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Abstract In spite of the fact that Liu Fu’s poems are collected in The Poems for Imperial Reading and that Zhang Hu ranked him with Li Bai, Du Fu, and Wei Yingwu, little is known about his biography, only few of his poems have been handed down and his literary collection was lost. The newly released Liu Fu’s Tomb Inscription was mainly composed by Liu himself. The inscription shows that Liu’s native place was Xiuwu in Huaizhou, that he entered an official school at about twelve. and went to the Yangtze’s River’s south (Southeast of China) to become a student of Lu Hao at twenty-four, and that he got his jinshi degree (in ancient Chinese Imperial Examination) and began his bureaucratic career in the early Dali period when he was forty-seven. He held low-rank civil positions for a long time, and later retired as Editorial Director on the strength of Lu Qi’s recommendation. Liu Fu’s Tomb Inscription recorded Liu’s academic pursuit in the Southeast. It provides biographical information about Liang Ning, Yan Zhou, Cao Ping, and Wang Yan that is not recorded in other historical sources, chronicling the heyday of the poet circles during the Tianbao period. Furthermore, Liu Fu’s Tomb Inscription recorded that in the fourth year of the Tianbao period, Liu met Wang Changling in Jiangning, which is an important clue to solving the long disputes on when Wang was demoted and when he wrote the poem of seeing off Li Bai. Moreover, from Liu’s experiences in the Southeast as recorded in the Liu Fu’s Tomb Inscription, it is possible to make some inferences about the source of the story about Wang Changling’s contact with Li Bai in Jiangning. As a poet star in his time, Wang’s whereabouts attracted attention from his contemporaries, Wang Wei, Cen Sheng, Li Bai all wrote poems for him as gifts. The ″clear creek″ in Chang Jian’s poem ″Staying in Wang Changling’s Hermitage″ was located in Jiangning. When Liu Fu was about to start his one-year study in the Jurong Mountain, he went directly to Wang Changling, indicating that Wang, who lived in Jiangning at that time, was already the center of poets in the Southeast. Although Wang Changling and Li Bai did not really meet in Jiangning, similar activities and presentation of poems would arouse people’s imagination about such gatherings. Especially after the An Lushan Rebellion, this event became part of the collected memory of the peaceful pre-Rebellion era, and was further virtualized and fictionalized. Four evolving phases of this story can be summarized from the combination of the four separate events. First, Han Huang, the local governor, was the first to honor the memory of the grand literary events in that area in his painting. Second, the ″Poets and Literary Persons″ in Yinchuang Zalu took form in the early-Jianzhong period as a collection of poetic lines, and this story was carried on by the parallel ranking of those great names. Third, the place name ″Liulitang,″ the poet’s name Wang Changling and the specific time ″one hundred and forty years″ all appeared in Zhang Qiao’s ″Wang Changling’s Hall Where Xu Tang from Shangyuan Holds His Position,″ making the story more credible. Fourth, Zhou Wenju’s Liulitang Shike Tu in Southern Tang Dynasty indicates that this story had by then become part of Jiangning’s local culture. Most of the poets in Yin Fan’s Danyang Ji were from the Southeast, and the anthology came out at the same time when Liu Fu studied in the Southeast and Wang Changling lived in Jiangning. It can be concluded that Wang Changling actually taught poetics in Jiangning, and that the Heyue Yingling Ji, and Wang Changling’s Poetry Rule might all be related to this background in one way or another. Liu Fu’s Tomb Inscription provides us with more detailed knowledge on the poetic activities outside the capital in the Glorious age of Tang Dynasty.
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