High Tang flowering of Chinese poetry: Li Bai and Du Fu
- Date
- c. 750 CE (High Tang, fl. 744-770)
- Category
- Culture, arts & philosophy
- Region
- China (Tang dynasty), East Asia
- Era
- Post-Classical / Medieval
- Significance
The mid-eighth century marked the apex of the Tang dynasty's golden age of Chinese poetry, the so-called High Tang, dominated by Li Bai (701-762) and Du Fu (712-770), traditionally regarded as the two greatest poets in the Chinese literary canon.
Li Bai, the 'Banished Immortal,' was celebrated for spontaneous, exuberant verse steeped in Taoist imagery, nature, friendship, and wine, while Du Fu, later honoured as the 'Poet-Sage' and 'Poet-Historian,' achieved a moral seriousness and technical mastery of regulated verse (lüshi) that made his work a chronicle of his turbulent age. The two met in 744 and formed one of literature's most celebrated friendships, exchanging poems though they met in person only a few times. The catastrophic An Lushan Rebellion (755-763) shattered the cosmopolitan brilliance of Emperor Xuanzong's court and deeply coloured Du Fu's mature poetry of war, displacement, and human suffering. Their roughly 2,500 surviving poems, alongside nearly 50,000 extant Tang poems by more than 2,000 authors preserved in the Quantangshi, established models of lyric expression imitated for over a millennium across China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam.
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Empires active in c. 750 CE (High Tang, fl. 744-770)
- Tang Dynasty618 CE – 907 CE
- Umayyad Caliphate661 CE – 750 CE
- Byzantine Empire330 CE – 1453 CE
- Abbasid Caliphate750 CE – 1258 CE
- Kanem-Bornu Empire700 CE – 1900 CE
- Tibetan Empire618 CE – 842 CE
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