When Tu Fu—by common consent the supreme master of classical Chinese poetry, cynosure of all latecomers to that tradition—was but a babe in the crib, a sorceress saved his life. Following his mother’s early death, the great poet was raised by his aunt, and the story goes that in his infancy both he and his little cousin fell ill. Feng shui held the answer: the witchy woman his surely overwrought aunt sent for told her that only the child placed in the southeastern corner of the bedroom would survive. Whereupon the aunt, with a selflessness hard to conceive, lifted her own son out of the crib in that corner and put Tu in his place. Her son died as foretold. Tu lived, and became literature.
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