Chinese · 712–770
Du Fu failed the civil service examination twice, spent ten years in the capital petitioning for a post, and finally got a minor one supervising the storage of weapons in 755, weeks before An Lushan's rebellion tore the Tang dynasty open. He was captured by the rebels, escaped in rags to the emperor in exile, was given a job as a remonstrance official and lost it for defending a friend. The rest of his life was flight: famine in Qinzhou, a thatched cottage in Chengdu, a boat on the Yangtze, and death at fifty-eight on the river in Hunan. About fifteen hundred of his poems survive. He was not much admired in his lifetime and became, from the Song dynasty on, the poet Chinese critics call the sage of poetry: the one who put the collapse of a state, the price of grain and a hole in his own roof into regulated verse without loosening a single rule of the form.