Chengdu Du Fu Thatched Cottage Museum

Chengdu Du Fu Thatched Cottage Museum
成都杜甫草堂博物馆

Address: 37, Qinghua Road, West Thatched Road of Chengdu, Sichuan province
Websites: www.cddfct.com/dufu_for/main/navigation/lang/en (En)
www.cddfct.com (Cn)
Hours: 8:00-20:00,1 May -31 October (no entry after 19:00)
8:00-18:30,1 November - 30 April (no entry after 17:30)
General admission: 60 yuan

In the August of 761 A.D., a cold autumn wind blew down a cottage with heavy rain, causing a poet who experienced a hard life to write the following verse, “Could I get mansions covering ten thousand miles, I'd house all poor scholars and make them beam with smiles. In wind and rain these mansions would stand like mountains high.”

The verse is from the poem “My Cottage Unroofed by Autumn Gales” by Poet Sage Du Fu (712-770). The cottage in the poem can still be visited today in Chengdu as a museum to commemorate this great poet.

Du Fu, who lived during the transitional time from the pinnacle to the decline of the Tang Dynasty (618 - 907), was a great Chinese realist poet. His path through life was hard and he was unsuccessful in his chosen profession, but his poetry compositions led him to be hailed as the poet of highest attainments in Chinese history.

The Thatched Cottage of Du Fu is located at the side of the Flower Bathing Brook on the western outskirts of Chengdu. During his stay of nearly four years, he composed more than 240 poems reflecting upon the misery of the people. His poems exercised a deep and enduring influence on the development of Chinese literature and are regarded as some of the highest achievements of any Chinese poet.

The Museum consists of a Memorial Hall, the Da Ya Tang Hall (the hall of great poets) and the Thatched Cottage of Du Fu. In addition to a display about his life, there is a library with books and ancient wooden carvings of his poems and a foreign section which holds books with his poems in different languages. Other famous attractions include the Tablet Pavilion, Fan’an Temple, three bamboo groves and a plum garden. The Tablet Pavilion, which was the original site of the old cottage, consists of nine rooms and bears a thatched roof.