Du wrote quite a few poems on the flowers near his cottage, with the most notable being Good Rain on a Spring Night:

A good rain falling

Just when it should

In springtime; riding

On the wind it fills

A whole night, soaking

The land with its goodness;

Clouds hang heavily over

Country paths; a lone light

Shines from a passing boat;

Morning and I see a damp

Redness on the branches,

Laden down with flowers.

Du lived in a period when the Tang Dynasty (618-907), one of China's most illustrious dynasties, had begun to decline. A war waged by two rebel generals from 755 to 763 ravaged many parts of the country and accelerated the dynasty's end.

Du, a native of Gongxian county in Henan province, reached Chengdu in 759 to take refuge from the war. In the ensuring year, he built a cottage by the Flower Bathing Brook with financial aid from his friend Yan Wu (726-765), who was a poet as well as a leading official in Sichuan.

A humanist, Du is revered for his writing style with its manifest sympathy for people's sufferings as a result of the war and his resentment of injustice and corruption. Among his most famous lines are these:

There comes the reek of wines

And meats that rot inside the gates

Of these rich, the bones of the

Starving and cold are strewn along

The roadsides.

The lines have been quoted to condemn the sharp contrast between the lives of the haves and have-nots.

Du himself was poor throughout his life. His youngest son died of starvation although he was a petty official at that time.

After the sudden death of Yan Wu, who had financially supported him, Du left Sichuan, passed today's Chongqing municipality, Hubei and Hunan provinces and died of illness on a boat on the east bank of the Dongting Lake in Hunan on his way home to Henan.