quality:correction, structural:scholar_edition
Five stints as a government official

Tao Yuanming's first stint in government was as State Officer of Rites, when he was about twenty-nine. He did this in part due to family poverty, and to support his aged parents. However, he had a difficult time of it and returned home. Accounts of Tao's second and third government service stints vary somewhat. One source of information is A Year-by-Year Biography of Tao Yuanming by Lu Qingli. Tao's second stint in government seems to have been working for Huan Xuan. According to Lu, Tao served in the government during the Long'an years of emperor An, during the time of the Sun En revolt. (Sun En seems to have been a populist magician associated with the Way of the Five Pecks of Rice movement.) Tao would have been about thirty-five years old, and the warlord Huan Xuan had become governor of Tao's home province, Jiangzhou. Huan had a plan to coordinate with other warlords (including Liu Yu) to eradicate Sun En. Again according to Lu, Tao Yuanming was the official to go to the imperial capital, Jiankang, and officially submit this proposal to the imperial government. After receiving approval, Huan and associates successfully subdued the rebellion. Then, about three tears later, Huan Xuan and other warlords rebelled, and captured both the capital city and the emperor, An, and thus the imperial power. But by this time Tao Yuanming was working not for Huan but as Defense Strategist (apparently his third stint as a government official), handling paperwork for Liu Yu, the general in charge of defending the Sima-lead imperial government. There was also a fourth stint. When he was about forty, Tao worked for general Liu Jingxuan, who resigned about a year later, and Tao along with him. Tao Yuanming's fifth and final stint, as Penze county magistrate (beginning March of the first year of the Yixing regnal year), only lasted about eighty days, as he resigned in August the same year. This was the time period when he wrote his essay "To Return", in his preface to which he mentions taking the job because having "a house full of little kids", and goes on to explain why he wants to give up government work and return home. Each stint seems to have lasted no more than a few years, and each time Tao Yuanming seems to have resigned and returned home. Officially, his retirement was due to the sudden death of his younger sister and his need to attend to the funeral rites. Another reason, given by his biographer Xiao Tong, was that Tao was faced with the imminent imposition of an onerous supervisor, whom he was told he "had to treat right", and which was the occasion of him saying, "I won't bow to a bucolic boy for the sake of five pecks of rice." Subsequently, despite various offers by Liu Yu, after he became emperor, Tao Yuanming refused to return to government service. Of Tao Yuanming's career Su Shi describe him as "working for the government when he desired to, without feeling shame in his requests; retiring when he desired to, without thinking himself lofty."