Du Fu

Du Fu (712-770) is one of the principal poets of the Tang dynasty, the period that many regard as the high point of Chinese verse. A contemporary and friend of Li Bai, he wrote poetry with a more political and social focus, often dealing with war, hunger and the lives of ordinary people. His reputation grew steadily after his death, and by the later imperial period he was counted among the greatest writers in Chinese history. His influence reached poets in China and Japan for generations.

Most of what is known about his life comes from his own poems. He was probably born near Luoyang in Henan province, into a family of officials; his paternal grandfather, Du Shenyan, had been a politician and poet under Empress Wu Zetian. His mother died shortly after his birth, and he was raised partly by an aunt. He received the standard Confucian education expected of a future civil servant, memorizing the classics of philosophy, history and poetry. Around 735 he sat the imperial examination and failed, possibly because his prose was too dense or because he had few useful connections in the capital. In autumn 744 he met Li Bai, and their friendship, which scholar David Young regards as the most formative influence on Du Fu's art, showed him up close the solitary life of the poet-scholar. The bond was lopsided, however: Du Fu wrote twelve poems to Li Bai and received only one in return.

He tried again for an official career. In 746 he moved to the capital, but in the 747 examination all candidates were rejected by the chief minister, apparently to block possible rivals. From then on he petitioned the emperor directly. The An Lushan rebellion, which broke out in December 755, transformed his life. For almost eight years the country endured war, famine and mass displacement; the census of 754 had counted 52.9 million people, and the one taken a decade later counted only 16.9 million. Du Fu lived on the move, was captured by the rebels in Chang'an, and in 757 returned to court in a junior post. There he protested the dismissal of a friend and in 758 was demoted to an education post in Huazhou.

This upheaval made him a poet of war. What he saw around him, the lives of his family, neighbours and strangers, along with what he feared or hoped from the campaigns, became the lasting subjects of his verse. Even when he learned of the death of his youngest child, he turned his attention to the suffering of others. After Huazhou he lived in Qinzhou, where he wrote more than sixty poems, and then in Chengdu in Sichuan, where he spent much of the following five years, short of money and relying on old acquaintances. He died in 770, and accounts differ on where and how.

He was little recognised during his lifetime, partly because his work was so original. Later critics called him the Poet-Historian and the Poet-Sage, and his poems are still read as a record of his age. Reading him well requires some knowledge of context, since classical Chinese is terse and leaves out what a informed contemporary would already have known.