The Last Words: The Night the Poet Died Dreaming of the North

The air in the small farmhouse at the foot of Mount Ji in Shanyin—present-day Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province—was cold and still. It was the twenty-ninth day of the twelfth lunar month, AD 1210, and an old man of eighty-five lay in his bed, his breath shallow, his body wasted by illness. His name was Lu You, and he was the most prolific poet in Chinese history. He had written over ten thousand poems, and now he had one last thing to say.

He called his sons to his bedside. He could not lift his head; he could barely lift his hand. But his voice, when it came, was clear. He dictated a poem—four lines, twenty-eight characters—that would become the most famous deathbed poem in Chinese history. It was called “Showing My Sons” (Shi Er):

“死去元知万事空， (I knew that when I died, all things would be empty,) 但悲不见九州同。 (But I grieve that I have not seen the Nine Provinces united.) 王师北定中原日， (On the day the royal armies pacify the Central Plains,) 家祭无忘告乃翁。” (In your ancestral sacrifices, do not forget to tell your father.) [citation:5][citation:11]

He had been waiting for that day for eighty-five years. He had been born in 1125, the year before the Jurchen Jin dynasty destroyed the Northern Song and conquered all of northern China [citation:2][citation:7]. He had spent his entire life dreaming of reconquest—writing poems, advocating war, volunteering for the frontier, and watching every effort fail. He had watched the peace party dominate the court, watched heroes like Yue Fei be executed, watched the empire settle into a comfortable cowardice that he could never accept.

And now, at the end, the dream was still unfulfilled. The “royal armies” had never marched north. The Central Plains were still in foreign hands. The Nine Provinces were still divided. He would die without seeing the thing he wanted most in the world.

But the poem was not a lament. It was a promise. Tell me when it happens. Even from the grave, I will be listening.

What drives a man—a poet, a minor official, a man of no military power—to spend his entire life dreaming of a reconquest that never came? The answer lies not in the farmhouse at Shanyin, but in the chaos of a childhood lived on the run, and in the stories of a father who wept for a lost empire.

The Son of the Fugitives: Forged in the Ashes of an Empire

The Blood of the Scholars

Lu You was born on the night of October 17, 1125, in a boat on the Huai River, as his father, Lu Zai, was traveling to the capital to take up a government post [citation:7]. The History of Song and later biographies record the moment: “宣和七年冬十月，犹是中原无事时” — “In the tenth month of the seventh year of Xuanhe, the Central Plains were still at peace” [citation:7]. It was a peace that would last less than two years.

His family was one of the great scholarly clans of the south. His grandfather, Lu Dian, had been a famous scholar and official; his father, Lu Zai, was a man of learning and integrity who had studied under the great reformer Wang Anshi [citation:4]. The Lu family had served the Song dynasty for generations. They were not aristocrats of the sword but of the brush—men who believed that the empire was held together by culture, by ritual, by the written word.

But the brush could not stop the Jurchen cavalry. In 1127, the Jin armies sacked the capital of Kaifeng and captured the emperor and his father. The Northern Song was destroyed. The Lu family fled south, joining the millions of refugees who crossed the Yangtze to escape the invaders. Lu You was two years old.

The Education of a Patriot

Lu You grew up in a household of exiles. His father, Lu Zai, was a man of fierce patriotism who refused to serve the Jin and who gathered with other refugee scholars to discuss the recovery of the north. The History of Song records the scene that shaped the young Lu You’s soul:

“When I was a child, I saw the worthy officials who were my father’s friends. Whenever they spoke of the theft of the imperial tombs and the sorrows of the north, they wept together. Even when food was served, they could not swallow it and left. My father would return home and also refuse to eat.” [citation:4]

It was in this atmosphere—of grief, of shame, of unquenchable longing—that Lu You was formed. He learned to read and write from his father and his tutors. He studied the Spring and Autumn Annals, the Book of Songs, the histories of the Han and Tang. But the most important lesson he learned was not from a book. It was from the tears of his father and his father’s friends. He learned that the north was lost, and that it must be recovered. He learned that this was the only thing that mattered.

At the age of twenty, he wrote the line that would define his life: “上马击狂胡，下马草军书” — “On horseback, I strike the mad barbarians; off horseback, I draft military dispatches” [citation:2][citation:8]. He was not yet a soldier, not yet an official, not yet anything. But he knew what he wanted to be: a warrior-scholar who would drive the Jurchen from the Central Plains.

The Three Relationships That Defined Lu You

The Mother Who Destroyed His Happiness: Lu You‘s Mother

Lu You married his cousin Tang Wan when he was twenty years old. She was beautiful, accomplished, and beloved by her husband. But Lu You’s mother disapproved. The traditional explanation is that she feared Tang Wan would distract her son from his studies; others suggest that Tang Wan‘s failure to produce a child within the first year was the real cause [citation:9][citation:12]. Whatever the reason, Lu You‘s mother forced him to divorce his wife.

He obeyed. In traditional Chinese culture, a son’s duty to his mother was absolute. He divorced Tang Wan, and she married another man, a nobleman named Zhao Shicheng. Lu You married a woman of the Wang clan, and tried to move on [citation:12]. But he never did. The wound of that separation would bleed for sixty years.

The Wife He Never Forgot: Tang Wan

Ten years after the divorce, in the spring of 1155, Lu You was walking in the Shen Garden in Shanyin when he saw a woman sitting alone. It was Tang Wan. She was with her husband, Zhao Shicheng, but when she saw Lu You, she sent a servant to bring him wine and food—a gesture of respect, of memory, of love [citation:3][citation:9].

Lu You took the wine. He looked at her across the garden—so close, so impossibly far. And then he took a brush and wrote on the wall of the garden the poem that would become the most famous love poem in Chinese history: “Phoenix Hairpin” (Chai Tou Feng):

红酥手，黄滕酒，满城春色宫墙柳。 东风恶，欢情薄，一怀愁绪，几年离索。 错，错，错！

春如旧，人空瘦，泪痕红浥鲛绡透。 桃花落，闲池阁，山盟虽在，锦书难托。 莫，莫，莫！ [citation:3][citation:9]

Tang Wan saw the poem. She wrote one in reply—“世情薄，人情恶” (“The world is cold, human feelings are cruel”)—and died within a year, of grief and broken health [citation:9]. Lu You would live another fifty-five years. He would never stop grieving.

The Friend Who Understood Him: Xin Qiji

Lu You and Xin Qiji were the twin pillars of Southern Song patriotism. Xin Qiji was a warrior-poet who had actually fought the Jin, who had led cavalry charges and written military memorials. Lu You was a poet-official who had never held a real command, who had spent his life in minor posts and long exiles. They were opposites in temperament—Xin was fiery, Lu You was brooding—but they shared the same dream.

They finally met in 1203, when Lu You was seventy-eight and Xin Qiji was sixty-three. Xin Qiji had been appointed governor of Shanyin, and he visited Lu You in his retirement. He found the old poet living in poverty, his house falling apart. Xin Qiji offered to build him a new one. Lu You refused: “辛幼安每欲为筑舍，予辞之” — “Xin Youan often wanted to build me a house; I declined” [citation:10].

But when Xin Qiji was summoned back to court to prepare for a new northern campaign, Lu You wrote him a farewell poem that praised him as a man “文能提笔安天下，武能上马定乾坤” — “capable of pacifying the world with his pen and settling the universe on horseback” [citation:10]. It was the highest praise Lu You could give. He saw in Xin Qiji the warrior he had never been allowed to become.

The Poetry of Lost China: The Architecture of a Lifetime‘s Grief

The Early Years: Learning to Write, Learning to Dream

Lu You’s early poetry was conventional. He studied under the Jiangxi school, which emphasized craft, allusion, and technical precision. His poems were elegant but imitative—the work of a talented young man who had not yet found his voice [citation:8].

The voice came when he went south. In 1169, at the age of forty-four, he was appointed as an assistant prefect in Kuizhou (modern-day Fengjie, Sichuan), a remote posting on the Yangtze [citation:1]. He traveled for five months, keeping a diary that he later published as “Record of Entering Shu” (Ru Shu Ji)—a work that scholars still admire for its clarity, its observation, and its quiet beauty [citation:1].

But it was in 1172, when he was invited to join the staff of the military commissioner Wang Yan at Nanzheng (modern-day Hanzhong, Shaanxi)—the front line of the Song-Jin war—that his poetry truly began. For the first time in his life, he was not a minor official in a safe posting. He was on the frontier. He wore armor. He rode horses. He inspected the defenses and watched the enemy across the border.

He wrote:

“楼船夜雪瓜洲渡，铁马秋风大散关。” (Tower ships in the night snow at Guazhou Ferry, armored horses in the autumn wind at Dasan Pass.) [citation:8]

It was the poem of a man who had finally tasted the life he had dreamed of since childhood. But it lasted less than a year. Wang Yan was recalled, the campaign was abandoned, and Lu You was sent to a series of meaningless posts in Sichuan. He wrote: “此身合是诗人未？细雨骑驴入剑门” — “Is this body meant to be a poet? In fine rain, riding a donkey, I enter Jianmen” [citation:7]. It was the cry of a man who wanted to be a warrior but had been forced to be a poet.

The Middle Years: The Poetry of Defiance

The middle period of Lu You‘s poetry—from his time in Sichuan to his return east in 1178—was his most productive and his most angry. He wrote poem after poem attacking the peace party, lamenting the loss of the north, and celebrating the heroes of the resistance.

His most famous poem from this period is “Song of the Golden Sword” (Jin Cuo Dao Xing), written when he was fifty:

“丈夫五十功未立，提刀独立顾八荒。” (A man of fifty has achieved no merit; blade in hand, he stands alone and gazes at the four directions.) [citation:8]

He also wrote the blistering “Song of the Guan Mountain” (Guan Shan Yue), which attacked the court‘s policy of appeasement:

“和戎诏下十五年，将军不战空临边。 朱门沉沉按歌舞，厩马肥死弓断弦。” (The edict of peace has been issued for fifteen years; the generals do not fight, they only stand at the frontier in vain. The vermilion gates are deep with singing and dancing; the stable horses grow fat and die, the bowstrings rot.) [citation:8]

It was poetry of protest, poetry of witness. He was not describing the world as it was; he was describing the world as it should not be. And he was doing it in language that was so beautiful, so memorable, that it could not be ignored.

The Late Years: The Poetry of Memory

After his final dismissal from office in 1189, Lu You returned to Shanyin and spent the last twenty years of his life in retirement. He was poor—he wrote of having to pawn his wine cups to buy rice [citation:10]—but he was not idle. He wrote over six thousand poems in these years, more than in all his previous decades combined [citation:13].

The poetry of his old age was different. It was quieter, more reflective, more willing to find beauty in small things: the plum blossoms outside his window, the rain on the roof, the laughter of his grandchildren. But the old fire never went out. At eighty, he wrote:

“一闻战鼓意气生，犹能为国平燕赵。” (At the sound of the war drum, my spirit rises; I am still capable of pacifying Yan and Zhao for the state.) [citation:8]

And he never stopped dreaming of Tang Wan. In 1199, at the age of seventy-five, he returned to the Shen Garden and wrote:

“城上斜阳画角哀，沈园非复旧池台。 伤心桥下春波绿，曾是惊鸿照影来。” (On the city wall, the slanting sun and the painted horn are mournful; the Shen Garden is no longer the old ponds and terraces. Under the heartbreak bridge, the spring waves are green; here her graceful figure once cast its reflection.) [citation:3]

Six years later, at eighty-one, he wrote:

“玉骨久成泉下土，墨痕犹锁壁间尘。” (Her jade bones have long become dust beneath the spring; the ink traces are still locked in the dust on the wall.) [citation:3]

And the year before he died, at eighty-four, he wrote one last poem about the garden:

“沈家园里花似锦，半是当年识放翁。 也信美人终作土，不堪幽梦太匆匆。” (In the Shen Garden, the flowers are like brocade; half of them knew me in years gone by. I know that beauties also become dust; I cannot bear how fleeting the dream was.) [citation:3]

He was still writing about her when he was dying. The two dreams—the lost north and the lost wife—had become one.

The Two Ghosts: Death, Legacy, and the Global Stage

The Final Years: The Last Campaign

Lu You died on January 26, 1210, at the age of eighty-five [citation:13]. He had lived through the reigns of five emperors, the fall of the Northern Song, the establishment of the Southern Song, the rise and fall of Qin Hui, the failed northern campaigns of Zhang Jun and Han Tuozhou, and the long, slow decay of a dynasty that had given up on its own history.

He had also lived to see one last hope. In 1206, the chancellor Han Tuozhou launched a new northern campaign, and Lu You—despite his age and his long opposition to Han Tuozhou‘s factionalism—supported it. He believed that any attempt to recover the north, even a doomed one, was better than no attempt at all. The campaign failed. Han Tuozhou was killed by his own officials, and his head was sent to the Jin in a peace treaty. Lu You lived four more years, watching the last embers of resistance die.

But he never gave up. The “Showing My Sons” poem, written on his deathbed, was not a surrender. It was a declaration that the dream would survive him. “王师北定中原日，家祭无忘告乃翁” — “On the day the royal armies pacify the Central Plains, do not forget to tell your father.” He was telling his sons: The dream is not mine alone. It belongs to you now. Carry it forward. Tell me when it comes true.

The Chinese Gene: The Legacy of a Dreamer

Lu You is remembered as the greatest patriotic poet of the Southern Song. He is also remembered as the greatest love poet of his age. The two are not separate. They are the same man, the same grief, the same unquenchable longing for something that has been taken away.

First, the poetry of irredentism. Lu You created a language for the grief of a lost homeland. His poems about the north—the “遗民泪尽胡尘里，南望王师又一年” (“the tears of the abandoned people are exhausted in the barbarian dust; they gaze south toward the royal armies, another year has passed”) [citation:2]—gave voice to the millions of Chinese who had fled south and never stopped dreaming of return. His poetry became the emotional archive of a displaced people.

Second, the poetry of love and loss. The “Phoenix Hairpin” and the “Shen Garden” poems are among the most beloved love poems in Chinese literature. They are not idealized romances; they are poems of guilt, of regret, of a love that was destroyed by duty and never stopped hurting. They speak to anyone who has lost something precious and could not let it go.

Third, the model of the poet as witness. Lu You was not a court poet, writing praise for the powerful. He was a witness—a man who recorded the shame and the suffering of his age. His poetry is a document of the Southern Song‘s failure, written by a man who loved his country too much to forgive its cowardice.

Lu You and the World: A Global Perspective

Lu You lived in the same century as the Crusades, the rise of the Mongol Empire, and the great flowering of medieval European literature. While he was writing poems about the lost north, the French poet Chrétien de Troyes was writing romances about King Arthur and the Holy Grail. While he was dreaming of reconquest, the knights of the Fourth Crusade were sacking Constantinople. The world was full of lost causes.

The comparison is revealing. Chrétien de Troyes wrote about a kingdom that never existed; Lu You wrote about a kingdom that had existed and been taken away. The French romances were escapism; Lu You‘s poems were testimony. But both were attempts to preserve something precious in language—a dream of a better world, a grief for something lost.

Lu You‘s poetry has not traveled as widely as the work of his contemporaries in Europe. The language barrier is one reason; the specificity of his subject matter is another. But his “Showing My Sons” is one of the great deathbed poems of world literature, and his love poems are among the most moving ever written. He is a poet of the particular—of a specific time, a specific place, a specific loss—who nevertheless speaks to universal human experiences: the grief of exile, the pain of lost love, the stubbornness of hope.

The Man Behind the Myth

The historical Lu You is difficult to separate from his poems. He wrote so much—over ten thousand poems—that his life and his art have become inseparable. We know him through his verse: the young man who dreamed of glory, the middle-aged official who raged against the court, the old man who never stopped loving a woman he had lost sixty years ago.

He was not a saint. He could be petty, obsessive, and self-righteous. He never held high office, never won a battle, never achieved any of the political goals that he spent his life pursuing. By any conventional measure, his life was a failure.

But he wrote. He wrote through his failures, his disappointments, his loneliness. He wrote the grief of a nation into verse that would outlast the dynasty that caused it. And he wrote a love poem that a woman read on a garden wall, and that she carried with her into her grave.

He died in 1210, still dreaming of the north. He was buried in Shanyin, in the hills he had loved. His tomb is simple, almost forgotten. But every schoolchild in China knows his deathbed poem. Every lover knows his “Phoenix Hairpin.” Every generation rediscovers him.

In the end, Lu You was judged not by his official rank, not by his political achievements, but by his words. And his words—ten thousand poems, written over sixty years—are a testament to a life lived in the shadow of loss, and to the stubborn, unkillable hope that one day, the lost would be found.

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For the reader who wishes to explore further: the primary source for Lu You‘s life is his biography in the History of Song (Song Shi). His collected poems are available in several English selections, including The Poetry of Lu You by Burton Watson and The Selected Poems of Lu You by David McCraw. The “Phoenix Hairpin” and “Shen Garden” poems have been translated by many scholars, including Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung.