Tradition has always been a powerful force in Chinese literature; there was a tendency to think of contemporary works in comparison with those of some classic age in the past. For the fu, the classic age was the period from the third century B.C. through the Han. The writers of that age were looked on as patriarchs of the genre, and the literary theories of the time have also had a profound influence. For that reason, it is useful to begin with a discussion of the early period; that is the one most likely to be familiar to the Western reader, so it can be kept quite brief.

What are called fu actually began as two separate genres: the elegy or sao, and the rhapsody. The former, as its name implies, is derived from the ‘Li sao’ (‘Encountering Sorrow’) by Ch'ü Yüan, whose dates are traditionally given as 323–277 B.C. Like their prototype, elegies are subjective and personal, sometimes insistently so. They tend to be complaints about the author's position in a hostile world; they also tend to favor allegory. Rhapsodies, on the other hand, are impersonal descriptions, characterized during the early period by wild hyperbole and bizarre vocabulary. When one thinks of the Han fu, it is generally in terms of these rhapsodies, such as Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju's ‘Rhapsody on the Shang-lin Hunting Park’. It would be convenient if one could restrict the Chinese term fu to the rhapsody, but the elegies were also sometimes spoken of as fu by Han writers.