Morning - a hut on the west bank of a stream
In the winter of 759 Du Fu left the disorder of the An Lushan rebellion and came west to Chengdu with his family. In the spring of 760 he built a thatched cottage on the bank of the Huanhua Stream, and he lived in it for three years and nine months. More than 240 of the poems that survive were written there, including the one almost every Chinese schoolchild knows, the song of the thatch torn away by the autumn wind. It is worth pausing on how much of a literature can come out of one small building.
The cottage was abandoned after Du Fu left in 765. The Tang poet Wei Zhuang later found the site and rebuilt the thatch, and the place has been repaired and enlarged at least fourteen times since. What you walk through today keeps the axial, courtyard-by-courtyard plan of the Ming Hongzhi 13 (1500) and Qing Jiaqing 16 (1811) rebuilds, and covers nearly 800 mu - roughly 300 mu of heritage buildings and 500 mu of garden. On the main axis stand the gate, the Daxie hall, the Shishitang, the Chaimen and the Gongbu Shrine; to one side is the reconstructed thatched cottage itself. It is a first-batch National Key Cultural Relics Protection Unit, was among China's first first-class national museums in 2008, and holds the country's largest collection of Du Fu research materials and of Du Fu-related calligraphy and painting.
Study session on site
Rather than a walk-through, this day is built around two short reading sessions led by your guide. The first is textual: take one poem written in this garden and work out what is actually happening in it, line by line, against the landscape it describes. The second is historical: what it meant for a poet in the eighth century to be here at all - what he had fled from, what he wrote about instead, and why a place of exile became, over twelve hundred years, a national literary shrine. Students are given the texts in advance and are expected to have read them.
Lunch
A Sichuan lunch near Huanhua Stream.
Afternoon - Xue Tao, and a poem turned into a place
After lunch you cross the city to the south bank of the Jinjiang river and the Wangjiang Tower Park, whose cultural relics area is included in this programme. The park exists because of a poet too: Xue Tao, one of the very few women to be remembered by name from the Tang, who lived and wrote on this river. What survives of her reputation here is unusually concrete - the Xue Tao Well, from which water was drawn in the Ming dynasty to imitate the small deep-red note-paper she devised, known ever afterwards as Xue Tao's note-paper. The buildings around it were raised over the Ming and Qing and include the Chongli Pavilion of 1889, built on the site of a Ming tower destroyed in 1644, along with the Zhuojin and Yinshi pavilions and the Wuyun Immortal Hall.
The park is also planted deliberately: several hundred varieties of bamboo, gathered because Xue Tao loved it and used it in her verse. The final session of the day uses that fact as its subject - how a poet can be remembered by a plant, a well, a paper and a building, and what it takes for a literary reputation to survive twelve centuries. Students are asked to argue a position on which of those memorial forms actually does the work.
Meals
Lunch
Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.
