by Tu Fu
Easily buys drink in silver jars. And with
No one to share the floating-ant wine,
At nightfall, I await the coming of crows.
A TRAVELER FROM
A traveler from southern darkness came,
leaving me a mermaid pearl. At its
center, indecipherable words lay
hidden—words I was unable to write.
I packed it away long ago, savings
against government clerks. And today,
opening wrappers to find it blood, I
have nothing left for taxes, not a tear.
SONG FOR SILKWORMS AND GRAIN
Every province and kingdom under heaven fronting on
the Great Wall, no city has avoided shield and sword.
Why can’t the weapons be cast into ploughshares,
and every inch of abandoned field tilled by oxen?
Tilled by oxen,
spun by silkworms:
don’t condemn heroes to weep like heavy rains, leave
men to grain, women to silk—let us go in song again.
MEETING LI KUEI-NIEN SOUTH OP THE RIVER
Often, long ago, I saw you in Prince Ch’i’s house.
And at Ts’ui Chiu’s, I sometimes heard you sing.
Just now, as we meet again, the season of falling
Blossoms gracing this world—how lovely it is.
ENTERING TUNG-T’ING LAKE
Ch’ing-ts’ao Lake is wrapped in serpent dens,
And White-Sand lost beyond Dragon-Back Island.
Ancient, cragged trees shelter flood-dikes
Here. Crow spirits dance, greeting these oars.
Returning, waves high and south winds strong, I
Fear sunsets. But tonight, a dazzling lake
Stretches into distant heavens—as if any moment,
On this raft of immortals, I will drift away.
THOUGHTS, SICK WITH FEVER ON A BOAT
(THIRTY-SIX RHYMES OFFERED TO THOSE
I LOVE SOUTH OF THE LAKE)
Spare us this harmony you made of earth. O
Huang Ti, occurrence unhinged still in your
Squawking pipes, and Shun, the heart of things
Wounded in your half-dead koto—what is your
Imperial wisdom to a wanderer caught here
And now? The year rifled with disease, my boat
Too long anchored off this eastern shore,
I watch Orion rise early over the glassy lake.
Ma Jung’s flute sings. Helpless, I hold
My tunic open, like Wang Ts’an, looking out
Toward a cold homeland full of sadness.
The sorrowful year blackened over by cloud,
White houses vanish along the water in fog.
Over the maple shoreline, green peaks rise.
It aches. Winter’s malarial fire aches,
And the drizzling rain won’t stop falling.
Ghosts they welcome here with drums bring
No blessings. Crossbows kill nothing but owls.
When my spirits ebb away, I feel relieved.
And when grief comes, I let it come. I drift
Outskirts of life, both sinking and floating,
Occurrence become its perfect ruin of desertion.
BIOGRAPHY
The biographical information is drawn from William Hung’s full-length biography. Tu Fu: China’s Greatest Poet. Numbers on the left margin are page numbers for corresponding poems.
The T’ang China which Tu Fu knew until middle age must be counted among the great moments of human civilization. In 712 A.D. Hsüan-tsung began his 43-year rule of China. The frugality and devotion of his government were legendary; corruption was rare and taxation light. His able generals secured the borders against ever-threatening barbarians, and within China there was peace and prosperity. Under his enthusiastic patronage, arts and letters flourished. Indeed, his reign is considered the pinnacle of Chinese cultural achievement. By the time his later excesses and misjudgments began, he had created a society nearly ideal in all respects. And he had so endeared himself to the people that, even after his foolishness had left the country in ruins, their affection for him continued.
EARLY POEMS (737—745)
Tu Fu was born in 712, at the beginning of Hsüan-tsung 's reign. Though not of the aristocracy’s highest stratum, his father came from a long line of respected scholar-officials. His mother, who died shortly after his birth, was the great-granddaughter of Emperor aitsung, the founder of the T’ang Dynasty. This heritage gave Tu Fu widespread and prominent connections, and in his life of poverty and lonely wandering, he would often depend upon their generosity. Although he was the only surviving child of this marriage, his father’s remarriage added three step-brothers and a step-sister to the family.
Very little is known of Tu’s early life. Oddly, he seems to have spent a great deal of time separated from his family. He received a classical education and, by the age of fourteen, was apparently impressing notable scholars with his talent. In his late teens, he began traveling. And when he was twenty, he traveled to southeastern China, where he stayed for four years. This extensive traveling at such a young age, and apparently not with his family, was highly unusual.
At twenty-four, in order to prepare for the imperial examinations, Tu Fu went to Ch’ang-an, the nation’s very cosmopolitan capital, a city of two million inhabitants. In the capital, his talent and broad experience attracted considerable attention. His ancestral home was Tu-ling, a village ten miles south of Ch’ang-an, so he was presented as a candidate from the capital’s prefecture, a position which carried considerable prestige and a virtual guarantee of success in the exams. These chin-shih examinations were the traditional means of securing official appointments in the capital. They consisted of poetry and prose composition, as well as the writing of essays on current political questions and the Confucian and Taoist classics.
Any young man from the educated, aristocratic class aspired passionately to serve as an official. Not only were the practical advantages considerable (intellectual/artistic opportunity and companionship, wealth, prestige), but in the Confucian order, helping the emperor care for the people was a scholar’s only proper place in the universe. Consequently, it was a terrible blow when a very impressive young Tu Fu, a devoted Confucian throughout his life, somehow failed the examinations.
The following year, 737, Tu left Ch’ang-an and traveled in the eastern countryside near Yen-chou, wherehis father was the assistant prefect. He spent three leisurely years there—riding, hunting, sightseeing, and socializing. His travels were brought to an end by his father’s death in 740. Tu resettled the family, for which he was now responsible, in a village near Lo-yang, where the family graveyard was located. After the twenty-seven-month mourning period, Tu moved to Lo-yang, the eastern capital. He remained there for several years, probably supporting himself with freelance literary work.
In 744, Tu Fu met Kao Shih and Li Po in a country wineshop east of Lo-yang and traveled with them briefly. The following year, he left Lo-yang and returned to the eastern countryside near Yen-chou, though this time he lived more the life of a recluse. Tu was visited here by Li Po. Li, who was eleven years older than Tu, was already quite famous, and Tu admired him inordinately. But this was to be the last time the two poets would meet. It seems Tu Fu quickly passed from Li Po’s mind (only two of Li Po’s surviving poems are addressed to Tu Fu, both written at the time of their parting), but Tu often thought of Li and, over the years, wrote more than a dozen poems concerning him.
CH’ANG-AN I (746–755)
Tu Fu returned to the capital at the end of 745, after an eight and one-half year absence, and began to see first-hand the results of a scarcely believable deterioration in the emperor’s wisdom. The military had become unmanageably large, as had the administration, where extravagance and corruption were endemic. The taxes needed to support this government had become an unbearable burden for the people, whose relative prosperity was in dramati
c decline. The emperor was intoxicated with his favorite concubine, the infamous Yang Kuei-fei, whose ostentatious and corrupt influence was pervasive. Occupying himself more and more with entertainments and the Taoist pursuit of immortality, he left the affairs of state to an equally dangerous person: Li Lin-fu, the prime minister. To consolidate his power, Li systematically eliminated anyone he could not be certain of controlling. Many of his victims were among Tu’s friends in the capital. Fortunately, Tu was not a man of great importance, otherwise his association with these people would have made him subject to Li’s enmity as well.
As China had long been beleaguered by encroaching barbarians, virtually everyone in the empire, including Tu Fu, applauded the early military successes on the frontiers. But the increasing military adventurism being orchestrated by Li Lin-fu had become alarming. He considered many military governors in the border regions a personal threat, so he replaced them with largely illiterate barbarian generals who were all too willing to carry out the expansionist program he convinced the emperor to pursue. Soon, the emperor controlled only the palace army directly, while foreign generals with no real loyalty to the T’ang government controlled vast autonomous armies and territories, setting what should have been an all too obvious stage for the catastrophe soon to follow.
Tu Fu’s reason for returning to Ch’ang-an undoubtedly involved his tireless hope of obtaining a governmental position. In 747, after Tu had been in the capital for a year, the emperor ordered a special examination for all accomplished scholars not already in government service. But again, Tu was to be dissappointed. Li Lin-fu, who administered the exam, failed all candidates and then praised the gullible emperor for having already brought every worthy man of the empire into his service.
With the exception of some time spent as a recluse in the nearby mountains, Tu remained in Ch’ang-an for the next five years. Though he received no official recognition, he was quite well-respected and counted among his friends and patrons some of China’s most eminent literary and political figures. Several of Tu’s fu (rhyme-prose) were eventually shown to the emperor, who was so impressed that he immediately “summoned” Tu, telling him to await further word. Tu became an instant celebrity and always remembered this as one of the great events in his life. He waited until the following year, 752, when the emperor ordered a special examination for him.
Tu Fu passed the examination—which was given with great fanfare and attended by many dignitaries—though not with any particular distinction. That this exam, like the one in 747, was administered by Li Lin-fu may help to explain Tu Fu’s mediocre showing. Rather than being appointed an advisor to the emperor, as was his hope, Tu was put on the list of those awaiting routine civil service assignments. As Li Lin-fu had brought this appointment system to a virtual standstill, Tu knew that even a routine position might now be years away. Severely disappointed, he retired to Tu-ling, his ancestral village just south of Ch’ang-an, where he had somehow acquired farmland.
The date of Tu Fu’s marriage is uncertain, but his first son, Tu Tsung-wen, was born at Tu-ling. Tu Fu, whom history has revered as a devoted father and husband, now began a desperate struggle to support his wife and children. Over the next four years, Tu’s wife apparently gave birth to two daughters and two more sons. One of these sons died in 755 (p. 22), however, leaving the couple with two daughters and two sons for most of their married life. In 769, another daughter was born, but she died one year later.
Li Lin-fu died in 753, one year after Tu moved to Tu-ling. Certain that the appointment system would soon be revitalized, Tu returned to the capital. By early summer, the struggling family was settled in the southeast part of the city, on the bank of Meandering River. Here, Tu developed chronic asthma and his lifelong battle with ill-health began.
A desperate, year-long wait in Ch’ang-an culminated not with a position in the imperial court, however, but with sixty days of steady rain. Houses crumbled and the crops were ruined. In the attempt to provide for his family, Tu Fu first moved back to Tu-ling, and then north to Feng-hsien where he managed to find help and support them through the winter. The following year, he left his family in Feng-hsien and returned to Ch’ang-an, hoping to settle his appointment. Finally, in early winter of 755, Tu Fu was granted a position in the palace of the crown prince, so he returned to Feng-hsien in order to move the family back to Ch’ang-an. Instead, his long-awaited success fell victim to the major political event of his time: the devastating An Lu-shan rebellion.
CH’ANG-AN II (756–759)
The T’ang Dynasty never fully recovered from An Lushan’s rebellion and the chronic militarism which it spawned. The fall in census figures from 53 million before the fighting to only 17 million afterwards summarizes its catastrophic impact. Of 53 million people 36 million were left either dead or displaced and homeless.
An Lu-shan, who had become the most powerful of the non-Chinese military governors on the frontier, launched his campaign from the northeast in December of 755. Although most people knew the rebellion was imminent, the self-involved emperor would hear nothing of it, so the loyal forces were unprepared to defend the country. In January, 756, the rebel armies captured Lo-yang, the eastern capital, and An declared himself emperor of a new dynasty. The imperial forces defending the capital were concentrated in T’ung-kuan Pass. When the court, in its folly, compelled the commanding general to abandon his secure defensive position and attack, the army was decimated by the rebel forces, and Ch’ang-an was left defenseless. The court escaped with the palace army, and in mid-July the capital surrendered to the rebels who sacked it as brutally as they had Lo-yang.
Having watched the foolhardy court ruin the country, the palace army was mutinous. At Ma-wei poststation, 40 miles west of Ch’ang-an, they killed the prime minister and Yang Kuei-fei, whom they recognized to be the primary corrupting influence in the court. Overcome by remorse for his incompetence and the death of his beloved concubine, Hsüan-tsung turned the throne over to the crown prince and traveled southwest to Ch’eng-tu. With the court ministers and palace army, the new emperor went north to organize the resistance, where two able generals and their sizable armies soon joined him. The rebel successes continued, and the first of many revolts by Chinese military governors in the interior began.
After the capital fell to An Lu-shan’s army, Tu Fu resettled his family further north, at Fu-chou, where he hoped they would be safe from the rebels. His wife was again pregnant, but having heard that the crown prince (in whose service he now was) had become emperor, he left to join the exile court. But for unknown reasons, he next appears in Ch’ang-an where, like all of the citizens, he was confined to the city. Although he was at times hiding from the rebels, it seems he generally moved freely around the city—perhaps because his official rank and reputation as a poet were so insignificant, perhaps because he was able to elude and/or keep his identity from the rebel authorities. In any case, he avoided being taken to serve in the rebel court at Lo-yang. Tu remained in Ch’ang-an for nearly a year. During this time, as if things weren’t bad enough, he apparently contracted malaria. In spite of his boast that chanting certain of his poems could cure the disease, he was to suffer relapses for the rest of his life.
Tu Fu managed to escape from the city in May of 757 and make his way to the exile court at Feng-hsiang. When he arrived there, he was appointed Reminder. According to tradition, the duty of a Reminder was to advise the emperor and to point out any errors or oversights he might make. In Tu’s time, however, Reminders were expected to do little more than take part in the imperial pageantry. The new emperor, Su-tsung, who was becoming suspicious and unreasonable, soon demoted Fang Kuan, one of his highest ministers. As Tu took his traditional advisory duties quite seriously (and Fang Kuan was his patron/friend), he pointed out the emperor’s short-sightedness. Su-tsung immediately had Tu arrested, and only after the intervention of several other ministers was he released.
Tu had by now been separated from his family for a year and, in suc
h calamitous times, had no idea what might have befallen them. In fact, the war had reportedly reached Fu-chou, so he suspected that the family had been killed, or at least driven away—a fear strengthened by the fact that his letters to them hadn’t been answered. Finally, in September, he received a letter from his wife. Not only was the family still safe in Fu-chou, but another son (Tu Tsung-wu) had been born. With news of them, he was now anxious to return to his family, and the emperor was hardly reluctant to allow the pesky man a leave of absence from the court. After a difficult journey which took over two weeks, he arrived home at the beginning of October.
A month later, loyal forces drove the rebels from the capital. They soon recovered Lo-yang, as well, and drove the rebels into the east. Tu Fu, overjoyed by the rebels’ defeat, returned to Feng-hsiang and joined in the emperor’s jubilant return to the capital. In January, 758, his family joined him in Ch’ang-an, where he was happily attending court and accompanying the emperor in victory celebrations. Although a rebel army remained at large in the east, most rebel forces had either surrendered or been defeated, and the rebellion seemed to have ended. Tu was optimistic and working diligently in the position he had so long desired.
By spring, however, the poorly advised emperor began to banish worthy officials, notably Fang Kuan and his associates, many of whom were Tu Fu’s close friends. That summer, because of his association with the Fang Kuan group, Tu Fu himself suffered a mild form of banishment. He was sent to Hua-chou, a town between Ch’ang-an and Lo-yang, where he served as Commissioner of Education.
The following January, apparently on official business, Tu went to Lo-yang. He used this opportunity to advise the commanders who had been sent to subdue the remaining rebels. In fact, this may well have been the real purpose of his trip. His advice was ignored, though it was quite astute, as it turned out, including specific warnings against the very dangers that would lead to an unforeseen and disastrous defeat for the loyal forces. The most powerful rebel commander had surrendered the previous year, but in exchange for his surrender, the emperor left him in command of his army. In April, this general turned on the T’ang government and staged a surprise attack at Yeh City, which sent the massive loyal army into disarray and retreat toward the west. The loyalists were able to defend Lo-yang for another six months, but the city was clearly threatened and its people fled. Tu Fu also fled, returning to his home in Hua-chou.
