Du Fu
Du Fu (Chinese: 杜甫; Wade–Giles: Tu Fu; 712–770) was a Chinese poet and politician during the Tang dynasty. Together with his elder contemporary and friend Li Bai, Du is often considered one of the greatest Chinese poets. His greatest ambition was to serve his country as a successful civil servant, but Du proved unable to make the necessary accommodations. His life, like all of China, was devastated by the An Lushan Rebellion of 755, and his last 15 years were a time of almost constant unrest.
Du Fu | |
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There are no contemporaneous portraits of Du Fu; this is a later artist's impression. | |
| Native name | 杜甫 |
| Born | 712 Gongyi, Henan, China |
| Died | 770 (aged 57–58) |
| Occupation | Poetry, politician |
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| Du Fu | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Du's name in Chinese characters | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Chinese name | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Chinese | 杜甫 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Courtesy name | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Chinese | 子美 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Chinese | 少陵野老 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Kanji | 杜甫 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Hiragana | とほ | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Although initially he was little-known to other writers, his works came to be hugely influential in both Chinese and Japanese literary culture. Of his poetic writing, nearly fifteen hundred poems have been preserved over the ages. He has been called the "Poet-Historian" and the "Poet-Sage" by Chinese critics, while the range of his work has allowed him to be introduced to Western readers as "the Chinese Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Shakespeare, Milton, Burns, Wordsworth, Béranger, Hugo or Baudelaire".