Li Bai Memorial Hall

The Li Bai Memorial Hall sits near the site traditionally identified as the poet's birthplace in the Jianmen road corridor. Li Bai (701–762 CE) was one of the two poets who defined the Tang Dynasty's golden age of verse — Du Fu was the other — and his association with this landscape, specifically the Shu Road and its terrifying passes, runs through a substantial part of his work. The memorial hall contains reproductions of manuscripts, biographical displays, and a garden designed around Tang-period aesthetics.

Whether the hall itself is worth extended time depends considerably on your interest in classical Chinese poetry and your tolerance for interpretive signage in Chinese only. What is undeniable is the location: standing at the edge of the gorge and reading, even in translation, Li Bai's description of the road — "You can touch the stars with your hand, yet your heart will sink and fail" — while looking at the terrain that produced the metaphor, is one of those literary travel experiences that work in a way that memorial museums in cities generally do not.

The memorial hall is a short bus or taxi ride from the main park entrance at Jiange.

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A story
Li Bai's poem "Shu Dao Nan" — "The Road to Shu is Hard" — contains the line "the road to Shu is harder than climbing to heaven," which became one of the most quoted phrases in Chinese literature. Li Bai wrote it about the road through Jianmen Pass, which he would have travelled as a young man leaving his home in Sichuan. The poem describes the landscape in terms of vertigo and supernatural difficulty, listing mountains that scrape the sky and gorges so deep they make birds dizzy. The landscape that inspired it still looks recognisably like the poem.