Du Fu (712–770) is a poet of the Chinese Tang dynasty, revered for centuries as the shi sheng, the 'poet-sage': the moral realist whose verse turned the ruin of the An Lushan Rebellion into poetic witness, detail that complements but does not replace the historical record of a society coming apart, and who, respected in limited circles but not yet accorded his later canonical stature, was in time crowned perhaps the greatest poet in the Chinese tradition.
He failed the imperial examinations, drifted through a collapsing empire as a minor official and a refugee, and once came home from the capital to find his small son had starved to death. He died sick and poor on a boat on a southern river, and almost no one in his own century thought his poems remarkable. Three hundred years later, Chinese critics had settled on a single word for him: sage, the same word reserved for Confucius. A thousand years after that, schoolchildren still know his lines by heart.