The study of a monument is not easy to write. For ten centuries, scholars and appreciative readers have devoted themselves to the examination of Tu Fu's every word and action. Erudition and personal attachment together produced a body of work on this poet that is formidable not only in volume but in dedication. Indeed the intense personal devotion which Tu Fu has always been able to inspire secured for both his poetry and the responses to it a certain immunity from objective evaluation. Today, when the personal patterns of the cultivated past cannot be convincingly reproduced, a critic venturing upon the study of Tu Fu cannot presume to the roles of either learned scholar or passionate reader in the old mold. Other available roles for the modern critic seem limited to the false promise of revisionism or the naïveté of a fresh Western approach. It is hoped that the present work has avoided these tendencies by undertaking to examine Tu Fu in terms of his two distinct but related legacies, as a cultural monument and as a figure of great poetic achievements. In approaching Tu Fu anew, my intentions were also to reformulate and answer some questions that are often asked about Tu Fu and to pose questions that I have not found asked elsewhere.

A formal occasion for the expression of gratitude brings on reflectiveness and a certain somberness. Life engenders debts of gratitude of many kinds, and in an academic life, where intellectual and personal debts are often intermingled, it is difficult adequately to express all that is due.