At the end of the Eastern Jin Dynasty, the once peaceful and stable situation disappeared, and the gentry seized the power. People who were not from a noble family could not be officials, especially big officials. The people in power are full of infighting. After the victory of the Battle of Feishui, it was a little stable for a period of time. Later, Sima Yao, the Emperor of Jinxiao, reused Sima Daozi and excluded Xie An and others. Later, Sima Yuanxian came to power, Wang Guobao was in chaos, and there were mutinies or uprisings in various places. After Huan Xuan's power grew, he abolished Jin 'an Emperor Sima Dezong. Emperor Wu of Song led troops to defeat Huan Xuan again. Finally, Emperor Wu of Song simply abolished the Emperor of Jin and established the Song regime in the Southern Dynasties.
The great poet Tao Yuanming lived in the late Eastern Jin Dynasty. Tao Yuanming's great-grandfather was Tao Kan, a general in the early Eastern Jin Dynasty, and once worked as a fu. Tao Yuanming's grandfather and father also worked as a prefect. Because the Taoists were not born in the cremation, they didn't have much property. When they reached Tao Yuanming's generation, they were almost the same as ordinary civilians.
Tao Yuanming likes reading, writing poems and articles since he was a child, and he is also very ambitious. But when he saw that the political situation was so chaotic at that time, he didn't want to be an official, and his thoughts were always in a state of contradiction and struggle. It was not until he was 29 years old that he officially came out as an official. He worked as an official several times in more than ten years, but all of them were very young. Not only could he not realize his ideals, but he also had to socialize with people he thought were not worth socializing with, which made him feel very painful. When Tao Yuanming was the county magistrate of Pengze (now Pengze, Jiangxi), because there was a Du You coming to inspect, according to the regulations, Tao Yuanming should dress up to meet him and salute him. Tao Yuanming was very upset and said, "I can't bend my back for five buckets of rice!" That is to say, I don't want to bow down to people I despise for the salary of five dou meters. He handed in his official seal and left for home.
On the way home after resigning from his post, Tao Yuanming was in the happiest mood. He wrote an article "Returning Words" to record his feelings, saying that he couldn't wait to step into the house and live a leisurely life with his wife and children. "Going back" roughly means going back, and later generations often compare "going back" to not competing in vanity fair.
Tao Yuanming left the officialdom and returned to Xunyang Chaisang (now southwest of Jiujiang, Jiangxi), where he lived a self-sufficient life of farming and weaving, and lived a hard life. He once said in a poem that his family didn't even have a day's surplus grain, but he lived very comfortably. He worked in the fields together with the villagers, drank and chatted together, and took care of each other. He was in a very good mood.
Tao Yuanming wrote many poems in his seclusion, which described the rural scenery beautifully. Tao Yuanming's poetic language is extremely plain and natural, which is completely different from the prevailing rhetoric atmosphere in the society at that time. However, his poetic language is expressive, and he can write his mood, surrounding scenes and beautiful rural scenery vividly in a few simple sentences, which makes you read it again and again, and the more you read it, the more profound it becomes.
Tao Yuanming has several hobbies in his life. First, he loves drinking, and wine is often written in his poems. There is a group of poems entitled "Drinking"; First, I love chrysanthemums. He thinks chrysanthemums are the most elegant. When the Double Ninth Festival comes, drinking wine and enjoying chrysanthemums is the most wonderful thing. His famous poem "Picking chrysanthemums under the hedge, leisurely seeing Nanshan" is highly praised by later generations of poets. Tao Yuanming also planted chrysanthemums in front of and behind his house, and later generations associated chrysanthemums with personality as a symbol of elegance.
In his later years, Tao Yuanming also wrote a fantasy "Peach Blossom Garden". The article said that a fisherman fished along a small river one day, saw a peach blossom forest, and peach blossoms were blooming on the trees. He went up along the flowing water to find its origin and entered a mountain pass, where the land was fertile and the human feelings were simple. Everyone took him home as a guest and cooked many delicious foods for this person. He told him that they had fled here during the Qin Dynasty and would not go out again. They don't know what happened outside. They don't know that after the Qin Dynasty, there was the Han Dynasty, and after the Han Dynasty, there was the Wei and Jin Dynasties. That's how the idiom "I don't know how to have a Han, no matter Wei and Jin Dynasties" came from. The fisherman lived for many days, marked all the way home, and then told the local satrap to look for it along the mark, but he couldn't find it. In the future, many local celebrities also wanted to look for it, but they didn't find it.
Tao Yuanming wrote this story to show his dissatisfaction with the society at that time and pinned his ideals on fantasy. "Peach Blossom Garden" has become synonymous with the ideal world.
Tao Yuanming didn't get much attention before his death. Others only knew that he was a hermit and didn't understand his poems. After his death, his works had little influence at that time; But after the Tang Dynasty, the artistic value of Tao Yuanming's poems was finally discovered by people, and its influence was growing, which had a far-reaching and extensive influence in the history of Chinese literature.