The Life Journey of Lu Lun, the Border Voice of the Ten Talents

Lu Lun (c. 739-c. 799), of Pu in Hezhong, failed the examinations repeatedly and became, by patronage and by war, the most forceful of the 'Ten Talents of the Dali Era' — the anarchy's poets. His six 'Frontier Songs,' written in the staff of the marshal Hun Jian, put the old border-ballad energy back into a tired century: 'In dark night the wild geese fly high; the Chanyu has fled — light horse to pursue him, and great snow filling the bow and the blade.' The Dali decade's manners, and the Tang's early iron, in one man.

Timeline of the Journey

• c. 739 · Hezhong — Born at Pu on the Yellow River bend — into a world about to break: the An Lushan rising drove the family south to Poyang in his teens.
• c. 760s · The Failed Lists — Examination after examination missed through the chaos years — the career only beginning when Yuan Zai and Wang Jin's patronage brought him a county lieutenancy at Wenxiang.
• c. 771 · Xiangyang? — The Dali years in the capital's poetic circle: with Qian Qi, Sikong Shu and the rest — the 'Ten Talents' name attaching itself to the decade's banquet verse.
• 780 · Zhaoying — Magistrate of Zhaoying under the new reign: the plain county years between the poems.
• 784 · The Marshal's Staff — The Zhu Ci rebellion: Lu Lun into the field headquarters of Marshal Hun Jian as judge — the war seen from inside at last, and the 'Frontier Songs' written out of the staff tent: the arrow in the stone's edge, the flight through the snow.
• c. 799 · Hezhong — Dead at about sixty, in or near the marshal's circuit: the banquet-poet who ended at the front — and whose four best lines every Chinese child still recites.

'At dawn they look for the white-feathered arrow — sunk whole in the stone's edge.' The archer-legend of General Li Guang, retold in twenty syllables: Lu Lun gave a broken century back its strongest memory.