Li Bai (also Li Bo or Li Po, Chinese: 李白; pinyin: Lǐ Bái / Lǐ Bó; 701–762) was a Chinese poet. His fellow poet Du Fu counted him to the group of Chinese scholars that he called the "Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup" in a poem. Li Bai is often regarded, along with Du Fu, as one of the two greatest poets in China's literary history. Today we know about 1,100 of his poems.
The first translations in a Western language were published in 1862 by Marquis d'Hervey de Saint-Denys in his Poésies de l'Époque des Thang. The English-speaking world was introduced to Li Bai's works by a Herbert Allen Giles publication History of Chinese Literature (1901) and through the liberal, but poetically influential, translations of Japanese versions of his poems made by Ezra Pound.
Li Bai is best known for the imagination and Taoist imagery in his poetry. He spent much of his life travelling. People tell the story that he fell from his boat when he tried to embrace the reflection of the moon, and therefore drowned in the Yangtze River.