食荔枝 Feasting on Lychee at Huizhou

食荔枝

原作: 苏轼（字子瞻, 号东坡居士; 11世纪北宋）

罗浮山下四时春，卢橘杨梅次第新。

日啖荔枝三百颗，不辞长作岭南人。

Feasting on Lychee at Huizhou

Chinese original: Su Shi

English version: Julia Min(Jan. 2025)

The year sits in spring at the foot of Luofu.

Endless loquats and bayberries swell anew.

Three hundred lychees as my daily fruit—

May I live in the wilder south for good?

Appreciation: 

Nothing in life could torture Su Shi for long before he found something delicious to cheer him up. Fresh out of prison and banished to Huangzhou during the Chinese New Year of 1080, he shrugged and wrote:

“Oh well, the Yangtse embraces the town in a loop,

Where the river fish should taste just as good.

There are also bamboo groves over the hills,

Where I should find many sweet and earthy shoots.”

Classic Dongpo: exile as a culinary scouting mission.

In 1094, they tried harder. He was banished even further south to Huizhou, near the border of modern Guangdong — a punishment generally understood as a slow death sentence. But the 57-year-old poet took one bite of a local lychee and perked right up. Who needs the capital when you have fruit that would make Empress Yang Yuhuan (she of the famous horse-delivered lychees) weep with envy?

You have to almost admire his political enemies. They threw everything at him — prison, poverty, poisonous swamps, the literal edge of the empire — and what did they get back? Poems. Popular poems. Poems that went viral (well, as viral as hand-copied scrolls could get in the 11th century). The more they punished him, the more the gentry adored him. The more they adored him, the more jealous his rivals became.

So they did what any rational, level-headed political faction would do: they sent him to Hainan Island — the "End of the World" — hoping that tropical heat, hunger, lack of medicine, and utter isolation would finally shut him up.

It didn't.

On the surface, this little lychee poem is a cheerful note from a man who has discovered perpetual spring and bottomless fruit. Many readers see it as a Daoist embrace of rustic simplicity, a nod to Tao Yuanming's peach-blossom paradise. And that's not wrong.

But read the last line again. "May I live in the wilder south for good?" It's a question, not a declaration. A wistful, almost teasing question. Asked of whom? Perhaps of the Emperor. Perhaps of his enemies. Perhaps of himself.

You wanted me gone. Here I am. And guess what — the lychees are fantastic.

That's the dark humour beneath the sweet flesh. Su Shi knew exactly what he was doing. And somewhere in Hainan, nibbling on a coconut, he was probably laughing.