after a highly chequered career, rose to be President of the Board of Rites. In 803, in consequence of an offensive memorial on the subject of tax-collection in Chihli, he was degraded and sent to 陽山 Yang-shan in Kuangtung. In 819 he presented a memorial protesting against certain extravagant honours with which the Emperor Hsien Tsung proposed to receive a bone of Buddha. The monarch was furious; and but for the intercession of his friends P'ei Tu and others, it would have fared badly with the bold writer. As it was, he was banished to Ch'ao-chou Fu in Kuangtung, where he set himself to civilise the rude inhabitants of those wild parts. He is even said to have driven away a huge crocodile which was devastating the water-courses in the neighbourhood; and the denunciatory ultimatum which he addressed to the monster and threw into the river, together with a pig and a goat, is still regarded as a model of Chinese composition. It was not very long ere he was recalled to the capital and re-instated in office; but he had been delicate all his life and had grown prematurely old, being thus unable to resist a severe illness which came upon him. As a writer he occupies a foremost place in Chinese literature. He is considered to be the first of the great literary trio of the T'ang dynasty, the other two being Li Po and Tu Fu. His friend and contemporary, Liu Tsung-yüan, said that he never ventured to open the works of Han Yü without first washing his hands in rose-water. His poems and his essays are of the very highest order, leaving nothing to be desired either in originality or in style. With regard to the famous memorial upon the bone of Buddha, it is by no means certain that we have a transcript of the original document. Chu Hsi indeed has pronounced it to be genuine, but Su Tung-p'o holds it to be a forgery. The latter, in his splendid epitaph on Han Yü, says that "from the age of the Hans, the
