Poems of Mao

27. Ascending Lushan (July 1, 1959)

Ascending Lushan

[a shih in seven-word regular, Chi Lu]

[translated by Nancy Lin]

A single range

Soars up like a giant guard

By the Grand Yangtse.

Four hundred curves and turns

Spiral to a leap

On to its pinnacle of massive green.

Cool-eyed, I face the ocean

And survey the world below

As warm winds cleanse the river-borne skies

With laps of rain.

Clouds scudding across the Nine Streams

Set the Golden Crane afloat;

Torrents rush down the expanse of Triple Wu –

Bursts of foaming white!

Where, I wonder,

Might Magistrate Tao have gone?

Farming in the Retreat of Peach Blossoms –

Was that ever feasible?

Notes [by Nancy Lin]

Lushan, one of the best known scenic hills of China, has been a favorite resort for literati and statesmen and an object of poems and songs through the centuries. Situated 20 kilometres south of Kiukiang, Kiangsi, it towers over the Yangtse on the north and Lake Poyang on the south, its highest peak rising 1,543 meters above sea level. Kuling, the resort center, is now accessible by bus over a road of 35 kilometers with some 400 turns and bends.

From Lushan heights, the poet’s vision, ranging over the immense expanse of the Yangtse Valley, sees in the clouds and torrents veritable scenes of stirring socialist reconstruction. The concluding lines are meant presumably to refute utopian dreams that shun realities.

Nine Streams and the Golden Crane represent the mid-Yangtse provinces with the industrial Wuhan area as the center.

[from Notes of Poem 2:

Nine streams: the various tributaries of the Yangtse river in Hupei and Kiangsi Provinces.

Golden Crane Tower: Situated on the Golden Crane Cliff west of Wuchang, Hupei, the tower was first erected in the time of the Three Kingdoms (220-280 AD) in commemoration of a Taoist immortal who, as the legend has it, rode past the site on a golden crane’s back. It has since been a popular place of pilgrimage, made especially famous by Tang poets, among them Tsui Hao and Li Po.]

Triple Wu, historically comprising Soochow, Changchow, and Huchow, stands here for the rich regions of the Yangtse Delta.

Magistrate Tao: Tao Yuan-ming (356-427 A.D.), probably the most celebrated poet between the Han and the Tang dynasties, retired a hermit to the foot of Lushan after quitting his job as magistrate in Pengtse out of distaste for the need of ‘bowing to a higher official’. He wrote the famous utopian essay ‘Peach Blossom Brook’, where a fisherman discovered an unknown colony in a valley upstream enjoying an idyllic life of simplicity and freedom away from the social and political turmoils of the outside world.

In connection with the line ‘Cool-eyed, I … survey the world below’, it may be pertinent to note that a couple of weeks before the poem’s date, Soviet Russia had unilaterally cancelled the 1957 agreement of supplying China with atom bomb secrets, and that the Camp David meeting between Khrushchev and Eisenhower was to take place in September.

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