Writers › Writer / Poet
Wu Wenying
Southern Song lyricist from Siming who never held office, lived as a retainer of great households, and wrote densely wrought song lyrics collected as Mengchuang ci
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 Junte · Hao Mengchuang · Mengchuang Jushi
- Roles
- Writer / Poet
Wu Wenying, courtesy name Junte, sobriquet Mengchuang, came from Siming; born into the Weng family, he was adopted into the Wu line, and Weng Fenglong and Weng Yuanlong were his brothers. He never entered office and spent his life moving between Suzhou, Hangzhou and Yuezhou as a retainer of men such as Wu Qian and Jia Sidao, and in his last years of Zhao Yurui, Prince of Rong. A trained musician who composed his own tunes, he built his lyrics from closely worked diction and layered images, and some 340 of them survive as *Mengchuang ci*. Zhang Yan's *Origins of Song Lyrics* (*Ciyuan*) likened them to a tower of seven jewels that dazzles the eye but falls into fragments when taken apart, while Shen Yifu thought he had caught the art of Zhou Bangyan. The Qing critic Zhou Ji made him one of the four masters in his anthology of Song lyrics, and Zhu Zumou edited his collection four times.
Life and times
Dates c. 1200 CE–c. 1260 CE