His writings are a sustained articulation of remembrance in the face of loss that that runs right through Chinese literary history: Li Qingzhao at the fall of the Song, a refugee still guarding her precious scrolls of his poetry; Fang Weiyi, another great female writer and educator who wrote of the fall of the Ming with Du Fu in mind; Zheng Zhen, the greatest of the moderns, who made a pilgrimage to Du Fu’s Thatched Cottage in Chengdu amid the horrors of the Taiping; even during the Rape of Nanjing in 1937 the poet’s words appeared in graffiti on fire-scorched walls: ‘the state is destroyed
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