Being the eldest of five sons, Liu’s father quit his post and traveled to Suchou to take care of funeral arrangements. After the funeral, instead of returning to Ch’ang-an, Liu Chen decided to spend the mourning period in Suchou. It turned out Liu Ch’a-kung was a local hero. Before he retired and moved to Suchou, his last post was as magistrate of nearby Teching 德清. The people of Teching were so grateful, they built a shrine in his honor, and he became their city god. The people of Teching still carry his statue through the streets every year to honor his memory.
Meanwhile, back in the capital, with her husband in mourning and not receiving a salary, Liu’s mother no longer had sufficient means to support herself and her children and moved to the countryside west of the capital to some farmland the Lu family owned on the Feng River 灃河. This was where Liu Tsung-yuan grew up and the place he later recalled in his poems when he thought of home. He was going on five, and it was also time for him to begin his education, at least the rudimentary phase. Since there wasn’t enough money for a tutor, his mother became his teacher. During their move she had neglected to bring any books with her, so she had to rely on her memory. But she was an educated woman, and what she remembered were the “Odes” in the Shih-ching 詩經, or Book of Poetry. And so Liu Tsung-yuan’s education began with poetry—poetry and messing around in the garden.
When, in 780, Liu Chen completed the three-year period of mourning, instead of returning to Ch’ang-an he asked to be appointed magistrate of Hsuancheng 宣城, south of Nanching 南京. It wasn’t any closer to the capital, but Liu Chen had lived in Hsuancheng as a teenager when he and his mother hid out there during the An Lu-shan Rebellion. Something about their time together drew him back. And at least the appointment included a salary that allowed him to provide his wife and children with the means to move back into the city. Liu Tsung-yuan was nearly eight, and his regular studies finally began, again under his mother’s guidance, but now with the help of a library of three thousand volumes his grandfather had left behind in the care of his other sons. Liu began to read the classics, be they Confucian, Taoist, or Buddhist, and by all accounts he was a precocious student.
The young Liu’s studies, however, were interrupted three years later. In the fall of 783, troops brought from western China to restore order in other parts of the country mutinied. They took over the capital, and the emperor and his court had to flee. Earlier that year, Liu’s father’s threeyear appointment in Hsuancheng ended, and he was appointed magistrate of Lingpao 靈寶, just across the Yellow River, more or less, from the Liu ancestral home near Yungchi. During the mutiny, Liu’s mother sent her son to join his father, while she stayed in the capital with her two daughters.
Once the insurrection was put down in the summer of 784, the court returned, and Liu’s father was rewarded for his service, and his loyalty. He was appointed administrative assistant to the military training commissioner for a vast region that included the areas south of the middle reaches of the Yangtze 長江. This time he took his son with him. Liu Chen’s job required him to visit all the major cities in the region, and he began with Hankou 漢口, where the Han River 漢江 joins the Yangtze. From there he proceeded south up the Hsiang River 湘江 to Changsha 長沙. While he was there, he arranged for his son, who was now twelve, to be betrothed to a daughter of the Yang 楊 family, a family that had already supplied a wife to Tu Fu and that would later supply one to Pai Chu-yi. During these peripatetic years, Liu Tsung-yuan attended local Confucian academies whenever possible, but he and his father never spent more than a year in any one place, and he often studied with tutors or on his own, under, of course, his father’s guidance.
Finally, in 788, when Liu was almost sixteen, his father was recalled to Ch’ang-an and rewarded for his service with the prestigious post of assistant censor in the Censorate 御史臺. Liu Tsung-yuan, meanwhile, began preparing for the exams he hoped would open the door to his own career as an official. As in his previous assignments, Liu’s father displayed an unwavering sense of justice. His first year at his new post, he was given charge of retrying a case and was instrumental in having the previous verdict overturned. The chief minister Tou Shen 竇參 was furious, as he had been responsible for applying the pressure that had resulted in the original verdict. For his temerity, Liu Chen was banished to the Yangtze Gorges and remained there for three years until Tou Shen himself was banished. Upon Liu Chen’s return in 792, he was rewarded for his refusal to bow to pressure and was appointed attendant censor in the Censorate, one notch higher than his previous post as assistant censor.
During his father’s absence, Liu dutifully took the imperial exams every year. But as the son of a man banished by someone as powerful as Tou Shen, it was hopeless. It was not until Tou Shen himself was banished that Liu Tsung-yuan passed, with honors. It was the second month of 793, and he was twenty-one years old.
With his son’s future looking bright and his own as well, Liu Chen decided it was time to conclude his son’s marriage to the daughter of the Yang clan to whom his son was betrothed nine years earlier. Unfortunately, Liu’s father died in the fifth month of that year—he was only fifty-four, and the marriage had to be postponed.
Although the customary three-year period of mourning prevented the young Liu from accepting an appointment in the government, it didn’t mean he had to stay home. He joined his father’s brother in the border post of Pinchou 豳州, 100 kilometers northwest of the capital. His uncle was serving there as administrative assistant to the military commissioner. During his years studying for the exams, Liu had formed relationships with a number of officials in the capital, and it hadn’t taken long for them to notice his literary skills. Even though Liu was “in mourning” and living in a military encampment in a border region, they began asking him to write compositions, including drafts of memorials they hoped to present at court. Liu was thus able to put his sabbatical to good use, which laid the groundwork for his future rapid rise through the ranks.
When the mourning period ended in 796, Liu returned to Ch’ang-an and consummated his marriage to his betrothed. He was twenty-four, and she was twenty. On his return, he also received an appointment as an assistant in the palace library. It wasn’t much of a post, but it provided an income and allowed Liu to prepare for another exam, a special one held later that year for recruiting especially talented men. Liu failed, but when the exam was held again two years later, he passed. He finally received his first real appointment. He became a proofreader in the Academy of Scholarly Worthies 集賢殿書院, which was responsible for compiling works for the palace library. It marked not only the beginning of Liu’s career as an official, but also the beginning of his literary career. His talents had already been noticed while he was a student and later while he was in mourning. He now became a sought-after writer of compositions of all kinds.
Liu was not only gaining a reputation as a writer, his reasoning abilities caught the notice of a group of reform-minded officials headed by Wang Shu-wen 王叔文 (753–806), who was chief adviser to the crown prince, Li Sung 李誦. It was also around this time that Liu and his mother moved into his grandfather’s former residence in the Shanho ward 善和里 (the name was changed to the Hsinglu ward 興祿里 in the T’ang, but Liu always refers to it by the old Sui-dynasty name). It was directly opposite the main gate of the Forbidden City and couldn’t have been a more prestigious address. But whatever joy Liu experienced in life was invariably soon balanced with sorrow. The first year at his new post, his wife had a miscarriage, and the following year she died giving birth to a stillborn infant. We don’t know much about Liu’s relationships with other women, but two years later, in 801, he fathered a daughter with an unknown woman. Perhaps she was a singsong girl Liu met at one of the parties the literati were always attending. He called his daughter Ho-niang 和娘, Happy Girl, and she lived with him the rest of her all-too-brief life.
Liu’s three-year appointment to the Academy ended the same year his daughter was born. It would have been normal for him to be sent out to the provinces then as a magistrate—to round out his experience with a local assignment. But Wang Shu-wen and the crown prince wanted to keep Liu close by—Liu later described his role in this group as
