Dù Fǔ 杜甫 (712–770)
Zì Zǐměi 子美; hào Shǎolíng yělǎo 少陵野老 (“the Wild Old Man of Shǎolíng”). Often called Dù Gōngbù 杜工部 (after his Acting Deputy Director-of-Civil-Works honorific) or Dù Shǎolíng 杜少陵 (after his Chángān residence near the Shǎolíng tomb). Native of Gǒngxiàn 鞏縣 in Hénán 河南 (modern Gǒngyì, Hénán); long-resident in Chángān, Chéngdū, and Kuízhōu 夔州.
Grandson of the early-Táng court poet Dù Shěnyán 杜審言 (645–708) and fourteenth-generation descendant of the famed Hàn / WèiJìn general Dù Yù 杜預 (222–284, Zuǒzhuàn commentator and conqueror of Wú in 280). Failed his jìnshì examinations in 736 and 747; his political career was brief and entirely peripheral — yòuwèishuàifǔ zhòucáo cānjūn 右衛率府冑曹參軍 in 754, zuǒ shíyí 左拾遺 (Left Reminder) in 757–758 under Sùzōng (the only post that gave him a court voice; he was demoted within a year), and finally jiàoshū jiāncháo gōngbù yuánwài láng 檢校監朝工部員外郎 from 765, an honorific that gave him the Gōngbù honorific.
The principal phases of his life: a privileged youth in the Kāiyuán and early Tiānbǎo periods, including ten years as a freelance literary man in Chángān (746–755) trying for office; capture by An Lùshān’s rebels in Chángān (757) and dramatic escape to Sùzōng’s court at Fèngxiáng 鳳翔; demotion to Huázhōu 華州 sīgōng cānjūn 司功參軍 in 758; resignation and a long hardship migration through Qínzhōu 秦州 to Chéngdū 成都 in 759; the Cǎotáng 草堂 (“Thatched Hut”) period at Chéngdū and Zǐzhōu 梓州 1760–1765; the Kuízhōu 夔州 (in the Three Gorges) productive years 1766–1768; and a final dispossessed Yangtze-valley descent ending in his death on the river near Lěiyáng 耒陽 (Húnán) in Dàlì 5 (770), aged 59.
Dù Fǔ’s poetic corpus — over 1,500 surviving poems plus a smaller body of fù, biǎo, qǐ — is the largest survival of any Táng biéjí and the most exhaustively annotated body of pre-modern Chinese poetry. The Sòng commentary tradition for Dù Fǔ runs to over a hundred named commentators (the late-Sòng Jí qiānjiā zhù Dù gōngbù shī jí KR4c0018 is its consummation); the principal Kanripo holdings of his corpus are KR4c0015 (Sòng Jiǔjiā jízhù), KR4c0017 (Sòng Bǔzhù), KR4c0018 (Yuán Qiānjiā zhù), KR4c0019 (Míng Táng Yuánhóng’s Dù shī jūn), and KR4c0020 (Qīng Qiū Zhàoáo’s Dù shī xiángzhù).
CBDB confirms 712–770 (cbdbId 3915). With Lǐ Bái 李白 and Wáng Wéi 王維 one of the three towers of High Táng poetry; conventionally classed as the shīshèng 詩聖 (“Poet-Sage”) of the Chinese tradition. Wilkinson (§54) places Dù Fǔ among the four poets — Wáng Wéi, Dù Fǔ, Lǐ Bái, Bái Jūyì — who “have dominated the Chinese poetic tradition from [the Sòng] to this day.”