The first poet in the Tang Trinity is Du Fu. Textbooks and other official channels largely agree that he was the greatest of the Tang’s poets. Although it is a simplification, Du Fu represents the Confucian tradition, to the point where, during the Song Dynasty, he was sometimes called the “poet-historian.”

Like the two other poets you’ll be introduced to shortly, Du Fu lived during the Tang Dynasty’s most tragic period, and his poetry is redolent of the sadness at the breakdown in government institutions and the violence that that breakdown inflicted on the lives of the people. The Tang state was at the height of its power when a non-Han Chinese, Central Asian general named Ān Lùshān 安禄山 tried to overthrow the Tang emperor. Du Fu, along with the emperor, fled the capital and did not return until after An Lushan had sacked it.

Much of Du Fu’s best poetry focuses on the way the breakdown in the state so quickly created a Hobbsian world. His poetry is a mediation on how, within a year, people went from throwing drunken poetry parties to merely trying to survive. In one poem, he meets a prince being hunted by rebel forces. In other poems, he rhapsodizes on what it is like to flee the capital, at the time the world’s largest city, and return to find it largely abandoned. If Du Fu is the “poet-historian,” his is a history of sadness, of violence, and of painful change, a history that is not narrated but reckoned with.

It is difficult to choose any representative poem by Du Fu, but here’s one that I like, which I’ve translated:

Sitting Alone

Saddened, I turn my white head,

Leaning on my cane, my back towards the abandoned city.

The river water is restrained and many sandbars emerge,

The sky is empty, the scene is clear.

In the darkness, I resent how I wither as I age,

The times have betrayed the promises of the life of an official.

Raising my head, I admire the birds in the evening light,

Sleeping in the woods, their feathers are so light.

独坐

悲愁迴白首， 倚杖背孤城。

江敛洲渚出，天虚风物清。

沧溟服衰谢，朱绂负平生。

仰羡黄昏鸟，投林羽翮轻。

By the time the narrator has arrived in his twilight years, the world has lost something that it used to have. The urbane capital has become a pale shadow of itself, and the world of promise that existed in his youth has passed. If Du Fu is the poet-historian, it is because his poetry is defined by this sad sense of history, the sense that the world that he knew as a young man would never return.