Qiupu Song: White Hair
秋浦歌十七首·其十五
Qiūpǔ gē shí qī shǒu · qí shí wǔ
A mirror turns sorrow into an impossible length of white hair. Read the Chinese, pinyin, word meanings, and original English translation.
Read the poem
Read the original and its translation together. Open a line’s word meanings for a closer look.
About the text and pronunciation
The simplified view changes character forms, not the edition. Notes and sources retain the cited text.
The Chinese source is shown in traditional characters by default, with a simplified view available. Pinyin is modern standard Mandarin, a reading aid, not Tang or Song pronunciation.
Word by word, in the order of the line. A gloss is a crib. It is not the translation.
Word meanings — Line 1
- 白髮 bái fà white hair
- 三千 sān qiān three thousand
- 丈 zhàng zhang (unit of length)
Word meanings — Line 2
- 離愁 lí chóu sorrow of separation
- 似 sì like
- 箇 gè this
- 長 cháng long
Word meanings — Line 3
- 不知 bù zhī do not know
- 明鏡 míng jìng bright mirror
- 裡 lǐ inside
Word meanings — Line 4
- 何處 hé chù where
- 惹 rě acquire
- 秋霜 qiū shuāng autumn frost
English translation by PoemWell.
Read the whole poem
Original
白髮三千丈，
離愁似箇長。
不知明鏡裡，
何處惹秋霜。
Translation
White hair, three thousand zhang long—
the sorrow of separation is just that long.
I cannot tell, within the bright mirror,
where I picked up all this autumn frost.
Try it from memory
After reading, recall the underlined word or phrase in each line. Say its meaning before opening the answer. These prompts use the text edition printed above.
-
Line 1 · What does the marked word mean?
白髮三千丈，
Pronunciation hint
bái fà
Reveal meaning and translation
白髮 — white hair
White hair, three thousand zhang long—
-
Line 3 · What does the marked word mean?
不知明鏡裡，
Pronunciation hint
bù zhī
Reveal meaning and translation
不知 — do not know
I cannot tell, within the bright mirror,
-
Line 4 · What does the marked word mean?
何處惹秋霜。
Pronunciation hint
hé chù
Reveal meaning and translation
何處 — where
where I picked up all this autumn frost.
One more question: what changes?
Compare the opening and closing lines. What changes in the scene, the speaker’s attention, or the feeling? Choose a Chinese word as evidence, then compare your reading with the notes. More than one answer may be reasonable.
Line-by-line notes →Self-check at your own pace. No score or progress is saved. Open only the answers you want included when printing.
Line-by-line notes
Lines 1–2 — Giving sorrow a length
三千丈 applies an impossible measurement to the speaker’s hair. The English retains zhang as the historical unit and lets the number work as exaggeration. 似箇長 says the sorrow is “as long as this,” using 箇 as a form of 個. This page follows 離愁, which directly names the sorrow of separation. The familiar variant 緣愁 instead makes sorrow the cause of the hair's length. In our reading the stated comparison lets hair provide a scale for the feeling.
Lines 3–4 — What the mirror cannot tell
The mirror is bright. What puzzles the speaker is where the white hair came from, rather than what the glass shows. 秋霜 names it through frost and 惹 treats that frost as something somehow picked up along the way. The opening seems able to measure everything. The last question cannot explain how that visible result was acquired.
Form and tone
This is a self-contained five-character quatrain within a seventeen-poem sequence. 長 and 霜 close the even lines. The first pair declares an extravagant length; the second exchanges that certainty for an unanswered question.
See the quatrain guide for the form. Pinyin gives modern Mandarin pronunciation; no unverified historical tone grid is supplied.
Historical context
The Qiupu poems range across travel, landscape, labor, and sorrow. This individual poem narrows the view to hair and a mirror. Keeping its sequence number avoids mistaking four lines for the whole collection.
Continue with Li Bai or the time and memory shelf.
Sources
Chinese text compared with 秋浦歌十七首·其十五, public transcription on Wikisource. This is the complete fifteenth poem of the sequence. We follow 離愁似箇長 in the cited transcription, rather than the familiar 緣愁似箇長. Punctuation is editorial; the English translation and reading notes are original to PoemWell.
English translation, gloss, and notes by PoemWell. The translation is original to this site.
The Chinese source is shown in traditional characters by default, with a simplified view available. Pinyin is modern standard Mandarin, a reading aid, not Tang or Song pronunciation.
Updated .
Cite this reading
Li Bai. “Qiupu Song: White Hair” (秋浦歌十七首·其十五). PoemWell. English translation by PoemWell. Updated .
https://poemwell.org/poems/qiupu-song-white-hair
Credit the poet for the Chinese original and PoemWell for this translation and commentary. Use the permanent page link above; source editions are listed separately.