Du Fu

Life

His place of origin is given variously as Chang’an and Gong County in Henan (modern Gongyi), while Xiangyang is identified as his ancestral home. Because of his Du-ling commandery affiliation and his residence near Shaoling south of Chang’an, he styled himself “Duling Buyi” and “Shaoling Yelao.” He came from a family devoted to Confucian learning and official service; his grandfather Du Shenyan served as a yuanwailang in the Bureau of Delicacies during the reign of Wu Zetian and contributed to the formation of early Tang regulated verse. His father was Du Xian, his father-in-law Yang Yi, his wife Yang, and his sons Du Zongwen and Du Zongwu.

In his youth, Du Fu spent roughly ten years in three extended rounds of travel, visiting Wu and Yue, Qi and Zhao, Liang and Song, and Qi and Lu; he failed the jinshi examination in 735 and failed an imperial special examination in 747. In the third year of Tianbao, he met Li Bai and travelled with him through Liang and Song and Qi and Lu; he was also a friend of Gao Shi.

In the tenth year of Tianbao (751), Du Fu presented the Three Great Ritual Rhapsodies; Emperor Xuanzong was impressed and appointed him a waiting official at the Jixian Academy. In the fourteenth year (755), he was appointed Commandant of Hexi but declined the post, and was then transferred to a military post in the Right Guard’s Rate Office. After the An Lushan rebellion broke out and Chang’an fell, Du Fu was trapped in the city. In the second year of the Zhide era (757), he made his way to Emperor Suzong’s temporary court at Fengxiang, where he was appointed Left Reminder—the office is also recorded as Right Reminder—and submitted a memorial pleading for Fang Guan.

In the first year of Qianyuan (758), he became an administrative officer at Huazhou; in the following year he resigned, travelled through Qinzhou and Tonggu into Shu, reached Chengdu by year’s end, and built a thatched retreat near the Huanhua Stream in the western suburbs. During the first year of Baoying (762), unrest in Shu drove him through Zizhou and Langzhou. In the second year of Guangde (764), he returned to Chengdu; Yan Wu, military governor of Jiannan Xichuan, took him onto his staff as a secretary and recommended him as an acting Vice Director in the Ministry of Works, from which he became known as Du Gongbu.

In the first year of Yongtai (765), Du Fu left Chengdu, passed through Yun’an, and reached Kuizhou, where he stayed for nearly two years and wrote more than 430 poems. After leaving the gorge in the first month of the third Dali year (768), he reached Jiangling, then moved through Gongan and Yueyang, and later wandered among Yuezhou, Tanzhou, Hengzhou, and Leiyang. He died of illness in the winter of the fifth Dali year (770); accounts variously place his death on a Xiang River boat at Leiyang, on a boat between Changsha and Yueyang, or in Jiangling Prefecture.

Literary achievement and works

Du Fu was skilled in poetry and rhapsody, practiced calligraphy, and was known for his fondness for wine; more than 1,440 of his poems survive. His poetry drew on the conditions of his age and his own experience, offering a comprehensive and penetrating picture of society, and later came to be called “poetry as history.” It absorbed the forms of earlier poetry and developed a style marked by “沉鬱頓挫” and “律切精深”; he came to be regarded as a poet who achieved a comprehensive synthesis. He was ranked with Li Bai as one of the “Li–Du” pair and was later honored as the “Poet Sage.”

His Du Fu Collection comprised sixty volumes but is lost; during the Dali era, Fan Huang compiled a six-volume Small Collection, also lost. In the Northern Song, Wang Zhu recompiled the twenty-volume Du Gongbu Collection, with a one-volume supplement, and it became the textual ancestor of later Du collections; the Complete Tang Poems includes his work in nineteen volumes, while later supplements added two poems and four fragments. Later scholars continuously edited, chronologized, classified, evaluated, annotated, and studied his poetry; around 200 specialized works from before the Qing remain extant, and more than 200 modern monographs appeared after the Xinhai period. Widely circulated editions include Qian Qianyi’s Annotations to Du’s Poems, Qiu Zha’ao’s Detailed Annotations to Du’s Poems, and Yang Lun’s Selected and Critical Edition of Du’s Poems.

Influence

Du Fu’s life and writing were closely bound to the Tang empire’s transformation from prosperity to decline, with the An Lushan upheaval as its decisive turning point. By gathering the strengths of earlier traditions while opening new paths for later poetry, he occupies a pivotal place in the history of Tang poetry and has exerted a profound influence on later literature.