Xindi Li
School of Language and Culture, Tianjin University of Technology, Tianjin 300382, China.
*Corresponding author: Xindi Li
Abstract
Du Fu’s Three Officials and Three Partings stands as the summit of realism in classical Chinese poetry. Composed against the chaos of the An Lushan Rebellion, these poems map the full texture of mid-Tang society in fine-grained detail. This paper approaches them through the lens of Du Fu’s own life and the conditions under which he wrote. It examines the content and artistry of the poems and, from there, works outward to interpret the social distress and the political and economic crises of the period. The study finds Du Fu wielding poetry as a tool of witness: he registers the brutal toll of war on ordinary people and exposes the deeper damage that political decay and institutional failure inflict on both state and society. The poems are far more than private expression. They form a living “poetic history”—one that gives later generations multiple ways of seeing Tang-dynasty society.
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Copyright
© 2026 by the author(s).
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) license, which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not modified or adapted.
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How to cite this paper
Du Fu’s Three Officials and Three Partings: Poetic Historical Testimony and Artistic Paradigm of Social Suffering in the Mid-Tang Dynasty
How to cite this paper: Xindi Li. (2026) Du Fu’s Three Officials and Three Partings: Poetic Historical Testimony and Artistic Paradigm of Social Suffering in the Mid-Tang Dynasty. Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Science, 10(6), 706-710.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/jhass.2026.06.014