54 Tao Yuanming

An Idyllist Inflicting Great Impacts to Chinese Culture

Tao Qian (365-427), with polite name as Yuanming, was a prose writer and idyllic poet standing out head and shoulders of other men of letters in Chinese history. People admired him both for his excellent literary works and his high profile moral integrity. Tao Yuanmong’s prose essay Source of Peach River was admired as a model of prose classics that for thousand years had served as the first stepping stone for schoolchildren began their access to literature. The essay told a story with simple and vivid language: One spring day, a fisherman set out for a trip with rowing a boat. Before long, he surprisingly found a strange peach forest in fully blossoming that he had never been seen before. When he went to a mountain cave, he got off the boat, groped through the narrow cave passage, and came to a new open field. There were trees, farmlands and villages, and people working in the fields were all ancient style attired. The villagers seemed frightened at the sight of a stranger. They later told the outsider that their ancestors, for the sake of fleeing from the turmoil in Qin Dynasty (200 BC), moved into the mountain and isolated themselves from the outside world. Since then they led a peaceful life free from war disasters and government oppressions and taxations. Given the long-lasting turmoil circumstance in Jin, the work Source of Peach River would be an allegory story in which the writer expressed his longings for utopia.

Tao Yuanming’s high profile integrity had spotlighted in a story of “refusing kowtow for earning 5 dou rice” (5 dou equal to 75kg) Tao had been a county governor earning a monthly salary only 5 dou rice. Once his superior would come, according to the general practice, the county officials must line up and bow him in. Tao hated to do that, he took off his official hat, hung it on the wall and walked away.

After Tao Yuanming returned home, he became a bare peasant. He did farm works everyday and led a real poverty-stricken life, but he was happy and optimistic. He was also a heavy drinker, used to compose poems over drinking cups of wine. He wrote a large quantity of excellent poems, among which the most popular and widely-appreciated two lines sounded:

Holing chrysanthemum aside the fence east

Watching the South Mountain with a feeling of content

As early as in the Spring & Autumn Period, many Taoist scholars had side stepped the worldly life and secluded themselves in the wild. The heritage made apparently a come-back and carried on by Tao Yuanming. And Tao’s poetry and performance had also inflicted a great impact on the poetry composition of the coming Tang Dynasty.