Re-walk the first half of the life of the poet Du Fu and reproduce the historical picture of the prosperous era of the Tang Dynasty

"If the study of Tang history is compared to an exam, then Du Fu is almost showing you the answers, but his gestures and codes need to be interpreted. ”

There has never been a shortage of research on the poet Du Fu, but most of them focus on the second half of Du Fu's life, but there is little in-depth research in the first half of his life, resulting in little attention to Du Fu in the first thirty or forty years of his life, and this is precisely the period of formation and development of his thoughts and cognition. "Du Fu's Historical Picture: The Prosperous Age" is one of the few historiographical works in China that focuses on the first half of Du Fu's life, using historical research methods to place Du Fu in the family, society, political struggles and geographical patterns of the 8th century, and to verify and restore a historical picture of the prosperous era that Du Fu witnessed and lived in that day.

Universal history and unique life history: the dual meaning of "poetic history".

Compared with the works of the school of sweat, there are not too many biographies of Du Fu in the sense of modern historiography. In 1952, Hong Ye published a monograph "Du Fu: China's Greatest Poet", which systematically narrated and researched Du Fu's life. The book is divided into two volumes, the first volume is the main body of the biography, and the second volume is the annotated appendix. In the same year, Feng Zhi also published "The Biography of Du Fu", which was smaller than Hong's works, but had a long influence in China. In 1971, Guo Moruo published his last monograph "Li Bai and Du Fu", which covered Du Fu's life and put forward many new insights from a historical perspective. In 1982 and 1988, Chen Yizhen successively published the first volume and the middle and second volumes of Du Fu's Commentary, which far surpassed the works of Hong and Feng in length, and was very meticulous in historical research and poetry analysis. In 1993, Mo Lifeng published "Du Fu's Commentary", which has little historical evidence and focuses on literary criticism and evaluation. The above biography gives us a deeper and more three-dimensional understanding of Du Fu's personal experience and the background of the times than the traditional chronology.

However, the existing biographies of Du Fu still bear a strong chronological imprint in terms of focus and layout. Compared with the biographies of ordinary historical figures, Du Fu's juvenile and young adult years are particularly blank. The part that has the most ink is roughly after Du Fu's middle age. In addition, the Anshi Rebellion was given too much historical significance in the course of Du Fu's life. The reason for this situation is directly related to the characteristics of Du Fu's poems. We know that there are about 1,500 Du poems in existence, and these poems show a typical exponential growth in terms of chronological distribution. If the number of words in the poems is taken into account, then most of Du Fu's poems we see today are actually records of Du Fu's life after middle age, as well as twilight memories concentrated in Kuizhou and other places. In the later period of Tianbao's presentation to Xuanzong, Du Fu said that "since the age of seven to embellished the poetry pen, to forty years, about more than a thousand articles" ("into the carving of the table"), and the existing Du Fu's previous poems are only more than 100. In other words, there are thousands of poems scattered by Du Fu before Tianbao alone, which is undoubtedly a huge shortcoming for exploring the life course of Du Fu in his early years.

On the other hand, thousands of years later, compared with the original author Du Fu, our understanding of Du Fu's poems as historical interpreters will inevitably be different. Whether on foot or on horseback, planting bamboo, or logging trees, Du Fu's concerns are not so important to us. On the contrary, many details of travel, interpersonal relationships, and historical events that flash in the poem have become valuable clues for us to explore relevant history. However, in the actual biographical writing, we are often assimilated by Du Fu's strong emotions, thus further amplifying Du Fu's personal life experience at the historical level. One of the most striking examples is that Du Fu's generation's perception of the rise and fall of the Anshi Rebellion was mixed with a large number of personal encounters and contrasting factors between the present and the past. If we do not distinguish this, we will take it for granted that the status of the Anshi Rebellion in Du Fu's life and even in the history of the Tang Dynasty will be infinitely elevated, and many deeper historical changes will be overlooked. In recent years, a common way of writing is to place historical figures under the times, often referred to as "so-and-so and his era", which is actually a reconciliation of the two historical methods of the traditional biography and the overall history of the yearbook school. In the famous "Saint-Louis", Jacques Le Goff (1924-2014) said:

The choice made by the historian is actually to force himself to do one important task in the first place, and that is the collection of documentary materials, on which the extent to which he hopes to know the preacher and how far he can go depends on the documentary materials...... Because Saint Louis was both king and saint, he was, along with Saint Francis, one of the 13th-century figures for whom we have the most first-hand accounts...... For historians, however, the apparent superiority of Saint-Louis due to the abundance of information is offset by doubts about the credibility of such information...... The first reason lies in the quality and goals pursued by the biographers of Saint Louis in the past, almost all of whom were authors of biographies of the saints...... They were not content to write him as a saint, but to write him as both a king and a saint according to the ideals of the group to which they belonged...... Most of the information we have about King Saint-Louis is written, which facilitates casual processing. These texts are "biographies" or "biographies" of the saints written in Latin...... The text is full of formatted accounts.

If Louis IX, King of France, was a religiousized historical figure, then Du Fu was a highly literalized historical figure, and he was the Saint Louis of literary history. Fu Xuancong bluntly said that the difficulty of Du Fu's research is that he "does not suffer from too little information like some writers, but suffers from too much information." It's just that a large amount of historical materials about Du Fu are actually complicated annotations to his literary status. If Le Goff had in mind, Saint-Louis is precisely about highlighting the individual and the individual. In view of this, we might as well try to get rid of the writing mode of "big history" and restore the various historical pictures he saw from the perspective of Du Fu as a microcosm.

Du Fu's name of "History of Poetry" has a long history. Compiled in the second half of the 9th century, the "Ability Poems" has the following record of Du Fu: "Du Fenglu Mountain's difficulty, exile from Longshu, Bi Chen in poetry, extrapolated to the hidden, left nothing behind, so it was called 'Poetry History' at that time." Du Fu is not Guicciardini (1483-1540), but his work is quite similar to the Renaissance historian's famous work, The History of Italy, which contains a lot of retelling of the canon history and paraphrasing of common sense. Many historical events seem to be well documented in Du's poems, but a little tracing back reveals that similar accounts already existed in the official archives of the time. As Ranke (1795-1886) said in his critique of Guicciardini, "we must collect and study extensively the reports and discourses that preceded him". Interpreting Du Fu at this level, clever people such as Qian Qianyi and Qiu Zhaoao can still make small remarks through the comparison of historical materials, while those who do not understand the essentials only serve as third-hand retellers of events after official documents and Du Fu's poems.

Therefore, the more important significance of "History of Poetry" lies in the fact that Du Fu, as a historical participant, provided future generations with original historical materials that he had seen. "History of Poetry" is the same as "Poetry Immortal" and "Poetry Buddha", and the core of the definition is the latter word, and the "history" here is not history, but historians and historians, in today's words, called "historical historians". "The Legend of the Ram" says: "What you see is different, what you hear, what you hear." "Aside from the scriptures, what we see, hear, and hear is actually a classification method of historical records, that is, the so-called original historical materials and paraphrased historical materials in the historical circles, and behind them is the so-called writing intention of the current historical materials. William Dilthey (1833-1911) argued that "the process by which one grasps and interprets one's own life takes place in a long series of stages" and that "in the final analysis, autobiography can be extended into a certain depiction of history". This depiction, though limited, is meaningful enough to be imbued with meaning through the individual's experiential relationship with the world. As an eyewitness, Du Fu recorded many unknown historical details with 1,500 surviving poems, and successfully integrated them throughout his own life, finally forming a standard autobiography in Dilthey's eyes. With a wealth of personal experience, his life history is stirred and blended with the history of the Tang Dynasty in the mid-8th century, releasing energy beyond imagination. This is probably the real value of the "history of poetry". (Excerpt from the preface to "Du Fu's Historical Picture: The Prosperous Age")