Du Fu

Du Fu was a Chinese poet and minor official of the Tang dynasty, often ranked with his friend Li Bai as the greatest poet in the Chinese tradition. Nearly 1,500 of his poems survive. Much of his best work came out of the An Lushan rebellion, which uprooted him and his family, and later critics called him the "poet-historian" for his record of war, hunger and displacement, and the "poet-sage" for the moral seriousness of his verse.

Du Fu was born in 712, probably near Luoyang in Henan, though the exact place is unknown. His grandfather Du Shenyan had been a noted poet and politician under Wu Zetian, but his father was only a minor official. He received a standard Confucian education.

In the early 730s he travelled in the lower Yangtze region. In 735 he sat the imperial examination, probably at Chang'an, and failed, a result that surprised later critics. He travelled again in Shandong and Hebei, and after his father's death around 740 spent several years near Luoyang.

In autumn 744 he made the acquaintance of Li Bai, some years his senior and already famous. They became friends and met again in 745. Twelve poems by Du Fu to or about Li Bai survive, but only one in the other direction, a sign of how unequal the friendship was. In 746 Du Fu moved to Chang'an to pursue an official career. He sat the examination again in 747, but the chief minister failed every candidate, and afterwards he petitioned the emperor directly. In 755 he finally received a small post in the crown prince's household.

The An Lushan Rebellion broke out in December 755 and took almost eight years to suppress. Its scale can be glimpsed in the census returns: about 52.9 million people were registered in 754 and only 16.9 million ten years later, the rest having fled, died or slipped out of the records. Du Fu moved his family to safety but was captured by the rebels and held in occupied Chang'an, where he wrote "Spring View", one of his best-known poems.

He escaped in 757 and joined the court of the new emperor, Suzong, as a Reminder, an adviser with access to the throne. Outspoken advice cost him favour, and in 758 he was demoted to a provincial post in Huazhou. In 759 he left it, spent about six weeks in Qinzhou in the north-west and in December reached Chengdu in Sichuan.

With help from friends, above all Yan Wu, the governor-general, Du Fu spent most of the next five years around Chengdu, living in a thatched cottage that became the subject of many calm, closely observed poems. In 764 he served as an adviser to Yan Wu during campaigns against the Tibetan Empire.

In 765 the family set off down the Yangtze, apparently hoping to return to Luoyang. In poor health, he stayed almost two years at Kuizhou, at the entrance to the Three Gorges, where he wrote about 400 poems in a dense late style. He then travelled into Hunan and died at Tanzhou, now Changsha, late in 770, in his 58th year. Accounts differ on the exact place and cause, and one says he died on a boat on the river.

Du Fu was little noticed in his own lifetime and barely appears in contemporary anthologies. His reputation grew steadily from the 9th century, helped by poets such as Bai Juyi and Han Yu, and under the Song dynasty in the 11th century he came to be seen as the poetic model of Confucian values. He was admired for mastering every verse form, especially the strict regulated verse in which about two-thirds of his surviving poems are written, and for widening poetry to cover domestic life, painting, animals and the sufferings of ordinary people. His work also deeply influenced Japanese literature, including the haiku poet Matsuo Bashō.

Our 700 map shows the Tang dynasty shortly before his birth, and the 800 map the weakened empire a generation after the rebellion he lived through.