Liu Tsung-yuan’s father also came from an important family. His branch of the Liu clan traced its ancestry back fifteen hundred years and thirty-nine generations to a man named Chan Huo 展獲 (720–621 BC). Chang spent his days sitting under a willow in the Yellow River town of Pingyin 平陰 dispensing advice, not far from where Confucius 孔子 would later do the same. People started calling him Liu-hsia-hui 柳下惠, the Wise Man under the Willow, and the name stuck. Eventually one branch of his descendants moved west from the Yellow River floodplain to where the river came down from Inner Mongolia and turned east just past the town of Yungchi 永濟. The place they chose was Pupan 蒲坂, where the Su River 涑水 joined the Yellow. Two thousand years earlier, this was also the location chosen by Emperor Shun 舜帝 for his capital. It was a strategic place, being one of only five fords on the Yellow. The move by the Liu clan was apparently prompted by the shift in the center of power at the end of the Chou dynasty 周代 from Loyang 洛陽 to Hsienyang 咸陽, where the Ch’in dynasty 秦代 established its capital in 221 BC. It was only a three-day ride west from Pupan to Hsienyang, on the north shore of the Wei River 渭河, and later on to Ch’ang-an on its south shore. In the centuries that followed, no dynasty went by without at least a few Lius serving in the higher echelons of court bureaucracy. During the long reign of the T’ang-dynasty emperor Kao-tsung 高宗 (r. 649–683), twenty-two members of the Liu family served in the Department of State Affairs 尚書省, which was where business at court got done.
The senior member of the family at that time was Liu Shih 柳奭 (d. 659), whose niece was Empress Wang 王皇后, which should have been a good thing. And it was, until Kao-tsung became enamored of a woman named Wu Chao 武曌. Wu Chao had been a concubine of Kao-tsung’s father, Tai-tsung 代宗 (r. 626–649). When an emperor died, the normal procedure was for his concubines to become nuns and to move into the western part of the palace, effectively putting them out of the reach of palace affairs. If Wu Chao became a nun, she didn’t stay a nun. Three years after Tai-tsung died, she bore Kao-tsung a son. She then murdered her own daughter—fathered by Tai-tsung—and blamed it on the empress. Kao-tsung believed her and demoted Empress Wang. He then elevated his father’s former concubine to become his new empress, Empress Wu. Empress Wang’s principal supporter had been her uncle, Liu Shih, who had served as one of the chief ministers at court for years. When Empress Wang fell, so did Liu. He was demoted and then banished and finally murdered on his way back to the capital to be tried for his “crimes.”
That marked the end of high times at court for the Lius. They continued to serve, but not at the upper level. Liu Tsung-yuan’s great-grandfather Liu Tsung-yu 柳從裕 never served higher than city magistrate, neither did his grandfather Liu Ch’a-kung 柳察躬. Liu’s father, Liu Chen 柳鎮(739–793), did a bit better, perhaps because he married a Lu. Shortly after his marriage, he too became a magistrate. In his case, the city of which he was put in charge was Ch’ang-an itself. Things were looking up for the Lius. And things looked positively rosy in 773 after Liu Chen’s wife gave birth to a son. She had already given birth to two daughters, but a family’s prestige and wealth came through its sons. Both parents were thirty-four at the time, and this was their last child. They called the boy Tsung-yuan. This was the name by which he was known to his family and friends. The formal name he acquired when he turned twenty and by which he was referred to by the public was Tzu-hou 子厚. He was also sometimes called Ho-tung 河東, after the location of his ancestral home: east of where the Yellow River comes down from North China.
At the time of his birth, Liu’s parents were living in the capital’s Chinjen ward 親仁里, which bordered the southwest corner of the city’s East Market. The market was huge, a kilometer on a side. It was where the upper class shopped and lived. Hence, it was a good place to grow up—not that such things would have mattered to a child. But this changed in 777. Liu’s grandfather, Liu Ch’a-kung, died in Suchou 蘇州, just west of the mudflats that would later become Shanghai 上海. It was a long way away, but the Lius were devoted followers of Confucian traditions, one of which required a three-year period of mourning for the death of a parent. 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