Tao Yuanming once served as Jiangzhou Jiuji, Peng and other small officials. Pengze county magistrate is the last official position in his career. This is described in detail in Xiao Tong's Biography of Tao Yuanming. According to the biography, he had to become Peng because of the pressure of life. As soon as he arrived, he ordered his men to plant glutinous rice, which can be used as wine. So he said, "I'm always drunk and I'm satisfied!" " "His wife insisted on growing rice. Therefore, 20 hectares and 50 acres of land will be planted with glutinous rice and 50 acres of rice.
At the end of the year, the county magistrate sent Du You to see him, and the county collectors told him to get dressed to see him. He sighed and said, "How can I bow down to the children in the village?" On the same day, I was relieved of my official position and wrote an article "Home".
Tao Yuanming's real thought of resigning from his post and retiring to seclusion does not stop there. In the poem "Returning to the Garden", it is very clear. He said that in the past 13 years, he has been an official for several times and has been deeply bound; This time, I resolutely left the officialdom and retired to the countryside, just like a caged bird flying back to nature, feeling extremely free and happy. Hometown huts, fields, trees, cooking smoke, and even crowing chickens and barking dogs are all so kind and lovely. This mood of the author reflects his hatred of the dark officialdom and his love for nature.
Tao Yuanming has 20 drinking poems, all written after drinking. He said in the preface: "I live at home and lack happiness. Recently, the days are short and the nights are long. When you meet good wine, drink it every night. If you drink alone, you will soon get drunk. When I wake up, I will write poems to amuse myself. This is just for fun. " Sometimes he drinks alone, and more often he drinks with fellow villagers and elders, from which he gets some comfort and fun. More importantly, in drinking, you can express your desire not to collude with the decadent ruling group. This is what Xiao Tong called "sending wine as a trace".
There are many legends about Tao Yuanming's drinking. For example, whenever the wine is ripe, he takes off the kudzu towel on his head and filters it out. After filtering, he still wears a kudzu towel on his head. Another example is that there is a big stone in the chestnut where Yuanming lives. Yuanming was drunk and lying on a stone, hence the name Drunken Stone. Another example is the wine buried in Jiujiang. A farmer dug the stone to the bottom and found a stone box. There is a bronze vessel with a lid, which is a flat-bottomed hip flask. Open the lid, the pot is full of wine. Sixteen words are engraved on the side of the pot: mountain flowers, don't bloom, and when the spring wine is ripe, it is even more annoying to hold the piano. Everyone suspected that the wine could not be drunk, so they all fell to the ground. The result is a smell of alcohol everywhere, and it will last for months.
One year on the Double Ninth Festival, he (Tao Yuanming) was enjoying chrysanthemums under the fence in the east of his home. When he played the piano and sang, he broke through and became addicted to alcohol. Unfortunately, he had to walk slowly among the chrysanthemums, pick many chrysanthemums and sit by the fence next to the house. Suddenly I looked up and saw a man in white with wine on him. I didn't know until I asked him that he was a wine messenger sent by Wang Hong, the secretariat of Jiangzhou. It turned out that the imperial court repeatedly tried to recruit Tao Yuanming as an official, but he refused. Wang Hong wanted to get to know him and sent wine to Tao Yuanming many times. This time, Tao Yuanming saw the joy of wine and immediately opened the jar to drink among the flowers. He got as drunk as a fiddler and sang a famous poem "Living in September". The stories of "Tao Gong chanting chrysanthemum" and "White clothes delivering wine" have also become the favorite allusions of later literati.