16 Facts About Qu Yuan

Qu Yuan was a Chinese poet and aristocrat in the State of Chu during the Warring States period.

Qu Yuan is known for his patriotism and contributions to classical poetry and verses, especially through the poems of the Chu Ci anthology : a volume of poems attributed to or considered to be inspired by his verse writing.

Qu Yuan is remembered in connection to the supposed origin of the Dragon Boat Festival.

Historical details about Qu Yuan's life are few, and his authorship of many Chu Ci poems has been questioned at length.

The first known reference to Qu Yuan appears in a poem written in 174 BC by Jia Yi, an official from Luoyang who was slandered by jealous officials and banished to Changsha by Emperor Wen of Han.

The only surviving source of information on Qu Yuan's life is Sima Qian's biography of him in Shiji, although the biography is circumstantial and probably influenced greatly by Sima's own identification with Qu.

Qu Yuan tried to resume relations between Chu and Qi, which King Huai had broken under the false pretense of King Hui of Qin to cede territory near Shangyu.

In 278 BC, learning of the capture of his country's capital, Ying, by General Bai Qi of the state of Qin, Qu Yuan is said to have collected folktales and written the lengthy poem of lamentation called Lament for Ying.

Qu Yuan is regarded as the first author of verse in China to have his name associated to his work, since prior to that time, poetic works were not attributed to any specific authors.

Qu Yuan is considered to have initiated the so-called sao style of verse, which is named after his work Li Sao, in which he abandoned the classic four-character verses used in poems of Shi Jing and adopted verses with varying lengths.

Qu Yuan is regarded as one of the most prominent figures of Romanticism in Chinese classical literature, and his masterpieces influenced some of the great Romanticist poets in the Tang dynasty.

The Chu Ci was compiled and annotated by Wang Yi, and is the source of transmission of these poems and any reliable information about them to subsequent times; thus, the role which Qu Yuan had in the authoring, editing, or retouching of these works remains unclear.

Qu Yuan began to be treated in a nationalist way as "China's first patriotic poet" during World War II.

Qu Yuan is the only person in the whole of Chinese history who is fully entitled to be called 'the people's poet'.

For example, one high-school Chinese textbook from 1957 began with the sentence "Qu Yuan was the first great patriotic poet in the history of our country's literature".

However, the legend continues, that late one night, the spirit of Qu Yuan appeared before his friends and told them that he died because he had taken himself under the river.