke of this western origin, but it explains the vastness in his verse, which belongs to no single place.”

Chronological Odyssey Scrubber· Spatial & Historical Milestones
Progress: 0% · 701 CE
(Ak-Beshim), Kyrgyzstan701
Jiangyou, Sichuan705
(Jingzhou), Hubei725
Hubei727
the First Attempt730
Imperial Court, Shaanxi742
Henan744
Tianmu, Zhejiang746
Lu, Jiangxi756
Emperor City, Kuizhou759
Dangtu, Anhui762
Click any milestone on the timeline to teleport wanderer and sync audio narration.
📍 驻足解说 · 西域碎叶城00:00 / 00:15
Live Narration (English)

“Li Bai's family had been banished to Suyab—one of the Tang's four Anxi garrison towns, today the Ak-Beshim site near Tokmok in Kyrgyzstan—after a crime at the end of the Sui. He was born there in 701 CE. In 705 his father brought the family east across thousands of miles to settle at Qinglian in Sichuan. Li Bai rarely spoke of this western origin, but it explains the vastness in his verse, which belongs to no single place.”

Station 1 · Suyab (Ak-Beshim), Kyrgyzstan701 - 704 (Age 0)

Born at the Empire's Western Edge, on the Silk Road

“其先隋末以罪徙西域，神龙初遁还，客巴西。”

“His ancestors were banished west in the last years of the Sui; in the early Shenlong era they slipped back and settled in Ba west.”

— From the New Book of Tang's biography of Li Bai, on his family's exile.

Li Bai's family had been banished to Suyab—one of the Tang's four Anxi garrison towns, today the Ak-Beshim site near Tokmok in Kyrgyzstan—after a crime at the end of the Sui. He was born there in 701 CE. In 705 his father brought the family east across thousands of miles to settle at Qinglian in Sichuan. Li Bai rarely spoke of this western origin, but it explains the vastness in his verse, which belongs to no single place.

Station 1 of 11
Field Pilgrimage TrailOpen the trail page →
Mindful Trail · WGS-84 VerifiedDifficulty: easy

Caishiji Yangtze Moon-Reaching Walk

A 4.2 km cliff-edge loop from the park gate to Taibai Tower and out along the Yangtze ledge to Moon-Reaching Point.

Download Native GPXOpen trail page →
Zero Map Offset · Garmin / Apple Watch Ready
Distance4.2 km~ 2.6 miles
Elevation Gain+65 mGentle Embankment
Duration2 hrsMindful Slow Pace
SurfaceCliff-cut Stone Steps & River BoardwalksPedestrian Only
Crowd Avoidance: 16:30–18:00 late afternoon recommended. Sunset over the Yangtze cliff edge with thinning crowds.
16:30–18:00
Module 01·The Spirit & Mindset

“The great Peng flew, shaking the eight corners of the world; in mid-heaven its strength failed.”

「大鹏飞兮振八裔，中天摧兮力不济。」

Caishiji is a limestone headland standing directly over the Yangtze shipping channel, where the river bends and widens beyond reckoning. Li Bai came here broken, exiled and pardoned, and died in the county behind the cliff. Walk the ledge path at dusk: the water keeps moving at the same immense pace it did in 762, and the only thing that has stopped is the poet. The legend that he drowned here reaching for the moon is not really about death—it is about a refusal to stop wanting.

采石矶是一处石灰岩岬角，正对长江主航道，江水在此转折、开阔到难以估量。李白来到这里时已被流放又获赦，身心俱损，最终病逝于矶后的当涂县城。黄昏时走一走临江栈道：江水仍以公元762年那样的体量不停奔流，唯一停下的是诗人。至于他醉后跃江揽月的传说，说的其实不是死亡，而是不肯停止渴望。

Module 02 & 03·Micro-Route & Mindful Checkpoints
4 field checkpoints
01cultural

Caishiji West Gate采石矶景区西门

WGS-84: 31.6430°N, 118.4665°E

Entrance to the cliff park at Dangtu, the county where Li Bai lived out his last two years after the amnesty of 759.

Inscription: 牛渚西江夜，青天无片云。

💧 Water Supply🚻 Restroom🚍 30 minutes by taxi from Ma'anshan East Railway Station; the park opens at 08:00.
02cultural

Taibai Tower太白楼

WGS-84: 31.6480°N, 118.4712°E

A memorial tower and hall holding stele inscriptions of Li Bai's verse, built to honour the poet who has been worshipped here since the Tang.

Inscription: 大鹏飞兮振八裔，中天摧兮力不济。

💧 Water Supply🚻 Restroom🚍 The tower courtyard is the only place on the loop with shade at midday.
03hazard

Sanyuan Cave River Ledge Path三元洞沿江栈道

WGS-84: 31.6522°N, 118.4768°E

A narrow path cut into the cliff face above the main channel, with only a low rail between the walker and a very large river.

Inscription: 孤帆远影碧空尽，唯见长江天际流。

🚍 Hold the inner handrail in wet weather; freighter wash can raise spray over the ledge.
04viewpoint

Moon-Reaching Point揽月台绝壁

WGS-84: 31.6568°N, 118.4815°E

The outermost headland, where folklore sends the drunken poet off the cliff to embrace the moon's reflection. The truth is gentler and the view is enormous.

Inscription: 举杯邀明月，对影成三人。

🚍 Return the same way or follow the ridge path back to the park gate; sunset is the reason to be here.
Act II · Field Stops·Footsteps & Living Archaeological Sites

Li Bai (Li Po) · 11 Living Field Stops

History is not entombed in parchment. Every station anchors an authentic coordinate and living site today.

📍 11 Verified Field Stations
01 / 11⏳ 701 CE🏛️Physical Sanctuary

Suyab

Li Bai's family had been banished to Suyab—one of the Tang's four Anxi garrison towns, today the Ak-Beshim site near Tokmok in Kyrgyzstan—after a crime at the end of the Sui. He was born there in 701 CE. In 705 his father brought the family east across thousands of miles to settle at Qinglian in Sichuan. Li Bai rarely spoke of this western origin, but it explains the vastness in his verse, which belongs to no single place.

📜Classical Inscription & Verse

“His ancestors were banished west in the last years of the Sui; in the early Shenlong era they slipped back and settled in Ba west.”

🚄High-Speed Rail Guide
Physical relics preserved · Open for pilgrimage
02 / 11⏳ 705 CE🏔️Wild Mountain & Water

Qinglian, Jiangyou

In 705 the five-year-old Li Bai came east with his father and settled at Qinglian village in Sichuan. There he read the hundred schools, practised swordsmanship and studied Taoist arts through his teens. The wild mountains and knight-errant culture of Shu forged the untameable freedom that defined his whole life.

📜Classical Inscription & Verse

“At five I recited the Six Jia calendars; by ten I had surveyed the hundred schools of thought.”

🚄High-Speed Rail Guide
Timeless landscapes · Walk with nature
03 / 11蜀Sichuan⏳ 725 CE🏛️Physical Sanctuary

Jiangling

In 725, at twenty-four, Li Bai left Mount Emei, descended the Pingqiang river through Qingxi into the Yangtze, and came out of the gorges to the river port of Jiangling—by water, not by the northern Jianmen road. There he met Sima Chengzhen, a Taoist master revered by three successive emperors, who told him he had the bones of an immortal and could wander beyond the eight limits. Elated, Li Bai wrote of the Great Peng meeting the rare bird, and took the Peng as his emblem for life.

📜Classical Inscription & Verse

“Sailing far beyond the Jingmen gate, I have come to wander the land of Chu.”

🚄High-Speed Rail Guide
Physical relics preserved · Open for pilgrimage
04 / 11⏳ 727 CE🏛️Physical Sanctuary

Anlu

After leaving Shu, Li Bai wandered through the middle Yangtze, married into the Xu family at Anlu, and built a retreat on White Omen Mountain for ten years. He read, travelled and petitioned endlessly for a post that never came. The waiting years, far from breaking him, polished the untroubled ease that later made him legendary.

📜Classical Inscription & Verse

“You ask why I perch on the green mountain; I smile and do not answer—my heart is simply at ease.”

🚄High-Speed Rail Guide
Physical relics preserved · Open for pilgrimage
05 / 11秦Shaanxi⏳ 730 CE🏙️Living Urban Overlay

Chang'an

In 730, at thirty, Li Bai entered Chang'an for the first time, telling friends he was going west to see the customs of the realm. He presented himself to the great and was received by almost no one—the chancellor Zhang Yue and his son, and little more. Out of that year of frustration came 'The Hard Road to Shu', 'Hard Is the Road', and 'Everlasting Longing': 'the great road is wide as the blue sky, and I alone cannot get out.' Early the next spring he left, defeated.

📜Classical Inscription & Verse

“The road to Shu is harder than scaling the blue sky!”

🚄High-Speed Rail Guide
Overlaid with modern city · Mindful walk
06 / 11秦Shaanxi⏳ 742 CE🏛️Physical Sanctuary

Chang'an

Summoned to the capital in 742, Li Bai believed he would finally govern. Instead he was made an imperial academician—a decorative poet for palace banquets. He wrote the famous 'Qingping Melody' drunk, and once ordered the chief eunuch to pull off his boots. Two years later he was sent away with a gift of gold, leaving the city he had entered laughing.

📜Classical Inscription & Verse

“I laugh aloud, face to the sky, and stride out the gate; how could men like us be nobodies in the weeds?”

🚄High-Speed Rail Guide
Physical relics preserved · Open for pilgrimage
07 / 11豫Henan⏳ 744 CE🏙️Living Urban Overlay

Luoyang

In 744 Li Bai and Du Fu met at Luoyang. The two travelled together through the Liang-Song plains, visited the poet Gao Shi, climbed terraces, drank and argued about the world, forming the most celebrated friendship in Chinese literature. For the rest of his life Du Fu wrote poem after poem to Li Bai; Li Bai's replies were few, and each one kept like a treasure.

📜Classical Inscription & Verse

“We drift apart like tumbleweed; let us at least drain the cups in our hands.”

🚄High-Speed Rail Guide
Overlaid with modern city · Mindful walk
08 / 11⏳ 746 CE🏔️Wild Mountain & Water

Mount Tianmu

After leaving the court, Li Bai roamed the Wu-Yue region, adopting the ancient poet Xie Lingyun as his spiritual companion. Dreaming of Mount Tianmu, he woke and wrote 'Dreaming of Tianmu, a Farewell Song'—a phantasmagoric ascent that ends with the coldest, cleanest refusal of power in Chinese poetry. For ten years he walked the sacred peaks of the south-east.

📜Classical Inscription & Verse

“How could I bow and scrape to the powerful, and never let my face be glad?”

🚄High-Speed Rail Guide
Timeless landscapes · Walk with nature
09 / 11⏳ 756 CE🏔️Wild Mountain & Water

Mount Lu

During the An Lushan rebellion Li Bai retreated to Mount Lu. Prince Yong, tasked with pacifying the region, summoned him three times; burning with patriotic feeling, Li Bai joined his staff. When the prince was condemned as a rebel, Li Bai was imprisoned at Xunyang and sentenced to death, saved only by friends' appeals and commuted to exile at Yelang—the deepest fall of his life.

📜Classical Inscription & Verse

“The torrent plunges three thousand feet; I wonder if the Milky Way has fallen from the ninth heaven.”

🚄High-Speed Rail Guide
Timeless landscapes · Walk with nature
10 / 11渝Chongqing⏳ 759 CE🏛️Physical Sanctuary

White Emperor City

Condemned for joining the staff of the losing Prince Yong, Li Bai was exiled to Yelang in 758. Travelling upriver in 759, at White Emperor City he learned that an amnesty proclaimed during a drought in Guanzhong had lifted his sentence. He turned his boat around at once and wrote of leaving White Emperor among the dawn clouds, covering a thousand li to Jiangling in a single day, the gibbons still crying while his light boat had already passed ten thousand mountains.

📜Classical Inscription & Verse

“At dawn I left White Emperor among the coloured clouds; a thousand li to Jiangling, and back in a single day.”

🚄High-Speed Rail Guide
Physical relics preserved · Open for pilgrimage
11 / 11⏳ 762 CE🏔️Wild Mountain & Water

Dangtu (Caishiji)

Amnestied but broken by age and illness, Li Bai came in 761 to Dangtu, where his kinsman Li Yangbing was magistrate, and died the next year at sixty-two. His last poem likens himself to a great Peng bird whose wing broke in mid-heaven. Folklore insists he drowned drunk, reaching for the moon in the river—an ending better suited to him than the facts.

📜Classical Inscription & Verse

“The great Peng flew, shaking the eight corners of the world; in mid-heaven its strength failed.”

🚄High-Speed Rail Guide
Timeless landscapes · Walk with nature
Act III · Cultural Soul·Inner Crucible

The Inner Crucible & Moral Resilience

Understand the resilient spirit and universal compassion before setting foot upon the stone.

📜 Historic Context Verified
The Cultural Anchor

Li Bai: The Sword, the Wine and the Timeless Moon

Li Bai is what happens when a genius decides that no ladder is worth climbing. Where bureaucrats measured life in promotions, he measured it in rivers crossed, peaks climbed and cups drained. Walking his routes is not about achievement; it is about permission—permission to leave, to fail spectacularly, and to keep going anyway.

🎋Aesthetic Landscape: A vertical world of white waterfalls against black cliffs, wine cups catching moonlight, and reed boats sliding between cloud-wrapped peaks at dawn.
⚖️Western Parallel & Comparative Insight

Lord Byron & Walt Whitman (Romantic Wanderers)

Where Byron scandalised an empire and Whitman celebrated himself, Li Bai simply walked away from power and made wanderlust into the highest possible art.

🌿The Somatic Walking Experience · Five Senses on the Trail

“Stand at Caishiji before first light and watch the Yangtze run gold under a low moon. The cliff is quiet, the water enormous, and the sensation is of scale that shrinks every ambition you carried in. Then walk the riverside path north, and let the sound of moving water replace every notification on your phone.”

Act IV · Constellation·Contemporary Companions

The Literary Constellation: Contemporary Bonds

Great minds never wander entirely alone. Companionships forged on open roads assembled the golden constellation of classical poetry.

✨ 1 Historic Voices Anchored

Du Fu (The Poet-Sage)

Tang Dynasty (712–770)

The Poet-Sage and Li Bai's Lifelong Friend

Met Li Bai at Luoyang in 744; their brief travels together became the most celebrated friendship in Chinese literature.

“Drunk, we slept under one quilt in autumn; hand in hand we walked out together by day.”

Act V · Wayfarer Toolkit·Field & Echo Toolkit
Click to open companion drawer
Featured Field Notes

Tools & Booking

Explore All Guides & Field Notes →
Cultural Deep Dive⏱️ 14 min read

In the Footsteps of Li Bai: The Complete Mindful Walking Guide to Caishiji Cliffs and the Banished Immortal's Final Shore

An exhaustive 5.2km literary walking guide to Caishiji on the Yangtze River: exploring Tang poet Li Bai's tragic exile, Arthur Waley and Burton Watson translations, the Moon Catching Terrace, Mount Qingshan tomb, and Nanjing HSR logistics.

Read Guide→
Continue Your Walk

Related Cultural Journeys

Du Fu (Tu Fu)

The Poet-Sage: An Epic Pilgrimage Across War, Wilderness, and Universal Compassion

4 Shared historic stops→

Wang Wei (Poet-Buddha)

From Imperial Court Prodigy to Mountain Hermit: A Zen Pilgrimage of Solitude and Clarity

2 Shared historic stops→

Su Shi (Su Dongpo)

From Mountaineer's Son to Exile Poet: An Odyssey of Resilience Across China

Same civilizational archetype→
FIELD VERIFIED|WalkingChina Editorial Desk · WGS-84 Trace (2026-09-12)
Who maps these routes? → Read the Manifesto