"Tu Fu is, by universal consent, the greatest poet of the Chinese tradition. In the epochal An Lushan rebellion, he alone of his contemporaries consistently recorded in poetry the great events and pervasive sufferings of the time. For a millennium now, Tu Fu's poetry has been accepted as epitomizing the Chinese moral conscience at its highest, and as such his work has been placed almost beyond the reach of criticism. Indeed, objectivity about Tu Fu has often been viewed as criticism of him.