Fu (Chinese: 賦 "Descriptive poem") is a kind of prose-poem popular in ancient China, especially during the Han Dynasty. China is the worlds oldest continuous major civilization, with written records dating back about 3,500 years and with 5,000 years being commonly used by Chinese as the age of their civilization. ... Later Han redirects here. ...

During the Han Dynasty, the Chu Ci-type of lyrics evolved into fu. It is a type of prose-poem with introductory, concluding, or other interspersed passages that are in prose, typically in the form of questions and answers. The fu is usually called rhapsody in English, but has also been called "rhyme-prose," "exposition," and sometimes "poetical essay." Portrait of Qu Yuan, the central figure of Chu Ci, by Australian Chinese artist Zhang Cuiying Chu Ci (Traditional Chinese: 楚辭; Simplified Chinese: 楚辞; pinyin: chǔ cí), also known as Songs of the South or Songs of Chu, is an anthology of Chinese poems by Qu Yuan and Song Yu from the... Look up rhapsody in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

A Han fu is typically very long, describes a subject exhuastively from every possible angle, and is usually meant to display the poet's rhetorical and lexical skill rather than express personal feeling. Since it is meant to impress and display, the Han fu is termed the "epideictic fu." One of the most well-known Han fu is Sima Xiangru's Tianzi Youlie Fu (天子遊獵賦 "Rhapsody on the Son of Heaven on a Leisurely Hunt"). Sima Xiangru (179 - 117 BC) was a Chinese writer. ...

During the Six Dynasties, fu remained a major poetic genre, and together with shi formed the twin generic pillars of Chinese poetry until shi began to dominate in the Tang dynasty. Six Dynasties (六朝) is a collective noun for the six Chinese dynasties, namely the Kingdom of Wu, Eastern Jin Dynasty, Song Dynasty, Qi Dynasty, Liang Dynasty and Chen Dynasty. ... Shi (詩) is the Chinese word for poem; it can also be used to mean Chinese poetry other than lyrics, or (most commonly) the classical form of poetry developed in the late Han dynasty and which reached its zenith in the Tang dynasty. ... The Tang Dynasty (Chinese: ; pinyin: ) (18 June 618 – 4 June 907), lasting about three centuries, preceded by the Sui Dynasty and followed by the Song Dynasty and the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period in China. ...

The typical Six Dynasties fu is very different than those of the Han, being much shorter, and often personal, expressive, and lyrical. Many have no prose appendages, consisting entirely of rhymed verse in regular, usually hexametric, metre. A fine early example of this "short lyrical fu" (shuqing xiao fu 抒情小賦) is Xi Kang's Qin Fu (琴賦) "Rhapsody on the Zither). Another representative work of this kind is Yu Xin's Ai Jiangnan Fu (哀江南賦 "Rhapsody in Lament of the South"). Xi Kang (嵇康) (223-262) was a Chinese author, poet, Taoist philosopher, and alchemist. ... Yu Xin (513-518) was a poet of the Northern Zhou dynasty. ...