Fu
Quick answer: The fu, or rhapsody, is Han China's grand blend of prose and verse built on lavish description. Explore its history and how to write a modern fu poem.
Long before the prose poem was a Parisian invention, Han dynasty China had the fu: a form usually translated as 'rhapsody' or 'rhyme-prose', which mixes rhymed verse with passages of unrhymed prose and devotes itself to description on a heroic scale. A fu does not glance at its subject; it inventories it. Palaces, hunting parks, capital cities, rivers, owls and abandoned wives were catalogued in cascades of language designed to exhaust the topic and dazzle the court.
The form flourished from the second century BCE onward and never quite died, softening over the centuries from imperial spectacle into personal meditation. For a modern poet, the fu offers permission that most forms withhold: to be abundant, to describe past the point of politeness, and to let rhythm and rhyme surge in and out of prose as the material demands.
A court spectacle with roots in the Chuci
The fu grew out of the incantatory verse of the Chuci, the southern 'Songs of Chu' associated with Qu Yuan, and reached its first glory under the Han emperors. Sima Xiangru (died 117 BCE) set the standard with vast rhapsodies on imperial hunting parks, poems that flatter the emperor's magnificence and then, in a closing swerve, counsel restraint. Ban Gu and Zhang Heng wrote competing rhapsodies on the two capitals. Later the form turned inward: Jia Yi's rhapsody on an owl meditates on fate, and by the Song dynasty Ouyang Xiu could build a quiet masterpiece from the sounds of autumn.
What the rules actually are
The fu is a genre with habits rather than a template with counts. Scholars generally agree on its core features, even while noting that practice varied enormously across a thousand years.
Writing a fu today
Choose a subject that deserves excess: a market, a hospital, a coastline, your grandmother's kitchen. Open with a short prose preface explaining, half-seriously, why the subject demands a rhapsody. Then build movements. Let each movement take one aspect and catalogue it richly, shifting into loose rhyme or strong rhythm when intensity rises, relaxing into prose when the poem needs to breathe or explain. Name things precisely; a fu about a harbour should know its bollards from its fairleads.
End with the traditional swerve: after all the abundance, a short, quiet judgement on what the abundance means, or costs. That final turn is what separates a fu from a shopping list in fancy dress.
Where it shines and where it collapses
The fu suits subjects of scale and sensory density, and it is one of the few forms genuinely built for praise, satire through overstatement, and civic or public themes. It collapses when the catalogue has no argument. Beginners ruin the form by mistaking length for grandeur, piling up adjectives without progression. Every movement of a good fu adds a new angle of vision, and the whole poem travels somewhere the opening could not foresee.
What poets can take from this
- Pick a subject large enough to survive four or five movements of description.
- Alternate deliberately: verse when intensity peaks, prose when the poem must think.
- Research your subject's technical vocabulary and use it with confidence.
- Organise catalogues by direction, season or sense so they progress rather than pile.
- Hold back one quiet moral or personal turn for the ending.
- Cut any passage that describes without adding a new angle.
Try it yourself
Write a fu on an all-night supermarket: a prose preface on why it deserves rhapsody, three movements cataloguing its aisles, machines and night workers, and a closing verse turn on hunger.
Questions
Is a fu poetry or prose?
It is deliberately both, which is why translators settle for 'rhyme-prose' or 'rhapsody'. Rhymed verse passages alternate with prose, and the balance shifted across eras. What defines the form is its descriptive ambition, not a fixed line count.
How long is a typical fu?
Classical examples range from under a page to thousands of characters; Sima Xiangru's imperial rhapsodies run to many pages. A modern fu of two to five pages is enough to honour the form's scale without exhausting your reader.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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