Han Yu - Overall Significance

Overall Significance

Han Yu died on December 25, 824 and was buried April 21, 825 in the ancestral cemetery at Ho-Yang. He ranks among the most important personalities in the history of traditional Chinese culture. All the major accounts of Han Yu's life agree that he had an open and forthright character, which manifested itself in his unswerving loyalty to his friends. He was a great conversationalist and an inspired teacher: "His teaching and his efforts to mold his students were unrelating, fearing they would not be perfect. Yet he amused them with jokes and with the chanting of poems, so that they were enraptured with his teaching and forgot about returning home". The sense of humor that is so obvious in his writing was also important in his life. Contemporarily, it is 'due to his calm and dignified patriotism that the Chinese still keep his memory green." Most modern scholarship, although content to assign to Han Yu a secure place in the history of Chinese literature, has been embarrassed by the violence of his Confucian passions. Han Yu's own life and personality as well as understanding of T'ang history have made this process more feasible than it would have been half a century ago. Han Yu is among the most personal and at the same time the most open of Chinese authors, he writes often and frankly about his own life, his feelings, his career, his friends. Accordingly, almost 95 percent of his writings can be securely dated and then read against the political history of the time. The result is a remarkably clear picture of Han Yu as an active participant in the political life of his age. "