The roof is the newest thing
Look at the cottage and the roof gives it away first. Thatch is grass laid in overlapping courses and combed downhill, and it is the least permanent part of any building: it takes water, grows moss, and has to be renewed while the frame and the walls stay standing. A thatched house that has lasted centuries is a house whose roof has been replaced many times. Up close the courses are thick, and the eave is cut square, because a soft edge would rot first. Rain runs off it in a sheet. Du Fu built his cottage here between 759 and 762, and the compound has been rebuilt again and again since. The grass is not a relic. It is a material, and it behaves like one.
The river behind the garden
The Huanhua River runs behind the site, and the garden is arranged around water and bamboo rather than around a distant view. Paths turn, the planting is dense, and the sound of water arrives before the water does. Du Fu lived here for three years and wrote a great deal in Chengdu; the poems are full of the house, the wind and the weather. The garden now is a later construction, planted so that the poems hold up when you stand in it. It does that work well. Stand where a roof would have leaked, hear water moving, and the line about the autumn wind stops being only a line. A house by a river is also a house with a damp floor and a roof that needs watching, and the poems know that.
The poem cut into stone
The stele corridor holds Du Fu's poems cut into stone, among them the one about the thatched cottage broken by the autumn wind. The poem is about a roof: wind takes the thatch, the neighbours carry it off, rain comes through, and the poet wishes for a house that would shelter everyone. Paper lasts a few hundred years at best; stone lasts longer, and a corridor of steles is a way of turning a poem into architecture. The corridor is open to the air on one side, so the steles take the weather they were meant to outlast. The characters are cut deep enough to read in slanting light, and some are worn to a shadow. Visitors lean in, find a phrase they know, and move to the next slab.
What a poet's house is now
The cottage has been rebuilt so often that the rebuilding is the real history of the place. What stands today is a museum and a memorial: the thatched house, the stele corridor, the displays in the thatched hall, and the garden, under a national key cultural relic listing and a first-grade museum. Museum status arrived long after the poems did, and it changed what the site is asked to do: conserve, explain, sell a ticket, keep a garden. None of this is a fraud, and none of it is the room Du Fu slept in. A poet's house is a proposition: here is where the poems were made, and here is what a later city decided to keep. The thatch will be replaced again. The wind in the poem will not.
