History of Chinese Literature/Chapter 10

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Chapter 10: Du Fu, the Late Tang, and Poetry in an Age of Catastrophe (755–907)

1. Introduction: The World After the Rebellion

The An Lushan Rebellion (安史之乱, 755–763) was the single most consequential event in Tang dynasty history — a catastrophe that killed perhaps thirty-six million people (roughly two-thirds of the registered population of northern China), shattered the political and military foundations of the empire, and transformed Chinese literature as profoundly as it transformed Chinese society. Before the rebellion, Tang poetry had been dominated by the confident, expansive, cosmopolitan spirit of the High Tang — the poetry of Li Bai's cosmic visions, Wang Wei's serene landscapes, and the frontier poets' grand panoramas. After the rebellion, a fundamentally different poetry emerged: darker, more introspective, more morally engaged, more acutely aware of human suffering, political corruption, and the fragility of all human achievements.

The period from 755 to the fall of the Tang dynasty in 907 — conventionally divided into the Mid-Tang (中唐, ca. 766–835) and the Late Tang (晚唐, ca. 836–907) — produced poetry of extraordinary richness and variety, including some of the most admired works in the Chinese tradition. But the dominant tone of this period is one of loss: loss of political stability, loss of cultural confidence, loss of the imperial grandeur that had made the High Tang the golden age of Chinese civilization. The poets of this era did not merely record this loss; they transformed it into art of the highest order — art that, in many ways, speaks more directly to modern sensibilities than the sunlit masterpieces of the High Tang.

The towering figure of this transformation — and, in the judgment of many Chinese and Western critics, the greatest poet in the entire Chinese tradition — is Du Fu (杜甫, 712–770), the "poet-historian" whose work is the subject of the first and most extended section of this chapter.

2. Du Fu: The Poet-Historian

Du Fu (杜甫, 712–770), honored with the title "Sage of Poetry" (诗圣, Shi Sheng) — the counterpart to Li Bai's "Immortal of Poetry" — occupies a position in Chinese literary culture that has no exact equivalent in the West. He is not merely a great poet; he is the poet in whom the Chinese poetic tradition found its fullest, most complete, and most humane expression. Where Li Bai dazzles with his spontaneity and genius, Du Fu moves with his depth, his compassion, his moral seriousness, and his relentless artistic discipline. The comparison that Chinese critics have drawn for twelve centuries — Li Bai as the romantic genius, Du Fu as the conscientious master — captures a genuine difference in temperament and method, even if it oversimplifies the achievement of both poets.

Du Fu was born in 712 into a family with a distinguished literary lineage — his grandfather, Du Shenyan (杜审言, ca. 645–708), was one of the notable poets of the Early Tang. But despite his literary gifts, Du Fu's political career was a lifelong story of frustration. He failed the jinshi examination (a humiliation he never forgot), spent years seeking patronage from the powerful, and never held any position of real authority. When the An Lushan Rebellion erupted in 755, Du Fu was a minor official in Chang'an; the rebellion caught him in the capital, and his harrowing experience of war, flight, capture by rebel forces, escape, and the desperate attempt to rejoin the Tang court became the raw material of his greatest poetry.

The years during and after the rebellion — roughly 756 to 770, the last fourteen years of his life — were Du Fu's supreme creative period. Wandering through a devastated China — from Chang'an to the northwestern frontier, then south to Chengdu in Sichuan, then east along the Yangtze to Hunan, where he died in 770 — Du Fu wrote poems that captured the full range of the human experience of war, displacement, poverty, illness, and loss with an accuracy and emotional power that earned him the title "poet-historian" (诗史, shishi).

The term shishi does not mean that Du Fu merely recorded historical events in verse — though his poems are, in fact, an invaluable source for the history of the rebellion period. It means, rather, that his poetry achieves the scope, the seriousness, and the moral authority of history itself — that his poems, taken together, constitute a comprehensive account of the human condition in a time of catastrophe that is simultaneously deeply personal and profoundly universal.

3. Du Fu's Poetic Achievement

Du Fu's technical mastery of regulated verse (律诗, lushi) is universally acknowledged as the highest in the Chinese tradition. Where Li Bai wrote his greatest poems in the freer old-style forms (古体, guti), Du Fu brought the strict formal requirements of regulated verse — the tonal patterns, the syntactic parallelism, the structural proportions — to a level of expressiveness that no other poet has equaled. His regulated verse achieves effects of extraordinary complexity and emotional depth within the most demanding formal constraints — a paradox that Chinese critics have compared to the achievement of Bach in Western music, who created his most profound and moving works within the strict formal requirements of the fugue.

His "Autumn Meditations" (秋兴八首, Qiuxing ba shou), a sequence of eight regulated-verse poems written in 766 while living in Kuizhou (夔州, modern Fengjie, Chongqing) on the Yangtze gorges, is widely regarded as the supreme achievement of Chinese regulated verse. The opening poem of the sequence sets the tone:

玉露凋伤枫树林，巫山巫峡气萧森。
江间波浪兼天涌，塞上风云接地阴。
丛菊两开他日泪，孤舟一系故园心。
寒衣处处催刀尺，白帝城高急暮砧。

Jade dews wilt and wound the maple trees;
On Wu Mountain, in Wu Gorge, the air is desolate and dark.
Waves on the river surge as if to reach the sky;
Wind and clouds above the pass press darkness to the earth.
The clustered chrysanthemums have bloomed twice — tears of other days;
A lonely boat, tied fast — the heart that yearns for home.
Everywhere, cold-weather clothes are urged by scissors and rulers;
On the walls of White Emperor City, the evening wash-blocks pound.

The poem weaves together the natural landscape of the Yangtze gorges, the personal emotion of exile and homesickness, and the larger historical situation of the declining Tang empire into a single, seamless fabric. The "jade dews" and autumn maples establish the season and the mood of decay; the surging waves and pressing clouds evoke the political turmoil of the age; the chrysanthemums blooming for the second time (Du Fu had been in Kuizhou for two years) mark the passage of time and the tears of prolonged exile; and the final image — the sound of washing-blocks as women prepare winter clothes — introduces the domestic world of ordinary people into the poet's meditation on history and loss. Every detail functions on multiple levels simultaneously — as landscape description, as emotional correlative, as historical allusion, and as philosophical reflection — achieving a density of meaning that rewards endless rereading.

Du Fu's social conscience — his acute awareness of the suffering of ordinary people — is one of his most distinctive and most admired qualities. His "Three Officers" (三吏, San li) and "Three Partings" (三别, San bie), a set of six narrative poems written in 759 during a period of renewed fighting, depict the conscription of peasant soldiers, the separation of families, and the devastation of the countryside with an unflinching realism that has no precedent in Chinese poetry. "The Officer of Shihao" (石壕吏, Shihao li) describes a night spent in a village where an old woman is dragged from her home by a recruiting officer:

暮投石壕村，有吏夜捉人。
老翁逾墙走，老妇出门看。

At dusk I sought lodging at Shihao village;
An officer was seizing people in the night.
The old man climbed over the wall and fled;
The old woman went to the gate to look.

The poem's power lies in its restraint. Du Fu does not editorialize or moralize; he simply presents the scene — the officer's brutality, the old woman's desperate pleading (she has already lost three sons to the war), the poet's own helpless witnessing — and allows the reader to draw the moral conclusions. This technique of moral witness — of bearing testimony to suffering without rhetorical inflation — is one of Du Fu's greatest contributions to the Chinese poetic tradition and one of the qualities that make his work speak so powerfully to modern readers.

4. Du Fu's Legacy and the Confucian Ideal

Du Fu's reputation grew steadily after his death and reached its zenith in the Song dynasty (960–1279), when he was definitively established as the greatest poet in the Chinese tradition — a judgment that has been endorsed by the majority of Chinese critics ever since. The reasons for this elevation are complex. Du Fu's technical mastery, his thematic range, his emotional depth, and his moral seriousness all contributed to his canonical status. But the most important factor was the perceived alignment between Du Fu's poetry and the Confucian ideal of the loyal, compassionate, morally engaged public servant — the man who, even in the depths of personal suffering, never ceases to care about the welfare of the people and the fate of the state.

This Confucian reading of Du Fu — which emphasizes his loyalty to the Tang emperor, his compassion for the common people, and his sense of moral responsibility — has been immensely influential, but it is also, in some respects, a simplification. Du Fu was not merely a Confucian moralist; he was a supremely self-conscious artist who reflected constantly on the nature, the purpose, and the limitations of his own art. His famous line — "Literature is the affair of a thousand ages; its gains and losses are known in the depths of the heart" (文章千古事，得失寸心知) — expresses a view of literary art as something at once supremely important and deeply personal, an endeavor whose ultimate value can be judged only by the artist's own conscience.

Du Fu's influence on subsequent Chinese poetry was overwhelming. Virtually every major poet of the late Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties acknowledged Du Fu as a master and a model. The Song poet Huang Tingjian (黄庭坚, 1045–1105) built an entire poetic school — the Jiangxi school (江西诗派, Jiangxi shipai) — on the close study and imitation of Du Fu's techniques. The Ming critic Hu Yinglin (胡应麟, 1551–1602) declared that Du Fu's poetry was "the culmination of all the changes in poetry from antiquity to the present" — a judgment that placed Du Fu at the summit of the entire Chinese literary tradition.

5. Bai Juyi and the New Yuefu Movement

Bai Juyi (白居易, 772–846) is, after Li Bai and Du Fu, the most famous and most widely read poet of the Tang dynasty — and, in terms of the sheer number of his surviving poems (approximately 2,800), the most prolific. His fame rests on two quite different aspects of his work: on the one hand, his long narrative poems — above all "The Song of Everlasting Sorrow" (长恨歌, Changhen ge) and "The Ballad of the Lute" (琵琶行, Pipa xing) — which are among the most beloved works in all of Chinese literature; on the other hand, his social-protest poems — the "New Yuefu" (新乐府, Xin yuefu) — which represent the most sustained and systematic attempt in Chinese literary history to use poetry as a tool of political criticism.

The New Yuefu movement, which Bai Juyi led in collaboration with his friend Yuan Zhen (元稹, 779–831), was explicitly inspired by the ancient tradition of the Yuefu (乐府, "Music Bureau") — the Han dynasty institution that had collected folk songs partly as a means of gauging popular sentiment and informing the emperor of the people's grievances. Bai Juyi argued that poetry should serve the same function in his own age: it should "supplement" the government's understanding of the people's conditions, expose corruption and injustice, and move those in power to reform. His programmatic statement — "Articles are written for their times; poems are composed for the sake of affairs" (文章合为时而著，歌诗合为事而作) — became the manifesto of the movement.

Bai Juyi's fifty "New Yuefu" poems, written around 809, are deliberately accessible — written in plain language, on specific social issues, with prefaces that explain the political point of each poem. They address topics such as the forced conscription of peasant soldiers, the exploitation of pearl divers, the extravagance of the imperial court, the suffering of women sold into servitude, and the corruption of local officials. The poems are consciously didactic — their purpose is to instruct and to persuade, not merely to delight — and this didacticism has led some later critics to question their artistic merit. But at their best, Bai Juyi's social poems achieve a directness and an emotional power that fully justify his claim that poetry can — and should — serve as an instrument of social justice.

"The Song of Everlasting Sorrow" (长恨歌, 806), by contrast, is a work of romantic narrative — a retelling of the love story of Emperor Xuanzong (唐玄宗) and his beloved consort Yang Guifei (杨贵妃), whose relationship was popularly blamed for the An Lushan Rebellion. The poem — 120 lines of seven-character verse — is one of the supreme masterpieces of Chinese narrative poetry, telling the story of the emperor's infatuation, the consort's execution during the flight from Chang'an, and the emperor's inconsolable grief with a lyrical beauty and emotional intensity that have moved Chinese readers for twelve centuries. Its most famous lines —

在天愿作比翼鸟，在地愿为连理枝。
天长地久有时尽，此恨绵绵无绝期。

In heaven, we would be birds flying side by side;
On earth, trees with branches intertwined.
Heaven is long, earth endures — yet both shall end;
This sorrow stretches on and on, forever without end.

— have become proverbial expressions of undying love in the Chinese language.

6. The Late Tang Aesthetes: Li Shangyin and Du Mu

The Late Tang period (晚唐, ca. 836–907) — the last seventy years of the dynasty, during which the Tang state was progressively weakened by eunuch domination, factional struggles, peasant rebellions, and the growing power of regional military governors — produced a poetry of extraordinary refinement, emotional complexity, and often deliberately obscure beauty. The two greatest poets of this period — Li Shangyin (李商隐, ca. 813–858) and Du Mu (杜牧, 803–852) — are known collectively as "Little Li and Du" (小李杜, Xiao Li Du), a designation that acknowledges both their stature and their relationship to the "Great Li and Du" (大李杜, Da Li Du) — Li Bai and Du Fu — of the High Tang.

Li Shangyin is one of the most enigmatic and most passionately debated poets in the Chinese tradition. His poetry — particularly his famous "Untitled Poems" (无题, Wuti) — is characterized by a dense, allusive, emotionally charged language that creates an atmosphere of intense feeling while resisting any single, definitive interpretation. His poems are saturated with images of separation, longing, loss, and the passage of time — candles guttering, silk threads tangled, spring silkworms spinning until death, wax tears flowing until the candle burns out — and these images function simultaneously as descriptions of erotic love, as allegories of political frustration, and as meditations on the nature of beauty and its relationship to transience.

His most celebrated lines — from the untitled poem beginning "Meeting is hard, and so too is parting" (相见时难别亦难) — have become among the most quoted couplets in the Chinese language:

春蚕到死丝方尽，蜡炬成灰泪始干。

The spring silkworm spins silk until it dies;
The candle's tears do not dry until it turns to ash.

The couplet operates on at least three levels: as a description of the silkworm and the candle (literal); as a metaphor for the constancy of the lover, whose devotion endures until death (erotic); and as an allegory of the loyal minister, whose service to his sovereign continues until his last breath (political). The Chinese word for silk (丝, si) is a homophone of the word for longing (思, si), adding a further layer of meaning. This kind of polysemous density — in which multiple meanings coexist without canceling each other out — is the hallmark of Li Shangyin's art and the source of both his fascination and his difficulty.

Du Mu, by contrast, is a more accessible poet — elegant, witty, politically engaged, and possessed of a sharp historical imagination. His quatrains on historical themes are among the finest in the Chinese tradition, combining vivid evocations of the past with pointed commentary on the present. His "Mooring at Qinhuai" (泊秦淮, Bo Qinhuai) — "The merchant girl does not know the sorrow of a fallen state; / Across the river she still sings 'Flowers of the Rear Court'" (商女不知亡国恨，隔江犹唱后庭花) — uses the image of a singing girl performing a song associated with the decadent last emperor of the Chen dynasty (陈后主) to comment obliquely on the decline of his own age.

Du Mu's poetry is pervaded by a sense of historical melancholy — an awareness that the present is always in the process of becoming the past, that today's glories are tomorrow's ruins. His poem "On Passing the Hua Qing Palace" (过华清宫, Guo Huaqing gong) — which recalls the extravagance of Emperor Xuanzong's reign and the destruction that followed — exemplifies this mood of elegiac hindsight that characterizes much Late Tang poetry.

7. The Emergence of Ci: A New Lyric Form

One of the most significant literary developments of the Late Tang was the emergence of the ci (词) — a new lyric form that would become the dominant poetic genre of the Song dynasty and one of the great literary achievements of Chinese civilization. The ci originated as song lyrics — texts written to be performed to specific musical tunes — and its development is inseparable from the vibrant musical culture of Late Tang China, particularly the entertainment quarters of the great cities.

Unlike regulated verse (律诗, lushi) and jueju (绝句), which use lines of uniform length (either five or seven characters), the ci employs lines of varying length — typically ranging from one to eleven characters — arranged in patterns dictated by the particular tune (词牌, cipai) to which the lyric is set. Each tune has a fixed pattern of line lengths, tonal requirements, and rhyme positions, and the poet's task is to fill this pattern with words that fit both the musical requirements and the desired poetic meaning. The ci form thus offers the poet a very different set of expressive possibilities from those of regulated verse: the varying line lengths create rhythmic effects of greater flexibility and variety, and the association with music and performance gives the ci an emotional immediacy and a sensuousness that regulated verse, with its more formal and cerebral character, does not possess.

The earliest ci poets were anonymous songwriters working in the entertainment quarters of Chang'an, Chengdu, and other cities. The Dunhuang manuscripts — a vast cache of documents discovered in a sealed cave near the Silk Road oasis of Dunhuang in 1900 — include a substantial number of early ci lyrics, many of them popular songs on themes of love, separation, and the pleasures and sorrows of the entertainment world.

The first major literary figure to write ci was Wen Tingyun (温庭筠, ca. 812–870), a brilliant, dissolute, and politically unsuccessful poet who is traditionally regarded as the founder of the ci as a literary genre. Wen Tingyun's ci are characteristically sensuous, ornate, and emotionally intense — miniature dramas of desire, longing, and loss set in the boudoirs and gardens of beautiful women. His imagery is drawn from the world of feminine adornment — jade hairpins, silk curtains, incense smoke, painted eyebrows, morning toilette — and creates an atmosphere of luxurious intimacy that is both seductive and melancholy.

Wen Tingyun and his successors in the ci tradition — particularly the poets of the Huajian ji (花间集, Among the Flowers Collection), the first anthology of ci lyrics, compiled in 940 — established the conventions that would define the ci form for generations: the female persona, the themes of love and longing, the ornate imagery, the association with the world of entertainment and courtship. These conventions would be both continued and challenged by the great ci poets of the Song dynasty, who transformed the ci from a form of elegant entertainment into one of the most powerful and versatile vehicles of literary expression in the Chinese tradition.

8. Han Yu, Liu Zongyuan, and the Guwen Movement

While the poets of the Mid- and Late Tang were expanding the expressive range of Chinese verse, a parallel revolution was taking place in prose. The guwen movement (古文运动, guwen yundong, "ancient prose movement") — led by Han Yu (韩愈, 768–824) and Liu Zongyuan (柳宗元, 773–819) — was a literary and philosophical reform movement that sought to replace the ornate parallel prose (骈文, pianwen) that had dominated Chinese writing since the Six Dynasties with a simpler, more direct, and more intellectually vigorous style modeled on the prose of the pre-Qin philosophers and the great Han dynasty historians.

Han Yu, the more influential and more combative of the two, was one of the most remarkable intellectual figures of medieval China. A brilliant prose stylist, an impassioned Confucian ideologue, and a fearless critic of what he saw as the moral and cultural decay of his age, Han Yu fought on multiple fronts: against the dominance of Buddhism and Daoism, which he regarded as foreign and subversive doctrines that were undermining Confucian morality; against the ornate, empty parallel prose style that he saw as a symptom of intellectual decadence; and against the court culture of flattery, compromise, and moral cowardice that he believed was destroying the Tang state from within.

His most famous prose work, "Memorial on the Buddha's Bone" (论佛骨表, Lun Fo gu biao, 819), is a ferocious attack on Emperor Xianzong's plan to bring a relic of the Buddha — a finger bone — to the imperial palace for veneration. Han Yu argued that Buddhism was a barbarian doctrine incompatible with Chinese civilization, that the worship of relics was superstitious nonsense, and that the emperor's public veneration of the Buddha's bone would bring disaster upon the dynasty. The memorial — written with a passionate directness that violated every convention of court rhetoric — nearly cost Han Yu his life; the furious emperor initially sentenced him to death, and only the intercession of fellow officials commuted the punishment to exile in the remote southern province of Chaozhou (潮州, in modern Guangdong).

Han Yu's prose style — vigorous, direct, argumentative, free from the rigid tonal and syntactic parallelism of pianwen — became the model for Chinese literary prose for the next thousand years. The Song dynasty master Ouyang Xiu (欧阳修, 1007–1072) explicitly acknowledged Han Yu as his predecessor and model, and the tradition of guwen prose that Han Yu founded culminated in the work of the "Eight Great Masters of Tang and Song Prose" (唐宋八大家, Tang Song ba da jia), of whom Han Yu and Liu Zongyuan represent the Tang dynasty and Ouyang Xiu, Su Shi (苏轼), and four others represent the Song.

Liu Zongyuan, Han Yu's friend and ally in the guwen movement, was a more reflective and more artistically self-conscious writer. His most enduring works are his landscape essays — particularly the "Eight Records of Yongzhou" (永州八记, Yongzhou ba ji), written during his exile in the remote southern town of Yongzhou (永州, in modern Hunan) — which are among the finest examples of prose nature writing in the Chinese tradition. Liu Zongyuan's landscapes are not merely descriptions of scenery; they are meditations on exile, solitude, and the relationship between the human spirit and the natural world, rendered in a prose style of limpid clarity and quiet emotional intensity.

9. Literature as Moral Tool Versus Craft

The tension between two conceptions of literature — literature as a moral tool, serving the purposes of governance and ethical instruction, and literature as an autonomous craft, valued for its aesthetic beauty and formal perfection — runs through the entire Tang literary tradition, but it reached its most explicit and most intense expression in the debates of the Mid- and Late Tang.

The utilitarian conception — literature as a tool of moral and political instruction — had deep roots in the Confucian tradition, going back to the "Great Preface" (大序, Daxu) to the Shijing, which described poetry as a means by which the people could express their grievances and rulers could learn of the people's conditions. Bai Juyi's New Yuefu movement represented the most thoroughgoing application of this principle in Tang poetry: poetry as social criticism, poetry as political protest, poetry as a mirror held up to the injustices of the age. Han Yu's guwen movement applied the same principle to prose: writing should serve the Way (文以载道, wen yi zai Dao), should communicate moral truth, should be judged by its ethical content rather than its formal beauty.

The opposing conception — literature as craft, as art, as an end in itself — was represented most fully by the Late Tang aesthetes, particularly Li Shangyin and the ci poets. For these writers, the purpose of literature was not to instruct or to persuade but to create beauty, to capture fleeting moments of emotional experience, and to explore the expressive possibilities of language itself. The ornate imagery, the dense allusiveness, and the emotional ambiguity of Li Shangyin's poetry are the antithesis of Bai Juyi's programmatic clarity; they presuppose a reader who values complexity, subtlety, and aesthetic pleasure over moral instruction.

This debate was never resolved — nor could it be, since both conceptions capture genuine and important aspects of the literary enterprise. The greatest writers of the Tang — Du Fu above all — transcended the dichotomy, creating works that are simultaneously morally profound and aesthetically supreme. But the tension itself — between the claims of morality and the claims of beauty, between the social function of literature and its autonomous value — remained a central preoccupation of Chinese literary thought throughout the late imperial period and beyond.

10. The Decline of the Tang and the Poetry of Endings

The last decades of the Tang dynasty — from the Huang Chao Rebellion (黄巢起义, 875–884) to the final collapse of the dynasty in 907 — were a period of devastating civil war, political fragmentation, and cultural destruction. The great cities were sacked, the imperial libraries were burned, and the cultural institutions that had sustained Tang literary life for nearly three centuries were swept away. The poetry of this final period is pervaded by a sense of endings — of autumnal melancholy, of things passing beyond recall.

The most poignant expression of this mood is found in the work of the monk-poet Guanxiu (贯休, 832–912) and the wandering poet Luo Yin (罗隐, 833–909), whose verse captures the experience of living through the death of a civilization. But even in this darkest period, the creative vitality of Tang literature was not exhausted. The ci form continued to develop, the traditions of narrative poetry and prose fiction that had emerged during the Tang were carried forward into the Five Dynasties and Song periods, and the literary legacy of the Tang — its poetry, its prose, its critical theories, and its literary institutions — provided the foundation upon which all subsequent Chinese literature was built.

The Tang dynasty, in its three centuries of literary achievement, accomplished something unprecedented in Chinese — and indeed in world — literary history. It produced not only the greatest body of poetry in the Chinese language but also the critical frameworks, the institutional structures, and the literary forms that shaped Chinese literary culture for the next thousand years. The High Tang gave Chinese literature its golden age of confident, expansive, cosmopolitan poetry; the Mid- and Late Tang gave it a more complex, more self-conscious, more morally engaged literary art. Together, they constitute the supreme achievement of the Chinese literary tradition.

11. Conclusion

The period from the An Lushan Rebellion of 755 to the fall of the Tang in 907 was an age of catastrophe — but it was also an age of extraordinary literary creativity. Du Fu transformed the experience of war, exile, and human suffering into poetry of unmatched moral depth and formal perfection, earning the title of China's greatest poet. Bai Juyi demonstrated that poetry could serve as an instrument of social justice without sacrificing its power to move the human heart. Li Shangyin and Du Mu created a poetry of exquisite beauty and emotional complexity that enriched the Chinese lyric tradition immeasurably. The ci form emerged as a new vehicle for emotional expression that would dominate the poetry of the Song dynasty. And Han Yu and Liu Zongyuan reformed Chinese prose, creating a style of vigorous, direct, intellectually serious writing that became the standard for the next millennium.

The legacy of the late Tang poets was not merely a collection of masterpieces but a transformation of the very conception of what literature could be and do. Du Fu's vision of the poet as moral witness, Bai Juyi's insistence on the social responsibility of art, Li Shangyin's exploration of the limits of language and meaning, the ci poets' discovery of new modes of emotional expression, Han Yu's demand that prose serve the cause of truth — these achievements collectively defined the terms within which Chinese literature would develop for centuries to come. The golden age of the High Tang may have ended in 755, but the literary age that followed it — darker, more complex, more morally engaged — was, in its own way, no less great.

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