In the long list of imperial patrons the name of the Emperor Ming Huang
of the T`ang dynasty holds the foremost place. History alone would not have
immortalized his memory.* But romance is nearer to this Emperor's life
than history. He was not a great ruler, but an artist stifled in ceremony
and lost in statecraft. Yet what Emperor could escape immortality
who had Tu Fu and Li Po for contemporaries, Ch`ang-an for his capital,
and T`ai Chen of a thousand songs to wife? Poet and sportsman,
mystic and man of this world, a great polo player, and the passionate lover
of one beautiful woman whose ill-starred fate inspired Po Chu-i,
the tenderest of all their singers,** Ming Huang is more to literature
than to history. Of his life and times the poets are faithful recorders.
Tu Fu in `The Old Man of Shao-Ling' leaves us this memory of his peaceful days
passed in the capital, before the ambition of the Turkic general An Lu-shan
had driven his master into exile in far Ssuch`uan. The poet himself
is speaking in the character of a lonely old man, wandering slowly
down the winding banks of the river Kio.

--
* A.D. 685-762.

** See and .
--

"`Alas!' he murmured, `they are closed, the thousand palace doors,
mirrored in clear cool waters. The young willows and the rushes renewing
with the year -- for whom will they now grow green?'

"Once in the garden of the South waved the standard of the Emperor.

"All that nature yields was there, vying with the rarest hues.