Du Fu (杜甫) Glossary
Du Fu (杜甫, 712–770) is one of the two or three most important poets in the Chinese tradition. He lived through the An Lushan Rebellion (安史之亂) — the catastrophic mid-Tang civil war that killed millions and effectively ended the high-Tang flowering — and wrote about the devastation directly: the bodies on the road, the villages emptied, the families broken. He did this while the imperial court was still publishing poems about spring blossoms and imperial virtue. He paid for it in obscurity and poverty for most of his life. He was rediscovered after his death and elevated, slowly, to the canonical place he now occupies, sometimes called the Poet-Sage (詩聖).
For this Dictionary the most useful gloss on Du Fu’s significance is from Prof. Langenkamp’s essay The Sincere Society (Substack, May 2026): “Du Fu… wrote about the devastation of the An Lushan Rebellion — the bodies on the road, the villages emptied, the families broken — while the court was still writing poems about spring blossoms and imperial virtue.” He is the model figure of art that holds the mirror at an angle that power cannot arrange. The Dictionary’s editorial position on sincerity in writing — see Earned Parallelism and the AI Writing parent — draws on the tradition Du Fu represents.
Du Fu is paired in the essay with Han Yu (韓愈, 768–824), the slightly-later Tang essayist who founded the Ancient Prose Movement (古文運動): a polemical rejection of the ornate, flattering court style in favour of plain, honest prose modeled on the ancient classics. Han Yu was exiled, more than once. The Dictionary may eventually have a Han Yu entry; for now he is named as Du Fu’s structural sibling in the tradition.
See also
- The Sincere Society — the essay tracing the tradition Du Fu represents
- Wu Jingzi — the Qing-era satirist who inherited the same problem
- Earned Parallelism — the Dictionary’s editorial practice of writing-against-form