Li Shilang of Longxi

Everyone knows Li Yi from The Tale of Huo Xiaoyu and curses him as a faithless lover, yet no one knows the life this frontier poet led beyond the pages of history. In the final years of the Tianbao era, the Silk Road city of Liangzhou flourished. Li Yi, the tenth son of the Longxi Li clan, was born in Guzang, where he and a Hu girl named A Li pledged themselves to each other. Then the An Lushan Rebellion erupted. The elite troops of Hexi were sent east, Tibetan cavalry stormed Liangzhou, his homeland went up in flames, and his beloved fled west into the Western Regions. At fourteen, the boy embarked on an endless journey into exile. After drifting to Chang'an, his family fell into decline. He repeatedly failed the imperial examinations and took a lowly post as a county commandant. Then, at his family's behest, he married a woman of the Lu clan from Fanyang. For half his life, he and his wife were rarely together. On one side was his first love in Liangzhou, a place he could never return to; on the other, the wife who shared his life and cared for their household. As he watched the Tang empire fracture and his career stall, he put down his writing brush and took up arms, moving between the frontier headquarters of Lingzhou, Jingzhou, and Youzhou to defend the border against the Tibetans. Beneath the frosty moon at Huilai Peak, the reed pipes sounded out. One line, "All the soldiers gaze toward home through the night," captured a lifetime of wandering. Old friends fell in battle or were scattered, his homeland was lost forever, and his hopes of fame went unfulfilled. There is no golden finger, no miraculous reversal, only a man of letters in a troubled age bearing the anguish of a shattered homeland and a family torn apart. With a lifetime of wind and frost on the frontier, he wrote an epic filled with longing for home. The major events in this book are true, while minor details are treated flexibly. It clears away a thousand years of bias from plays and legends to restore the real, deeply devoted Li Shilang of Longxi, a man who spent his whole life longing to return, but never could.