The river at the wall The Changming River runs past the wall of the Li Bai Memorial in Jiangyou, Mianyang. The site is not where Li Bai lived; it is a memorial in the region he came from, and the river is the part that was here before the building. Planning began in 1962, the memorial opened in 1982, and it now holds national second-grade museum status and an AAAA scenic-area rating. Those labels decide how it runs: galleries, a garden, a ticket office, a conservation store. But the first thing the site offers is a simple arrangement of water, wall and tree, and a poet who is not present. The building is modern, the river is not, and the difference is the subject.

A Tang garden, built late The garden is laid out in the Tang literati manner, and that is a twentieth-century decision about the Tang rather than a Tang survival. After the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake the memorial was rebuilt and expanded, so much of what stands now is younger than the collection it holds. That is the honest way to visit it: as a garden made to frame a body of writing. The reconstruction is not hidden. It is the condition under which a small city keeps a poet's name in public. The garden also does something a gallery cannot: it gives the poems a route to walk rather than a shelf to sit on. The garden looks older than it is, which is exactly what a memorial garden is for.

Seven names The names organise the visit. Taibai Hall opens it as a preface to the person. Taibai Study takes the life; the Poetry Garden holds calligraphy and painting; the Old Style Hall gives Jiangyou's local history; a Du Fu Hall puts the two Tang poets in one building; the Return Pavilion and a stele corridor close the sequence. Each room has a single task, and the route through them is short. What holds the sequence together is a decision to treat a poet as a local fact: the town's history, the town's river, the town's editions and copies, all kept inside one walled garden. The Du Fu Hall is the most argumentative room: the two poets were not from the same place, and putting them together is a later claim about Tang poetry.

What the collection holds The collection is the part that resists reconstruction. It holds more than ten thousand objects and sets, of which 456 are classified as precious: editions of Li Bai's poems, paintings, and the accumulated material of a poet's afterlife. A museum of this kind is not about furniture; it is about how a text travels. Editions differ, paintings argue with each other, and the garden outside gives the argument somewhere to sit. Li Bai never lived in these buildings. That is not a flaw to be explained away. It is the subject: a place can hold a person who is absent, if the river, the garden and the collection are specific enough.