Even the most casual acquaintance with Chinese poetry will have made the name of Tu Fu a familiar one, as the poet acknowledged throughout history by his countrymen to be China's greatest. And it is not only the poetry that is admired; the poet himself inspires respect, veneration even, as a good man. Though separated from us by a gap of thirteen centuries and an unfamiliar culture, we feel we know him, because the 1,400-odd poems reliably ascribed to him constitute a record of his life and his times that has earned him the epithet of poet-historian. There are poets of whom we know very little whose poetry is highly esteemed – Homer or Shakespeare, for example – and others of whom what we know does not enhance our appreciation of their poetry. In the case of Tu Fu, the identification of poet with the poetry is complete, to the point where it is possible to wonder how much of the esteem for the poetry is a product of admiration of the poet: how would we read “Journey to the North” if we thought it had been written by the lively Li Po? And conversely, how much do we like a poet who is continually telling us what a good man he is?

These are awkward questions that do not usually get asked. Professor Chou faces such problems and suggests solutions with far-ranging implications for future scholarship.