Six Dynasties recluse who made farming a poetic ideal
Tao Yuanming (365–427), also Tao Qian, was a Six Dynasties poet-official who spent much of life farming and reading in rural reclusion. His plain style bucked contemporary literary fashion; from the Tang onward he became the model recluse farmer, and Northern Song literati such as Su Shi crowned him a master.
Midlife he changed personal names while keeping the family surname—Yuanming to Qian—amid naming complexities later tangled by Tang taboo rules around imperial characters. He is also linked with the names Yuanliang, Shenming and Quanming, partly because Tang rules forbade writing an emperor's personal characters, forcing substitutions.
His great-grandfather was the eminent Jin general and governor Tao Kan, and his grandfather and father both rose to county governor, yet he was born into modest poverty with little political pull. He is usually dated to 365 in Chaisang, whose name means Mulberry-Bramble, near Mount Lu and Poyang Lake in what is now Jiujiang in Jiangxi.
He grew up in turbulent times: he was about eighteen when the invading Former Qin state was checked at the Battle of Fei River in 383. Mount Lu near his home became a Buddhist centre and a birthplace of Pure Land Buddhism after the monk Huiyuan settled there in 386, when Tao was twenty-one. Across more than ten years, in five separate stints, he held civil and military posts and sailed down the Yangzi to the capital Jiankang.
That service was miserable. He worked under two usurpers, Huan Xuan and Liu Yu, and under Emperor An of Jin, a member of the ruling Sima family made crown prince in 387 although he could not dress himself or speak. Tao is counted a man of the Eastern Jin, the dynasty that ran from 317 to 420, which he outlived. Against that backdrop his retreat to farming, reading and wine looks less like escapism than a considered refusal, and later readers from the Tang onward treated it that way.
Source: Tao Yuanming
