前赤壁赋

苏轼 wrote it in the autumn of 1082, in exile at 黄州 after a political trial over his poems. He and a guest drift below the cliff at night; the guest grieves that life is short, and Su answers that the wind on the river and the moon over the hills belong to everyone and never run out. Three months later he wrote a sequel, 后赤壁赋, so this one is called 'former'.

The piece is often called simply 赤壁赋. The cliff at Huangzhou is probably not the site of the Battle of Red Cliffs (赤壁之战), though Su Shi writes as if it were. 用之不竭 'inexhaustible' comes from it.