Su Zhe is four years younger than Su Shi. The two brothers have lived together since childhood. Su Shi once said in a poem: "I am twenty years old and have no friends. At that time, there was only one son in the four seas. " Brotherhood never dies. When Su Zhe heard the bad news of Su Shi's arrest, it was like a bolt from the blue. These two people are brothers and sisters.
After entering the political arena, the two agreed with each other's political views. Su Zhe, then the judge of Yingtianfu (Nanjing in Northern Song Dynasty, now Shangqiu in Henan Province), knew the seriousness of this matter and immediately wrote to Zongshen. After he got the news that Su Shi was in prison, he told himself, "My family was shocked, and I have a lingering fear." "My parents died early, and my brother Shi was the only one. I have to live for my life."
1079 (the second year of Song Shenzong Yuanfeng) In April, Su Shi was transferred from Xuzhou to Huzhou. Because he opposed the new law promoted by Wang Anshi at that time, he also ridiculed the "new progress" between the new law and the new law in his poems, so his political opponents wrote a letter to impeach Su Shi: "Writing poems and slandering Chinese and foreign courtiers are fearless." In August this year, Su Shi was arrested in Huzhou and taken to Bianjing. In April, in Yushitai prison, he was tried by his trainer for drinking Lori, and he tried to kill him in various ways.
At that time, some senior officials, such as Wu Chong and Fan Zhen, wrote to rescue, and Zongshen's grandmother Cao Shi intervened, so Zongshen ordered a lenient sentence. 12, was responsible for awarding Su Shi the post of unified deputy envoy of Huangzhou, Ministry of Water Resources, and was placed in the state, so he was not allowed to sign official documents. More than 20 officials, including Zhang, Sima Guang and Su Zhe, Sima Guang's younger brother, were implicated in the exchange of poems. This is the "Wutai Poetry Case" that shocked the ruling and opposition parties.
Since the establishment of the Song Dynasty, Su Shi was the first person to be imprisoned for writing political essays. These two poems were written in prison because of Su Zhe's words. After Su Shi was arrested and imprisoned, he first thought of his younger brother, and explained and cared for his younger brother in his poems. On the way to the prison, Su Shi and his eldest son Mai Su set off together. Su Shi and Mai Su agreed to send only vegetables and meat, and if they heard bad news, they would change them into fish.
Mai Su kept the agreement for more than a month, which coincided with the food shortage, so he went to find someone to find a way to ask a relative to deliver food on his behalf and forgot the agreement with his father Su Shi. Relatives accidentally got squid (pickled fish) for him. Su Shi was taken aback, thinking that the crime was unforgivable. He wanted to plead with the emperor (Song Shenzong, the same below) but couldn't pass it. So he wrote two poems to his younger brother Su Zhe (from the word). Su Shi also generally expected that the prison officials didn't dare to believe privately, and Zong Shen was moved by this poem. In Su Shi's pen, the power of affection is earth-shaking. During his imprisonment, his younger brother Su Zhe went to the Emperor's Mansion many times to relieve him of the crime of redeeming his younger brother. Even Zhang, the minister who has retired to farm at home, is saddened by it. He wrote a personal letter and sent his son Zhang Shu to Beijing for rescue overnight, which was considered lenient.