Chinese · -340–-278
Qu Yuan was a minister and royal kinsman in the southern state of Chu who advised alliance with Qi against the rising power of Qin, lost the argument to rivals at court, and was slandered and banished. When Qin took the Chu capital of Ying in 278 BC he is said to have walked into the Miluo River holding a stone. Villagers raced boats to find him and threw rice into the water to keep the fish from his body, which is the story attached to the dragon boat festival every fifth day of the fifth month. He is the first named poet in Chinese literature and the first to write in the first person about his own political disgrace. The Li Sao, a long poem of exile in which the speaker searches heaven and earth for someone who will recognise him, invented the tradition of the loyal minister slandered by petty men, a figure every later Chinese poet in trouble reached for.