Chang'an Poems: Li Mo's Record of Hits and Attacks

On Zhuque Street in Chang'an during the prosperous Tang Dynasty, Li Mo, the 30-year-old editor of the Tang Dynasty Bookstore, was carrying out a life-and-death KPI: the "Selected Poems of the Tang Dynasty, the most popular poems in the Tang Dynasty" approved by the boss, needed to be finalized in March, reviewed by the Imperial College, and its sales volume exceeded that of the Chongwen Bookstore. This isn't compiling a book, it's about surviving within the rules. The boss wants traffic, denounces Du Fu's poems as "too sad and destroys the signboard", and urges more erotic and novel works; Master Zhang of the Imperial Academy abides by etiquette, underlines Li Bai's famous lines, criticizes frontier fortress poems, and rejects the hymns if they are not enough; competing products rush to publish "Li Bai's Unpublished Pornographic Poems Collection" and spread rumors. The author is even more difficult to serve: Li Bai refused to recognize the manuscript when he woke up after drinking, and had to feed it with wine and meat; Wang Wei wanted the exclusive authorization of ten taels of silver ingots, but refused to give up a penny; Meng Haoran felt that the selected poems were few and threatened to switch to competing products. Li Mo was caught between traffic, etiquette, and people's hearts, running around Chang'an wine shops, bookstores, and Imperial College. He acted as Li Bai's "drinking buddy's secretary", writing letters of love to the auditors, secretly fighting with competing products, and dealing with typos, budgets, and rumors. The thought of revising poems was like a knife, and negotiating manuscript fees was like walking on thin ice. I came across Zhang Ji's "Night Mooring at Maple Bridge" and regained my original intention of "selecting poems to pass on good poems". There are no flashes of blood in this book, only grassroots daily life wrapped up in KPIs; there is no soul-stirring content, only the anxiety and perseverance of the people who write it. In the final selection of poems, Chang'an is expensive, Li Mo got promoted and received a salary increase, but he secretly hid his own "Chang'an Editor's Sigh" at the end - it is about the laborer's love and stubbornness that has not been smoothed away.