Gathers poems about four of China's venerable cities - Chang'an (now Xi'an), Luoyang, Beijing, and Hangzhou. To the Chinese, the city was a depiction of the Confucian ideal of social harmony. To leave the city was to exile oneself from high culture and high politics; this collection also chronicles that Taoist escape and exile: the poetry of personal loss and disappointment, the veiled political polemic and poetry extolling the natural world that lay beyond the Emperor's courts.