Du Fu ( 712 - 770 ), styled himself Zimei, nicknamed Old Man of Shaoling. His ancestral home is in Xiangyang (the now Hubei Province), later moved to Gongxian County (the now Henan Province ). Du Fu is also a great poet of the Tang Dynasty, with fame paralleling to that of Li Bai. People respect him as Sage of Poetry.
Du Fu was born in a well-known feudal bureaucratic family. He was eager to learn ever since his childhood and devoted much effort on writing. He summarized his writing experience as "inspiration will come to your command when you have scrutinized ten thousand volums".
Just like Li Bai, Du Fu started his touring trek through the country when his was young. In 745, he stopped at Jinan and met the mayor at Lixia Pavilion in Daming .jpg)
Lake. He wrote many poems to extol the beauty of Jinan, in which some famous lines, such as "Old is the pavilion over central China and many are celebrities in Jinan", are still popular today.
Du Fu cherished great political ambition and was a great realistic poet. He had undergone the "An-Shi Turmoil" and was constantly stroked and squeezed in his official career and over a long time led a life of hardship and sorrow. As a result, he had intimate experience of the decadence of the reigning group and the hardship of the masses. In his poems, he courageously exposed the extremely lavish and loose life of the reigning group. His widely circulated verse "Food rots in rich houses while hunger put the poor dead on the road" is a profound condensation of the social injustice. Many of his poems reflect people s hardship and social conflict, reflect his wish for the integration of the nation and love for his country. His poems are solemn in style, rich in language, deep in emotion, concise in words, are of highly artistic value and had an enormous influence upon his successors. 1,400 of his poems are extant today and are collected into The Complete Works of Du Fu.
