Writers › Writer / Poet
Zhang Yan
Late Song and early Yuan lyricist, descendant of the general Zhang Jun, whose Origins of Song Lyrics set out the ideal of airy clarity in the form
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 Shuxia · Hao Yutian · Le Xiaoweng
- Roles
- Writer / Poet
Zhang Yan, courtesy name Shuxia, sobriquet Yutian, came of a Fengxiang family long settled in Lin'an and was a sixth-generation descendant of Zhang Jun, Prince of Xun. He grew up in privilege, but when Yuan armies took Lin'an his grandfather Zhang Ru was executed and the family estate seized, and he spent the rest of his life wandering south of the Yangzi. In 1290 he went north to Dadu to copy sutras in gold, returning the following year, and afterwards moved between Hangzhou, Shaoxing and Siming, where in old age he kept a fortune-telling stall. A trained musician, he wrote the *Origins of Song Lyrics* (*Ciyuan*), whose first part treats music and whose second treats composition, insisting that a lyric should be airy and clear rather than dense. His poems on spring water and on a lone goose earned him the nicknames Spring-Water Zhang and Lone-Goose Zhang, and about three hundred lyrics survive in his *Shanzhong baiyun ci*.
Life and times
Dates 1248 CE–c. 1320 CE