Du Fu was born in 712 AD in Shao-ling. Du Fu’s family came from traceable greatness – his genealogy shows a link to the great Emperor Yao. The family was also associated with Tu Yu, who married an imperial princess, was made a marquis, became one of the greatest generals of the army, and was revered as a man worthy of a place in the Confucian temple. In his early life, Du Fu showed great promise. He was considered to hold extraordinary talent, and when he went to take his government exam, he was expected to score highly. However, Du Fu did the unthinkable: he failed. There are many speculations on why he failed, but the most prominent is that Du Fu lacked the practica

	When he was 20 years old, he left his home to travel in China. He used to be an official in Chang`an (present Xi`an), the capital of the Tang dynasty, for 10 years, and was later captured by rebels after an uprising and fled to Chengdu where he built a humble cottage and stayed for about four years.

	During these four years, Du Fu composed more than 240 poems reflecting upon the misery of the people, in which most of them are very familiar to Chinese people.

	Du Fu played with Chinese poetic language. For example, he would take a word that was normally used as a noun in Chinese poetic language, and create a sentence where it could be functioning as an adjective, or as a verb, or as an adverb, leaving it up to the reader to decide how the line was created.

	Du Fu, the greatest poet of a country devoted to poetry, believed himself a failure. He gained little distinction in the official examinations, but remained a minor civil servant uprooted by the An Lu-shan rebellion that destroyed the first T`ang dynasty. He was usually poor, and occasionally close to starvation. The major turning points in his life were his meeting and friendship with Li Po (701-762), and the civil war, which opened his eyes to the sufferings of the common people. It is said that Li Po was the greater technician – an astonishing technician – but it`s Du Fu`s humanity that speaks across the centuries.

	He met Li Po in 745, and was deeply impressed by the older poet in spite of, or perhaps because of, their very different personalities. He continued to write poems to, or about, Li for many years after. Du was essentially serious, and his work, in contrast to Li Po`s, commonly shows a greater interest in the condition of his times. His emotional range seems greater than Li`s and he is also a more intellectual poet. Of the two his immediate influence was greater.

	Bibliography and image source: psu.edu