Writers › Writer / Poet
Jiang Kui
Southern Song lyricist and composer who never held office; his song collection gives seventeen ci with notation, the main surviving scores of Song lyric music
Mural of Tune: Yangzhou Man — The Famed City East of the Huai, a work by this person.
Wheat grows through the ruined streets of Yangzhou beneath a cold moon, while the Twenty-four Bridge stands quiet and peonies bloom without visitors. The deserted city contrasts with its former splendor.
Also known as Zi Yaozhang · Hao Bai Shi Dao Ren · Bai Shisheng
Jiang Kui, courtesy name Yaozhang, came from Poyang and spent his boyhood in Hanyang, where his father Jiang E held office. The poet Xiao Dezao admired his talent and married him to his niece, and Jiang settled with Xiao in Huzhou near White Stone Cave on Mount Bian, taking from it the name Baishi Daoren, the Daoist of White Stone. In 1197 he submitted a treatise on court music to the throne, and in 1199 a set of twelve victory songs; he was allowed to sit the metropolitan examination without the prefectural round but failed, and lived out his life as a commoner supported by patrons such as Zhang Jian. His Songs of the Daoist of White Stone (Baishi daoren gequ) give seventeen lyrics with notation in vernacular characters, among them Yangzhou man, Anxiang and Shuying. He died in Lin'an; the year is uncertain, one reckoning placing it around 1221. Zhang Yan's Sources of the Lyric (Ciyuan) likened his style to a lone cloud drifting in the wild.
Life and times
Dates c. 1155 CE–c. 1221 CE (death by another account c. 1209)