A live-streamed Chinese language lesson under the sky—the ancients were taken aback.

Three days later, when the sky lit up again, the scene slowly faded from the sea of ​​fire of the previous episode to a scene of charred ruins.

New grass sprouted from the ruins, spring grass, tender green and fine, clumps emerging from the cracks in the rubble.

But the greener the grass, the darker the ruins.

She seemed about to speak but didn't appear; her voice came from off-screen.

"The An Lushan Rebellion broke out. In the last episode, we talked about the hidden dangers before the rebellion. In this episode, we will look at the scene during the rebellion."

What should we use to judge? Du Fu's poems, of course.

In June of the fifteenth year of the Tianbao era, the sixth month after the outbreak of war, An Lushan's rebel army broke through Tongguan Pass, and Chang'an was in grave danger.

Emperor Xuanzong of Tang fled Chang'an overnight with Yang Guifei and a few close ministers, heading west.

Three days after he left, Chang'an fell.

Forty days later, Crown Prince Li Heng ascended the throne in Lingwu, becoming Emperor Suzong of Tang.

Without his knowledge, Emperor Xuanzong of Tang was remotely honored as the Retired Emperor.

One court, two emperors—chaos upon chaos.

And Du Fu? He didn't escape.

The scene shows a muddy road crowded with refugees. Some people are pushing wheelbarrows with their elderly mothers sitting on them, while others are carrying bundles and leading their children, who are crying as they walk.

An elderly person, unable to walk, lay in a ditch by the roadside, and no one stopped to help them up.

On the distant horizon, several plumes of black smoke rose straight up, the burning substance unknown.

"Du Fu, with his family, followed the flow of refugees toward Fuzhou. On the way, they were robbed by soldiers and almost lost their lives."

Finally, he settled his wife and children in Qiang Village in Fuzhou. Upon hearing the news that the new emperor had ascended the throne in Lingwu, he decided to travel north alone to join the imperial court.

As a result, he was captured by the rebels on the way and taken back to Chang'an, which had already fallen.

In the autumn of the fifteenth year of the Tianbao era, Du Fu wrote his timeless masterpiece, "Spring View," in the fallen city of Chang'an.

An empty city appears in the picture.

Zhuque Avenue was deserted, the gates of the wards were crooked, the signs of the taverns were fluttering in the wind, there were no pedestrians on the street, only a few stray dogs scavenging for food in overturned vegetable baskets, and in the distance, the flags of the rebel army were planted on the city walls of the palace.

"The country is broken, but the mountains and rivers remain; spring has come to the city, but the grass and trees grow deep."

He uttered these two sentences, wanting to say more, and then remained silent for a few seconds.

"The country may be broken, but the mountains and rivers remain."

This statement may seem simple, but if you think about it carefully, the mountains and rivers were originally there, while the country was built by people. The mountains and rivers are still there, but the country is gone.

He didn't say "the palace is destroyed" or "the emperor has run away." He only said that the mountains and rivers are still there.

Mountains and rivers were originally an eternal backdrop; now the backdrop remains, but the foreground is completely empty—this is the greatest desolation.

"Springtime in the city, with its lush grass and trees." Spring comes to Chang'an every year, but what was Zhuque Avenue like in previous springs?

It is a carriage, a pedestrian, a flower-selling woman from Central Asia, and men and women enjoying a spring outing.

This spring, the same street was covered in weeds, knee-high. What does "deep" mean? It doesn't mean how tall the grass was, but how few people were there.

The grass grows deep because no one tramples it; a city of a million people is now empty.

"Two lines of poetry, ten characters, without using the word 'miserable' even once, yet they depicted the desolate state of the deserted city after the war."

"Flowers shed tears at the passing of time, birds startle at the sorrow of parting."

He wanted to say more, but he kept reading.

"The way these two lines are written is very special. It's not that the poet is crying when he sees flowers, but that the flowers are crying. It's not that the poet is startled when he hears birds, but that the birds are startled."

Du Fu projected his feelings onto flowers and birds. This is not a rhetorical device; it is a soul in extreme pain feeling that the whole world is crying for him.

A poet, in a fallen capital, experiences the arrival of spring, the blooming of flowers, and the singing of birds, but instead of feeling vitality, he senses that the entire spring is suffering on his behalf.

"A letter from home is worth a fortune when war has raged for three months."

"These are the two sentences that best represent the sentiments of ordinary people during the entire An Lushan Rebellion."

"The flames of war have raged for three months." The war went on for months, not just three months, but for six months, then a year, without end.

A letter from home is worth a fortune; a letter informing you that you are safe and sound is more precious than ten thousand taels of gold.

Note that he doesn't want gold or silver treasures, nor does he want official promotions; he just wants a letter home to know that his wife, children, and elderly parents are still alive.

In chaotic times, to what extent can human desires be suppressed? To this extent.

Du Fu's greatest wish now is simply for a letter.

The image on the celestial screen shifted to a detail.

A middle-aged man in a tattered round-necked robe stood alone beneath the ruined city wall. His hair was gray, his face haggard, and he clutched a crumpled letter in his hand. It was Du Fu, trapped in Chang'an.

"My white hair grows even shorter from scratching, and can hardly be held up by a hairpin."

"The last two lines are about Du Fu himself."

A man in his forties with completely white hair, whose hair falls out in clumps when he scratches it, so short that he can't even hold it up with a hairpin.

Du Fu searched everywhere in Chang'an for a chance to escape, but he couldn't get out.

He could only sit in the abandoned house, looking at the weeds outside the window, scratching his head.

He worried about the country, about his family, about whether his wife and children in Fuzhou had enough to eat, and about whether the letter he carried home could still be sent. He poured all these worries into these two lines of poetry.

After finishing this poem, Du Fu made a decision.

He paused for a moment, as if he wanted to say something but couldn't.

He risked his life to escape from Chang'an.

They didn't flee out of the city, but west of the city, towards Fengxiang, where Emperor Suzong of Tang was located.

He crossed the rebel blockade, bypassed the battlefield, and walked through the mountains for countless days before finally arriving in Fengxiang.

When he appeared at the temporary encampment of the imperial court, everyone was stunned.

His clothes were tattered, with the sleeves torn open to expose his elbows, and the soles of his straw sandals were worn through, with his toes sticking out.

He came back alive.

Emperor Suzong, moved by his loyalty, appointed him Left Reminder, which is how Du Fu came to be known as "Du the Reminder."

Inside the Taiji Hall, Li Shimin, who had been silent, suddenly looked up upon hearing this.

"Left Remonstrance Official." He repeated the name of the official title, his lips twitching slightly.

He thought to himself, "The subject who has gone through countless hardships to cross enemy-occupied territory and risked his life to come to surrender should be granted the rank of eighth grade."

But he didn't say it.

Tianmu continued.

"Du Fu wrote 'Spring View' on paper, and we can still see it today."

But what we don't see is what those ordinary people in Chang'an who left no name were looking at that spring.

They were also waiting, waiting for the rebels to leave, waiting for the imperial court to return, and waiting for a letter from home that they would never receive.

The voice, seemingly wanting to say something, slowly faded away, and the overgrown Chang'an city in the scene gradually disappeared.

"Spring View" only describes Chang'an after it has fallen.

The place we're going to next is even more devastating than the fallen Chang'an.

That was a battlefield, a front line, a living hell of repeated back-and-forth battles and massacres during the An Lushan Rebellion—Ye City.

A besieged city appears in the picture.

The bricks on the city wall were pitted and dented by the cannonballs, and the moat below the city had dried up, with corpses piled up haphazardly at the bottom.

Within a radius of hundreds of miles around this city, there is no longer a single intact village.

"We will use Du Fu's 'Three Officials' and 'Three Separations' to get closer to ordinary people who were conscripted, had their food stolen, and had their families torn apart."

Their names do not appear in official history, but Du Fu wrote their story into his poems.

Those stories are just as heartbreaking as the clash of swords on the battlefield.