Li Shangyin

Life

In 829, Li paid his respects to Linghu Chu in Luoyang, followed him to Yunzhou, and became a circuit staff officer under the Tianping military command. In the sixth and eighth years of the Dahe era, he successively served on Linghu Chu’s Taiyuan staff and in the Yanhai administration of Cui Rong.

His appointments also included 押左右萬騎, a command secretaryship, and a circuit-observation assistantship.

He passed the jinshi examination in 837. In the spring of 838 he failed the erudite-and-broad-learning examination, entered the Jingyuan staff of Wang Maoyuan, and married Wang’s daughter.

As factional conflict intensified, one account aligned Linghu Chu with the Niu faction and Wang Maoyuan with the Li faction, so that Li’s marriage was treated as a betrayal and Linghu Tao later kept him under long-term pressure. Whether Li belonged to the Li faction, the Niu faction, moved between the two, or stood outside the factional struggle has remained disputed; another view holds that Wang Maoyuan was not a Li partisan.

Li Shangyin’s father was Li Si, his father-in-law was Wang Maoyuan, and his son was Li Tinggui.

In 839 he entered official service as a Secretariat Proofreader and was soon transferred to become magistrate of Hongnong. He nearly lost his post after offending the surveillance commissioner Sun Jian by trying to remit or reduce the punishments of wrongfully accused prisoners; when Yao He replaced Sun, he was restored to office.

In the winter of 840 he joined Wang Maoyuan’s Chenxu staff. In 842 he re-entered the Secretariat as a Corrector after passing the examination in written judgments, then observed mourning for his mother; he moved his household from the Guanzhong region to Yongle in 844, and after completing mourning returned to the capital in 845, again serving as a Secretariat Corrector.

In 847 he followed Zheng Ya, the observer of the Gui管 circuit, to Guilin as a staff assistant responsible for memorial writing. After Zheng was demoted to Xunzhou in 848, Li left the staff and returned north; later that year he reached Chang’an, became magistrate of Zhouzhi, and was retained by the Jingzhao prefect as a provisional assistant in military affairs, where he drafted official memorials.

In the tenth month of 849, Lu Hongzhi, military commissioner of Wuning, appointed him staff judge with the title of Investigating Censor, and he went to Xuzhou. In the summer of 850 he followed Lu to the Bianzhou staff and once undertook a mission through the passes; he left the staff and returned to the capital in the spring or summer of 851.

His wife, Wang, had already died when he returned to the capital, where he became a Erudite of the Imperial Academy. When Liu Zhongying took charge of East Sichuan, Li joined his staff as a military-secretariat secretary, later becoming staff judge at Zizhou; the associated title is given as Investigating Gentleman of the Ministry of Works, with another form reading Assistant Investigating Gentleman of the Ministry of Works.

Around the end of the seventh year of the Dazhong era he probably returned to the capital to see his children. In the spring of Dazhong 10 (856), he followed Liu Zhongying back to court and became a Salt and Iron Investigator; he may have travelled in Jiangdong during this period. In Dazhong 12, illness forced him to return to Zhengzhou, where he died soon afterward.

Literary work

Li Shangyin’s early prose was striking and archaic in manner, and he studied memorial composition under Linghu Chu. He excelled in parallel prose and regulated verse; his ornate prose won him fame alongside Wen Tingyun and Duan Chengshi as the “Thirty-Six Styles,” while his poetry was paired with Wen as “Wen and Li” and with Du Mu as the “Lesser Li and Du.”

One explanation for the name “Thirty-Six Styles” is that all three writers were ranked sixteenth in their families.

His poems often express concern for the fate of the state and satire of current affairs, as in “A Hundred Rhymes Written on the Journey through the Western Suburbs,” “Two Poems with the Feeling,” “Renewed Feelings,” and “曲江”; other poems voice personal aspirations and the pathos of his circumstances, including “On the Tower at Anding” and “Late Clearing.”

His historical poems, poems on objects, and untitled poems are especially accomplished, as are his regulated and quatrain verse in seven-character form. His poetry is marked by novel conception, rich imagination, exact parallelism, brilliant coloration, melodious tone, and mastery of allusion.

He frequently used symbolic suggestion and turned personal circumstances into reflective feeling, producing a melancholic tone and often hazy emotional landscapes. The melancholy of Song Yu, the gravitas of Du Fu, and the symbolism of Li He exerted particularly deep influence on him.

Later judgments often summarized his regulated verse as “deeply felt and lingering,” “learned and magnificently beautiful,” and “deep in implication and gentle in diction”; later poets also took it as a model.

Some accounts additionally grouped him with Li Bai and Li He as the “Three Lis.”

Works and reception

Three volumes of Yuxisheng shi circulated. Fannan jiaji and Yiji were each in twenty volumes, while Fu and Wen were each in one volume and were largely lost; later editors assembled a six-volume Li Yishan shiji, and the Fannan wenji and its supplement continued to circulate.

The Quan Tang shi preserves three volumes of his poetry, while the Quan Tang shi waibian and Quan Tang shi xushi add four poems and five fragments. Other titles listed among his authored works include 義山雜纂, 雜纂, 義山雜記一卷, 宜都內人, and 齊魯二生.

In his later years, bereavement and frustration in official life led him toward a firm commitment to Buddhism. Twenty-two of his poems are included in the Three Hundred Tang Poems, the fourth-highest number in that anthology.