Writers › Writer / Poet
Huang Tingjian
Northern Song poet and calligrapher, one of Su Shi's four disciples, paired with Su as Su-Huang and later treated as the founder of the Jiangxi school of poetry
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 Luzhi · Hao Fuweng · Fu Po · Shangu Daoren · Shi Wenjie
Huang Tingjian, courtesy name Luzhi, styled Shangu Daoren and later Fuweng, came from Fenning in Hongzhou, present-day Xiushui in Jiangxi, and passed the jinshi examination in 1067. His poetry won Su Shi's notice early, and he was counted with Qin Guan, Chao Buzhi and Zhang Lei as one of Su's four scholars. In the Yuanyou years he served in the imperial library and helped compile the Veritable Records of Emperor Shenzong. When the reform party returned in the Shaosheng era it charged that the records slandered Shenzong, and he was banished to Qianzhou and later Rongzhou. In 1103 an inscription he wrote for a temple at Jingnan was said to gloat over disaster, and he was struck from the rolls and confined at Yizhou, where he died in 1105. His poems were paired with Su Shi's, and Lu Benzhong's chart of the Jiangxi school put him at its head; his calligraphy ranks among the four Song masters, and the Southern Song gave him the posthumous name Wenjie.
Life and times
Dates 1045 CE–1105 CE