China Guide
Sichuan and Chongqing
Du Fu Caotang
Opening time: Daily 9am–5pm
Price: ¥60
Address: 2km west of Qingyang Gong (#901 bus route)
The line of minibuses pulled up outside Du Fu Caotang (Du Fu's Thatched Cottage) attests to the respect the Chinese hold for the Tang-dynasty poet Du Fu. His works record the upheavals of his life and times with compassion and humour, and are considered, along with the more romantic imagery of his contemporary Li Bai, to comprise the epitome of Chinese poetry. Born in 712, Du Fu struggled for years to obtain a position at the imperial court in Chang'an, succeeding only after one of his sons had died of starvation and just as the empire was struck by the An Lushan rebellion. Fleeing the war-ravaged capital for Chengdu in 759, he spent the next five years in a simple grass-roofed dwelling outside the city's west wall, where he wrote some 240 of his 1400 surviving poems. Du Fu spent his later years wandering central China "like a lonely gull between the earth and the sky", dying on a boat in Hunan in 770.
Three centuries after Du Fu's death, a pleasant park was founded at the site of his cottage by fellow poet and admirer Wei Zhuang, and around 1800 it was expanded to its current layout of artfully arranged gardens, bamboo groves, pools, bridges and whitewashed halls. Besides antique and modern statues of Du Fu – depicted as sadly emaciated – there's a small, free museum illustrating his life.