Du Fu

Du Fu a Chinese poet of the Tang dynasty, revered together with Li Bai as the greatest of Chinese poets and honoured by tradition as the Poet Sage. His grave, compassionate and technically masterful verse, shaped by the suffering of the age in which he lived, has made him the model of the poet as historian and moral witness.

Early Life and Education

Du Fu was born in 712, into a family of scholar-officials that claimed descent from the third-century general and commentator Du Yu. His mother died early and he was partly raised by relatives in the eastern part of the empire. He received a classical education and, like many young men of his class, prepared for a career in the public service through study and examination.

As a young man he travelled widely, visiting the scenic regions of the south and forming the literary friendships that would adorn his memory. He was ambitious for office and confident of his powers, and his early poems show a youthful exuberance and a faith in the possibility of a distinguished career. He hoped to serve a wise emperor and to bring benefit to the people.

In 735 he sat the imperial examination at Chang'an and failed. He tried again a decade later, and the outcome was the same. His failure to secure office through the examinations was a lasting disappointment, and it was compounded by the difficulty of obtaining patronage in the crowded and competitive capital.

Years of Struggling and the Rebellion

Du Fu finally obtained a minor post in the bureaucracy after presenting verses to the throne, but the outbreak of the An Lushan rebellion in 755 overturned his life. The rebel armies overran the north, the emperor fled, and the capital fell. In the chaos Du Fu was separated from his family and captured, spending a period as a prisoner in Chang'an.

He escaped and made his way to the court of the new emperor in exile, where he was given a position as a censor. But he was soon in trouble for his outspokenness, and in 759 he was demoted and sent away from the capital. Thereafter he held only minor and insecure posts, and he came to depend on the charity of friends and officials.

In 759 he moved west to Qinzhou and then to Chengdu, in Sichuan, where with the help of patrons he built a thatched cottage beside a stream. The years at the cottage were comparatively calm and productive; about a quarter of his surviving poems were written there. He was later forced to move again, and he spent his last years drifting down the Yangtze.

Poetry and Themes

Du Fu wrote in many forms and on many subjects, but he is above all the poet of human suffering and of the disasters of his age. His long narrative poems record the miseries of war, the conscription of peasants, the separation of families and the ruin of the countryside. He wrote with a vivid physicality and with a deep compassion for the weak and the poor.

He was also a master of precise observation and of language. His regulated verse, the metrically strict eight-line form, achieved a subtlety and a concentration that later poets regarded as unsurpassable. He could compress immense feeling into a single image, and his handling of parallelism and tone was studied for centuries as the highest craft of the art.

His poems are not only public and political. He wrote movingly of his wife and children, of friendship, of illness and old age, and of the pleasures of ordinary life, such as a friend's visit or the rain in spring. This union of the personal and the historical, of private grief with public disaster, gives his work its unique weight and its enduring hold on readers.

The Chengdu Cottage and Late Years

The thatched cottage at Chengdu became the most famous of his dwellings and is preserved today as a site of pilgrimage for lovers of his poetry. There he lived in modest comfort, cultivated a garden, and wrote poems of remarkable serenity as well as poems of deep anxiety about the state of the empire and the fate of his family and friends.

Patronage failed, and in 765 he left Sichuan and drifted eastward along the Yangtze, moving from place to place as his health and his fortunes declined. He wrote of his illness, his poverty and his sense of homelessness, and of the vastness of the river and the bleakness of the winter landscape. His poetry of this period is among his most affecting.

He died in 770, aboard a boat on the Yangtze near Changsha, aged about fifty-eight. He had written some fourteen hundred poems that survive, a body of work that records not only his own life but the whole texture of his troubled times. His last years were spent in obscurity, and his greatness was only fully recognised by later generations.

Influence and Legacy

Du Fu's reputation grew after his death until he came to be regarded as the supreme poet of the Chinese tradition. The Song poet and statesman Su Shi and the critic Yan Yu praised him as the very model of the craft, and the term Poet Sage, applied to him in the Ming dynasty, expressed the moral and technical authority of his work. He is studied, imitated and recited as no other poet is.

His influence extended beyond poetry to the wider culture. He became the exemplar of the scholar who suffers with the people and speaks for them, and his poems were used to illustrate Confucian ideals of concern for the state and compassion for the common folk. Generations of officials and writers looked to him for a moral standard.

He and Li Bai, so different in temperament and style, are remembered together as the two peaks of Tang poetry and of all Chinese verse. Where Li Bai is the immortal of imagination, Du Fu is the sage of experience, and the contrast between them has itself become a durable theme of Chinese literary reflection.

See also

• Li Bai
• Tang poetry
• An Lushan Rebellion
• Regulated verse