The poets
23 voices, three centuries
The Tang dynasty lasted from 618 to 907 and produced something like fifty thousand surviving poems. These are the poets whose work still shapes how Chinese is spoken and felt.
Li Bai
The most famous poet in the Chinese language, a wanderer, drinker and Daoist visionary whose lines feel improvised and inevitable at once.
9 poems in this edition →Du Fu
Witness to the An Lushan rebellion, he turned personal hardship and public disaster into poems of unmatched moral weight.
8 poems in this edition →Wang Wei
Painter, musician and Buddhist, he wrote landscapes so quiet that the reader seems to hear the mountain.
9 poems in this edition →Meng Haoran
A country recluse who preferred friends, wine and rivers to office, and whose plainest lines are the most moving.
3 poems in this edition →Bai Juyi
He wrote for ordinary readers and aimed to be understood by any old woman in the street; his plain style hides great craft.
3 poems in this edition →Li Shangyin
Master of the untranslatable mood, his love poems are gorgeous puzzles that readers have argued over for a thousand years.
4 poems in this edition →Du Mu
A brilliant prose stylist whose quatrains turn a spring street or a rainy festival into a meditation on empire and time.
5 poems in this edition →Wang Changling
Called the master of the seven-character quatrain, he wrote border poems of enormous scale and loneliness.
3 poems in this edition →Wang Zhihuan
Only a handful of his poems survive, yet two of them are among the most quoted lines in Chinese.
2 poems in this edition →Liu Zongyuan
Reformer, prose master and exile, whose twenty-character poem on fishing in snow is the coldest, calmest thing in the language.
1 poem in this edition →Meng Jiao
Poor, late to succeed and devoted to his mother, he wrote the poem every Chinese child learns about gratitude.
1 poem in this edition →Jia Dao
Legend says he agonised over a single verb for years; his poems are spare, austere and exact.
1 poem in this edition →Zhang Ji
A minor official remembered for one poem, whose midnight bell at Cold Mountain Temple still keeps travellers awake.
1 poem in this edition →Li Shen
A statesman whose two short poems on farming became the standard Chinese lesson on where food comes from.
1 poem in this edition →Chen Zi'ang
He argued for plain strength over ornamental court poetry and set the tone for the golden age that followed.
1 poem in this edition →Wang Bo
A child genius who died at twenty-six, leaving the most consoling farewell couplet in Chinese literature.
1 poem in this edition →Cui Hao
His tower poem was so good that legend says Li Bai refused to write on the same wall.
1 poem in this edition →Gao Shi
A frontier poet who could write encouragement as convincingly as grief.
1 poem in this edition →Wei Yingwu
A magistrate who wrote about the small weather of provincial life with perfect restraint.
1 poem in this edition →Cui Hu
One poem about a gate, a girl and a year that passed; it became the template for every Chinese love story about missed chances.
1 poem in this edition →Yuan Zhen
His elegies for his wife Wei Cong gave Chinese its most quoted images for a love that cannot be replaced.
1 poem in this edition →Liu Yuxi
Twenty-three years of banishment, and he still wrote the brightest poem about autumn in the language.
3 poems in this edition →He Zhizhang
A court favourite and friend of Li Bai, he retired at eighty-six and wrote the definitive poem on returning home a stranger.
2 poems in this edition →