In the Footsteps of Du Fu
Michael Wood, Simon & Schuster, £16.99

HISTORIAN Michael Wood has penned an excellent introduction to one of China’s most influential poets.

Following the course of Du Fu’s life as he travelled China enables Wood to tell an engaging story, reflect on the cities and landscapes that inspired him and discuss him with today’s “Du Fu pilgrims,” literature buffs who flock to sites associated with the great artist.

Like his friend Li Bai — together with whom he is often paired as the greatest Chinese poet — Du Fu lived in times of social upheaval. The critic Huang Kuo-pin noted Du Fu’s use of antithetical couplets: “the first half soars to the highest point… the second descends to the lowest limit.” 

The technique reflects his own life. Du Fu grew up prosperous during the reign of the 8th century Tang dynasty Emperor Xuanzong, a “golden age.” 

When as a young man he first went to the capital Chang’an (today’s Xi’an), it was the largest city in the world. Xuanzong presided over a court of unparalleled opulence. Du Fu’s delight in its music and dancing stayed with him.

Even then he was alert to the cruelty of empire. His earliest surviving poems take up the voice of conscripted soldiers, “holding back sobs” as they leave their families to fight on the distant frontier, and they don’t pull punches on political criticism (“The emperor’s land is already vast, why extend its boundaries?”).

The wars were worse than useless. By building up huge frontier armies they paved the way for the rebellion of China’s most powerful general An Lushan in 755AD, the defining event of Du Fu’s life. 

China plunged into devastating war: official censuses record a population drop from 52 million to 16 million in a decade. Certainly an exaggeration reflecting population displacement and the collapse of the bureaucracy’s ability to take an accurate census, but even modern historians estimate the eight-year war killed 13 million people, making it one of the bloodiest of all time. Like millions of others, Du Fu fled with his family, and he’d be fleeing for the rest of his life.

Du Fu was a refugee, and few have recorded the refugee experience so starkly in verse. The rebellion was a time of high tragedy, and generations of Chinese artists have returned to themes like the execution of the emperor’s favourite concubine Yang Guifei, demanded by his guards as the court fled the capital because she was blamed for An Lushan’s promotion. 

Du Fu’s preoccupation, however, was with the common people. Poems tell of fleeing along roads crowded with refugees; encounters with penniless and terrified former aristocrats; begging for food. His youngest child died from malnutrition. (“My infant child died of hunger… I am ashamed to call myself a father.”) Du Fu was still alluding to his lost child in poems written on his deathbed.

The haunting Road to Fengxian contrasts the refugee experience with the hot-spring spa formerly frequented by the court. At times Du Fu slips into nostalgia for the good old days, times when “the rice was succulent and there were no bandits on the roads,” but he never forgets that the court’s wealth came from exploitation. After describing the gorgeous raiments of the ladies at the spa, he adds “Those silks were woven by poor people/ Women whose husbands are beaten for their taxes.”

Du Fu wrote about everything, which allows Wood to paint a vivid picture of the man. An affectionate husband and parent, writing moving birthday poems for his children (“Young boy, when did we first see you? Deep in autumn you were born…”) A man of sensitivity, writing powerfully of some of China’s most dramatic landscapes, but also a man happy to write about dancing drunk under the stars or even how much he enjoyed a bowl of noodles.

Du Fu settled in various places, but never for long. A Tibetan invasion drove him from Chengdu to the Yangtze Gorges; a putsch by a local commander later forced him to flee Changsha. 

Each time he finds a new destination, where through a relative or friend he hopes he can get a plot of land to feed his family: the human reality of the “economic migrants” the Tories despise. In the Gorges he lived next to an old woman who had lost everything in the war, and let her help herself to the produce of his garden: when leaving he tells the new occupants to maintain the arrangement. “Don’t build a fence. It would not be kind.”

You can feel his intense war weariness: “From city walls war bugles are blown. When will there be an end to such sad music?” I’m reminded of Joan Baez’s denunciation of the propaganda drives that precede war in her song Jerusalem: “The drums start drumming again, and I cannot stand the sound.” Wood regularly compares Du Fu’s sentiments to those of Western artists, underlining the universal message of so much he has to say.

The book contains occasional sneers at communist China, often misleading. The idea that the communists set out to “wreck” China’s cultural heritage might apply to the Red Guard movement between 1966-69, but hardly to the revolution more generally, while Mao himself was a poet who emulated the Tang masters (though usually seen as influenced more by Li Bai’s style than Du Fu’s). 

But these are asides which don’t interrupt the narrative and are anyway belied by the vibrant modern China his encounters depict: the retired women enjoying cultural tourism, the local poetry clubs (one near Changsha has “about 100 members… many of them farmers with a passion for poetry.”) 

These introduce one of the most fascinating parts of the book, the discovery that in places an ancient tradition of singing Du Fu’s poetry persists. The poems were originally meant to be sung, and while we can’t know whether the existing traditions date all the way back to the 8th century, some are clearly very old.

In today’s atmosphere of unreasoning hostility to China, anything promoting cultural understanding is welcome, with Wood’s engaging conversations with modern Chinese Du Fu fans a window on a misrepresented world. 

More than that, though, Du Fu is a universal poet. His vivid accounts of the horror of war should be read in an era where our rulers are again “blowing the war bugles.” And with climate disruption hitting our food supplies, who’s to say today’s young people will not, like Du Fu, look back wistfully in old age on a time when there was food in the shops?

And in an age of terrible xenophobia it is surely worth hearing such powerful poetry from the mouth of a refugee, a person like millions today who didn’t choose to spend his life on the move but just wanted to keep his family safe. 

The next time you hear the poison from politicians about “stopping the boats,” you can remember Du Fu, packing his family and few belongings into a small boat as they took once more to the Yangtze to escape the approaching war, watching his children sleep as “through the mountains and gorges sighs a desolate wind.”