Writing Songshan: Li Bai and the Making of Religious Landscape

This paper reads Li Bai’s poems on Mount Song as a small corpus linking poetic form to the social and institutional life of a sacred mountain. Rather than treating his “Daoism” as personal temperament projected onto scenery, I show how the poems presuppose Songshan as a worked religious terrain: a Central Marchmount shaped by past legends of transcendents, sites of retreat and rare herbs, imperial sacrifice, and abbeys. Four clusters anchor the analysis: poems on Yuan Danqiu that make friendship and visiting a way of locating aspiration; the sweet flag gatherer poem that condenses the Han Wudi legend into a fleeting encounter with a transcendent; a farewell poem that ties imagined residence to herb gathering; and an address to a female Daoist master that builds presence through absence. Together, they show Songshan made visible through acts of visiting, seeking, and naming: where friendship, hagiographic memory, and institutions converge