The Man Who Slept Well in Exile — Su Shi, Adversity, and the Art of Resting Anyway

He had been stripped of his titles, exiled to the edge of the known world, and left with almost nothing. So he planted a vegetable garden, invented a new way of cooking pork, wrote some of the greatest poetry in Chinese history, and apparently slept very well.

Su Shi — known to posterity as Su Dongpo, the Eastern Slope, after the patch of land he farmed in his first exile — was the most complete literary genius of the Song dynasty: poet, essayist, calligrapher, painter, gastronome, engineer, and Buddhist-Taoist philosopher. He was also one of the most politically unfortunate men of his era, exiled three times to increasingly remote locations by opponents who found his brilliance inconvenient.

The last exile sent him to Hainan Island — then considered so far beyond civilization that officials sent there were not expected to return. Su Shi was in his sixties. He had lost his positions, his property, and most of his friends. He wrote, from Hainan, some of his most luminous work.

The Rooftop in the Rain

One of Su Shi's most beloved prose poems describes a night of insomnia in Huangzhou — his first place of exile. Unable to sleep, he rose, dressed, and walked to a nearby temple, where he found a monk also awake. They sat together in companionable silence. On the way home, he noticed the moonlight on the courtyard, the bamboo shadows on the ground, and wrote: "What night is without moonlight? What place is without bamboo and pine? But there are few people as idle as we two."

This is not the writing of a man defeated by his circumstances. It is the writing of a man who has found, within circumstances he did not choose, something genuinely worth attending to. The moonlight was there whether he was exiled or celebrated. The bamboo shadows fell the same way. What changed was his availability to notice them.

Adversity, for those who know how to receive it, is sometimes the condition that makes presence possible.

Su Shi's insomnia that night became one of the most celebrated pieces of Chinese prose. The sleeplessness was real. The suffering was real. And within it, something else was also real — the moonlight, the friendship, the particular quality of attention that comes when the usual distractions have been stripped away.

What Exile Teaches About Sleep

Su Shi was exiled because he was inconvenient — too honest, too independent, too unwilling to perform the political allegiances that survival at court required. Each exile stripped away another layer of the identity he had built: the official, the celebrity, the man of influence. What remained, each time, was something more essential.

Traditional Chinese medicine understands the relationship between identity and sleep in terms of the po — the corporeal soul, the aspect of the self that is most deeply rooted in the body, that governs the breath and the physical rhythms of rest and waking. When the po is strong, the body sleeps regardless of external circumstances. When it is weakened — by the chronic stress of maintaining a constructed identity, by the exhausting performance of being someone in particular — sleep becomes contingent on conditions that are never quite right.

Su Shi's exiles, paradoxically, may have strengthened his po. Stripped of the performance, he was returned to the body — to farming, to cooking, to walking in moonlight, to the simple physical pleasures that court life had obscured. And the body, given back to itself, knows how to rest.

The Pork Belly and the Philosophy

In Huangzhou, Su Shi discovered that pork belly — cheap and abundant, disdained by the wealthy — was extraordinary when cooked slowly over low heat with wine and soy. He wrote a poem about it. The dish is still called Dongpo Pork, and it is still made the same way.

This is not a trivial detail. The man who invented Dongpo Pork in exile was practicing something that Taoism has always understood: that the good life is not a function of circumstances but of attention. The pork belly was there for anyone. Su Shi was the one who noticed it, who had the patience to cook it slowly, who found in its transformation something worth celebrating.

The same attention that found beauty in cheap pork found beauty in moonlit courtyards, in the sound of rain on a bamboo roof, in the particular quality of light on the Yangtze at dawn. Su Shi was not optimistic in the sense of denying difficulty. He was present in the sense of refusing to let difficulty be the only thing he noticed.

The mind that can find something worth attending to in exile can find something worth resting in anywhere. The conditions for sleep are never perfect. The willingness to rest anyway is a practice.

The Modern Exile

Most of us are not exiled to Hainan. But many of us live in a kind of internal exile — the chronic sense that our real life is elsewhere, that the present circumstances are temporary and unsatisfactory, that rest and peace are available only once certain conditions have been met.

Once the project is finished. Once the relationship is resolved. Once the finances are stable. Once the children are older. Once the world is less uncertain.

Su Shi waited for none of these conditions. He planted his garden in Huangzhou. He cooked his pork in Huizhou. He wrote his poems in Hainan. He did not wait for circumstances to become acceptable before he allowed himself to be present in them.

In the age of algorithmic anxiety — where every platform is optimized to remind us of what we lack, what we should fear, what we are missing — Su Shi's practice is more radical than it sounds. To rest in the present circumstances, without waiting for them to improve, is to refuse the fundamental premise of the attention economy: that satisfaction is always one more scroll away.

The moonlight is already there. The bamboo shadows are already falling. The question is only whether we are available to notice them.

The Red Cliff at Midnight

Su Shi's two Red Cliff Rhapsodies — written during a midnight boat trip on the Yangtze near Huangzhou — are among the greatest prose poems in the Chinese language. In them, he meditates on impermanence, on the smallness of human life against the scale of rivers and mountains, and arrives, somehow, at something that feels like peace.

He writes of the river flowing endlessly, the moon rising and setting, the mountains unchanged since antiquity. Against this scale, his exile is nothing. His suffering is nothing. And yet — and this is the turn that makes the rhapsodies great — his presence in this moment, on this river, under this moon, is everything. The infinite and the particular are not opposites. They are the same thing, seen from different distances.

This is the perspective that makes sleep possible in difficult times. Not the denial of difficulty, but the expansion of context — the recognition that the present moment, however uncomfortable, is also the only moment in which the river flows, the moon rises, and the body, given permission, can rest.

Silk in Exile

Su Shi, in his exiles, was often cold, often poorly housed, often without the comforts that his former position had provided. He wrote about this without self-pity — noting the leaking roof, the inadequate bedding, the sounds of the night that kept him awake, and then finding, within these conditions, something to attend to.

We cannot always choose our circumstances. But we can choose, within them, the quality of the environment we create for rest. Mulberry silk is not a luxury in the sense of excess. It is a luxury in the original sense: something that makes life more fully livable, that reduces the friction between the body and its rest, that creates the conditions in which the body's own intelligence can do its work.

Su Shi would have understood this. He was not an ascetic. He loved good food, good wine, good company, and the particular pleasure of a body well-rested and ready for whatever the next day of exile might bring.

To sleep well in difficult circumstances is not escapism. It is the most practical form of resilience — the daily renewal that makes it possible to keep finding moonlight in the courtyard, beauty in the cheap cut of meat, poetry in the leaking roof.

What Night Is Without Moonlight

Su Shi's question — what night is without moonlight? — is not rhetorical. It is an invitation. The moonlight is always there. The bamboo shadows are always falling somewhere. The river is always flowing past some Red Cliff, carrying some small boat with some person in it who is, if they are paying attention, exactly where they need to be.

Tonight, when you lie down, the circumstances may not be what you would have chosen. The day may have been difficult. The future may be uncertain. The world may be, as it has always been, somewhat more complicated than you would prefer.

None of this changes the fact that the body is here, in this bed, in this moment, ready to rest if you will let it. The moonlight is already coming through the window. The bamboo — or whatever grows outside your particular window — is already casting its shadows.

What night is without moonlight? None of them. Not even this one.

Find Your Sacred Ground in Exile

Like Su Shi planting his garden on the Eastern Slope and finding it enough, our monthly journeys seek out the sacred in the ordinary landscape of ancient China. Every month, we travel to temples and Taoist sanctuaries across the country — lighting incense, offering prayers, and carrying the intentions of our members into sacred spaces. Those who walk with us for six months or more will receive, at year's end, a curated collection of sacred tokens gathered from the altars and shrines along our path — small objects that hold the memory of incense smoke, mountain silence, and whispered prayers. Each piece travels from a place of stillness to find its way to you.

Discover the Journey →🕯️🏮☯️

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