Chinese poets were always drinking wine and then writing about it.

From The Right Attitude to Rain by Alexander McCall Smith

Mimi reached for the coffee pot. “And I shall be trudging round the bookstores,” she said. “I don’t know how you can eat that stuff. I really don’t.”

Isabel applied Marmite to her toast. “Looking for?” Mimi was a serial book collector, moving from author to author. Her collection of Andrew Lang was virtually complete, as was that of Graham Greene firsts. Isabel continued, “It’s an acquired taste, I suppose. Like the hundred-year eggs that the Chinese eat. You know, the eggs they bury for a hundred days and then dig up and eat. They go wild over them.”

“Arthur Waley,” said Mimi in answer to Isabel’s question. “He translated Chinese poetry. It was wonderful stuff. And he wrote biographies of some of his poets. It’s quite a thought, isn’t it—there they were in the eighth century or whenever it was and somebody should write their biography twelve hundred years later. An Englishman. So far away. Picking over the lives of these poets.”

That, Isabel agreed, was strange. But so was any act of homage to the classical world. Would Catullus have imagined that he would be read after millennia had passed? That people would show an interest in the small details of his life? No, said Mimi, Catullus probably would not. But Horace would. He described, she recollected, his poems as a monument more enduring than bronze; that had struck her as a sign of excessive ego. “But I don’t think that these Chinese poets would have imagined that degree of immortality,” she said. “They led rather remote lives. They were often exiled for some tiny faux pas committed at court. They were sent off to be magistrates in the remote provinces somewhere. And that made their poetry rather wistful, full of regrets.”

Isabel thought for a moment. She was trying to remember something by Li Po. She had Waley’s translation of his works in her library, but could only remember a poem about drinking wine by oneself. That was all.

“Li Po drank wine by himself,” she began.

“Indeed he did,” said Mimi. “But so did many of the others. Chinese poets were always drinking wine and then writing about it. Or waiting for boats to arrive from downriver. Or wondering what absent friends were up to. Brooding about what they were doing.”