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“We have Dante, Shakespeare and Du Fu (712 — 770). These poets create the very values by which poetry is judged,”said Harvard professor Stephen Owen in Du Fu, China’s Greatest Poet, a BBC documentary.

Despite the fact that Du Fu is usually mentioned in the same breath as Dante and Shakespeare, he has remained largely unknown in the Western world for long. However, with the screening of the first English-language documentary feature about the poet, the days of Du Fu as China’s best-kept literary secret seem to be just numbered.

It is written and presented by Michael Wood, a skilled television historian who also directed other China-related documentaries such as The Story of China (2016) and The Story of China’s Reform and Opening Up(2018).

From the Yellow River to the Yangtze Gorges, and down to the forested hills of Hunan province, Wood visited a number of places such as the poet’s birthplace Gongyi in Henan province and Tang Dynasty capital Chang’an, today’s Xi’an. Along the way, he met and talked to ordinary people, dancers and musicians, who helped to tell the fantastic story of the poet. Interviews with famous scholars specializing in Chinese literature also helped present a clearer picture of the poet’s life experiences, literary significance and his friendship with Li Bai, another great Chinese poet.

Born in 712, Du Fu lived in the Tang Dynasty, a time marked by extraordinary cultural achievements. However, after a civil unrest, Du Fu, the former civil servant at the Tang court, was forced to be come a porter, and suffered from starvation. Through ups and downs, the poet never stopped writing, pouring out his concern for his-country and people as well as celebrating the simple joys of life.

Du’s poetry reflects the country’s historical events mirrored in his own spiritual journey, so he becomes a part of the emotional vocabulary of Chinese culture, said Stephen Owen, who in 2016 completed the eight-year-long project to translate DuFu’s 1,400 poems into English.