Chinese · 365–427
Tao Qian took a series of small official posts to feed his family, and in 405 quit the last of them, magistrate of Pengze, after eighty-odd days, saying he would not bend his waist for five pecks of rice. He went home to farm land near Mount Lu and stayed there for the remaining twenty-two years of his life, poor, sometimes hungry, and repeatedly refusing to be recalled. He wrote about weeding, drinking, his children's laziness, the beans he could not get to grow, and the chrysanthemums by the eastern hedge. He also wrote a short prose fable about a fisherman who follows a stream through peach blossom into a valley where refugees from the Qin have lived undisturbed for centuries; Peach Blossom Spring became the standard Chinese image of a place outside history. Barely noticed in his own century, he was raised by Song critics to the position he still holds: the model of the poet who chose poverty over office.