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Home among a thousand sorrows
2021-01-26 
Visiting the nearly 20-hectare cottage museum at this time of the year is a treat because of the scent of the 30 varieties of plum trees that are in blossom. CHINA DAILY/HUANG LERAN/FOR CHINA DAILY

For poetry lovers, the Du Fu Thatched Cottage Museum in Chengdu, Sichuan province, is a must-do pilgrimage.

During his three-year-and-nine-month stay in the cottage, Du Fu (712-770), who is one of China's most revered poets, penned 240 of his 1,400 extant poems.

Couplets with lines from Du's poems greet the eye, gracing gates, pillars and halls in the museum.

Good Rain on a Spring Night and Song of the Autumn Wind and the Cottage, which every Chinese student can recite, are two of the masterpieces Du wrote in the cottage.

Because of the poet's influence on Chinese literature, Du was hailed as China's Shakespeare in Du Fu: China's Greatest Poet, a BBC English documentary that premiered on April 6, 2020.

For those who are not familiar with his poetry, visiting the nearly 20-hectare cottage museum at this time of the year is still a treat because of the scent of the 30 varieties of plum trees that are in blossom.

People in Chengdu have had the tradition of planting plum trees since ancient times.

Lu You (1125-1210), a native of Shaoxing, Zhejiang province, is another poet who secured his place in the history of Chinese literature.

He was an official in Sichuan and visited the Qingyang Taoist Temple and Du's cottage, both of which are in the western part of Chengdu. At 65, he stepped down as an official and settled down in Shaoxing. Recalling his trip, he penned the following lines:

Riding a horse in west of Chengdu,

I was intoxicated with plum blossoms;

Ten kilometers of fragrance,

From Qingyang Taoist Temple to Flower Bathing Brook.

Du's cottage by the Flower Bathing Brook has flowers in all four seasons, magnolias in spring, lotus flowers in summer, sweet-scented osmanthus in autumn and plum blossoms in winter. Visitors like the sweet-scented osmanthus and plum blossoms most because of their fragrance.

Visiting the nearly 20-hectare cottage museum at this time of the year is a treat because of the scent of the 30 varieties of plum trees that are in blossom. CHINA DAILY/HUANG LERAN/FOR CHINA DAILY

Du wrote quite a few poems on the flowers near his cottage, with the most notable being Good Rain on a Spring Night:

A good rain falling

Just when it should

In springtime; riding

On the wind it fills

A whole night, soaking

The land with its goodness;

Clouds hang heavily over

Country paths; a lone light

Shines from a passing boat;

Morning and I see a damp

Redness on the branches,

Laden down with flowers.

Du lived in a period when the Tang Dynasty (618-907), one of China's most illustrious dynasties, had begun to decline. A war waged by two rebel generals from 755 to 763 ravaged many parts of the country and accelerated the dynasty's end.

Du, a native of Gongxian county in Henan province, reached Chengdu in 759 to take refuge from the war. In the ensuring year, he built a cottage by the Flower Bathing Brook with financial aid from his friend Yan Wu (726-765), who was a poet as well as a leading official in Sichuan.

A humanist, Du is revered for his writing style with its manifest sympathy for people's sufferings as a result of the war and his resentment of injustice and corruption. Among his most famous lines are these:

There comes the reek of wines

And meats that rot inside the gates

Of these rich, the bones of the

Starving and cold are strewn along

The roadsides.

The lines have been quoted to condemn the sharp contrast between the lives of the haves and have-nots.

Du himself was poor throughout his life. His youngest son died of starvation although he was a petty official at that time.

After the sudden death of Yan Wu, who had financially supported him, Du left Sichuan, passed today's Chongqing municipality, Hubei and Hunan provinces and died of illness on a boat on the east bank of the Dongting Lake in Hunan on his way home to Henan.

Visiting the nearly 20-hectare cottage museum at this time of the year is a treat because of the scent of the 30 varieties of plum trees that are in blossom. CHINA DAILY/HUANG LERAN/FOR CHINA DAILY

In 761, the thatched roof of Du's cottage was destroyed in a storm, leading him to think of the plight of other poverty-stricken scholars.

Rather than wallowing in self-pity, he composed the poem Song of the Autumn Wind and the Cottage desiring that all who needed could take welcome shelter in an immense house with thousands of rooms, and saying if only such could be, he would be content to be frozen to death in his leaking cottage.

Du's poems have been referred to as poetic history since they faithfully record the times he live in and people's misfortunes because of the war.

Du's cottage fell into ruins after he left.

The Du Fu Thatched Cottage Museum in Sichuan province's Chengdu is where Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu lived for about four years and penned 240 of his 1,400 extant poems. HUANG LERAN/FOR CHINA DAILY

A replica of the cottage was built in 1997, according to the description of his poems.

Not far from the replica is the Shrine of Gongbu (Du's title as a petty official for a short time) where a statue of Du and those of his admirers Lu You and Huang Tingjian (1045-1105), two prominent figures in Chinese literature, are housed.

The cottage museum also harks back to Du's era with a gigantic hall displaying lots of Tang utensils that were discovered on the site in 2001.

Workers found Tang ash pits and a site of human existence when laying underground pipelines on the western side of the museum's main entrance and northeastern side of the Shrine of Gongbu.

Such a find of Tang relics in Chengdu is rare, says Wang Yi, head of the Sichuan Provincial Cultural Heritage Administration.

The find has verified Du's descriptions of the natural and living environments around the Flower Bathing Brook and the location of his cottage, ending the complaint that the museum only displayed literature but no Tang objects.

Then again, contemporary visitors will discover there are many things that make Du's cottage a unique place in the history of China and the world.

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