Du Fu

Xin (辛) Metal is the Metal of pearls and jade, with Hurting Officer revealed twice. Traditionally, Hurting Officer signifies overflowing talent and an unruly reliance on it. Looking back on the life of Du Fu, who “read ten thousand scrolls and wrote as if inspired by the gods”: the critical edge of his “Three Officials” and “Three Partings” poems reflects the Hurting Officer’s urge to “cry out against injustice.” With Water strong three times over, the Metal sinks to the bottom; the hardships captured in “literature resents a smooth fate” (ten years stuck in Chang’an, wandering in the southwest) offer a point of observation.

Yet Hurting Officer also signifies “poetry as history”: during the An Lushan Rebellion his poems recorded the suffering of the age and earned him the title “poet-historian,” so his talent ultimately found its place. Metal generates Water, and Water drains Metal; the loneliness of his late years, “drifting, drifting, what am I like? A lone gull between heaven and earth,” can be observed in hindsight through the structure of “much Water, sunken Metal.”

This is a cultural retrospective at the level of three pillars, not a fatalistic judgment. (Historical sources do not record the exact date of his death; only the year is noted here.)