Du Fu

Du Fu lived from 712 to 770 and worked as both a poet and a government official during China’s Tang dynasty. Alongside his older friend and fellow poet Li Bai, he is considered a major figure in Tang poetry. Around 1,500 of his poems have been preserved.

He tried to build an official career and served briefly as a remonstrance official at the imperial court. The An Lushan rebellion, which started in 755, forced him and his family to flee, and this upheaval influenced much of his later work. After that, he lived in Qinzhou and Chengdu, then traveled through the middle Yangtze region. He died in 770, though different accounts give different places and causes of death.

Later Chinese critics gave him the titles “Poet-Historian” and “Poet-Sage.” His poetry covers war, displacement, life as an official, family experiences, and everyday observations. It became influential in both Chinese and Japanese literary traditions.

Life

Traditional Chinese literary criticism often looked at an author’s life when interpreting a work. The American scholar Burton Watson linked this to the close connection Chinese thought makes between art and morality. Because Du Fu’s poems frequently deal with morality and history, this approach is especially relevant.

Another reason, noted by the Chinese historian William Hung, is that Chinese poems are usually concise and leave out context that a contemporary reader would have known. For modern Western readers, Hung argued, the less accurately we know the time, place, and circumstances, the more likely we are to misunderstand the poem. American scholar Stephen Owen added a third factor specific to Du Fu: the wide range of his work requires looking at his whole life, rather than using the simplified categories applied to more limited poets.

Early years

Most details about Du Fu’s life come from his own poems. His paternal grandfather was Du Shenyan, a well-known politician and poet under Empress Wu Zetian. Du Fu was born in 712, somewhere near Luoyang in Henan province, with Gong county often suggested as the likely place. Later in life, he considered himself a native of Chang’an, the ancestral home of the Du family.

His mother died shortly after his birth, and he was partly raised by an aunt. He had an older brother who died young, as well as three half brothers and a half sister, whom he often mentions in his poems, though he never refers to his stepmother. His father was a minor scholar-official, so his youth involved the standard education for a future civil servant: studying and memorizing the Confucian classics in philosophy, history, and poetry. He later claimed to have written decent poems by his early teens, but none of those survive.

In the early 730s, he traveled through Jiangsu and Zhejiang. His earliest surviving poem, about a poetry contest, is thought to date from around 735, near the end of this period.

That same year, he took the imperial examination, likely in Chang’an, and failed, which surprised both him and later critics. Hung thought he failed because his prose style was too dense and obscure, while another scholar, Chou, suggested he had not cultivated the right connections in the capital. After failing, he traveled again, this time through Shandong and Hebei.

His father died around 740. Du Fu could have entered the civil service due to his father’s rank, but he is believed to have given up that privilege in favor of one of his half brothers. He spent the next four years in the Luoyang area handling domestic duties.

In the autumn of 744, he met Li Bai for the first time, and they became friends. David Young called this the most important formative element in Du Fu’s artistic development, because it gave him a living example of the reclusive poet-scholar life he was drawn to after his exam failure.

The friendship was somewhat one-sided: Du Fu was younger, and Li Bai was already a famous poet. Du Fu wrote twelve poems to or about Li Bai, but Li Bai wrote only one in return. They met again just once, in 745.

In 746, Du Fu moved to the capital to try to restart his official career. He took the civil service exam again the following year, but the prime minister failed all candidates, apparently to prevent potential rivals. He never took the exams again. Instead, he petitioned the emperor directly in 751, 754, and probably again in 755.

He married around 752, and by 757 the couple had five children—three sons and two daughters—though one son died in infancy in 755. Starting in 754, he developed lung problems, likely asthma, the first of several health issues that troubled him for the rest of his life. That same year, massive floods caused a famine, forcing him to move his family.

In 755, he was appointed Registrar of the Right Commandant’s office of the Crown Prince’s Palace. This was a minor post, but in normal times it would have been the start of an official career. Before he could begin work, however, the position was overtaken by events.

War

The An Lushan rebellion began in December 755 and lasted nearly eight years. It caused enormous disruption: the census of 754 recorded 52.9 million people, but ten years later the number had dropped dramatically.