Writers › Writer / Poet
Su Zhe
Northern Song writer and minister, younger brother of Su Shi, who rose to vice-director of the Chancellery under Zhezong and spent his last years in seclusion at Xuzhou
In a study at night, a desk holds a brush pot, a porcelain vase with a plum branch, a lit red lantern, a folded fan and an unrolled blank scroll, with no one seated there, while through a round window the moon rises over a lake with a sailboat.
Also known as Zi Ziyou · Hao Ying Bin Yi Lao · Luan Cheng · Wen Ding · Zi Tongshu
Su Zhe, courtesy names Ziyou and Tongshu, was the younger son of Su Xun of Meishan. He passed the jinshi examination with his brother Su Shi in 1057 and openly criticised Emperor Renzong in the decree examination of 1061. Opposing Wang Anshi's green-sprouts loans, he left the capital early in the Xining era, and when Su Shi was jailed over his poems in 1079 he offered his own rank to redeem him and was demoted to a tax post at Yunzhou. Recalled under Zhezong, he became assistant director of the Department of State Affairs in 1091 and then vice-director of the Chancellery. After protesting the revival of the reforms in 1094 he was exiled as far as Leizhou and Xunzhou. Under Huizong he settled at Xuzhou as the Old Recluse of the Ying Shore and lived in near silence until his death in 1112; he was later canonised as Wending. Su Shi told Zhang Lei that Ziyou's prose was better than his own, though the world did not see it.
Life and times
Dates 1039 CE–1112 CE
- 1079Su Shi's Crow Terrace Poetry Caseage 40