Writers › Writer / Poet
Liu Guan
Yuan scholar from Pujiang, a pupil of Jin Luxiang, who rose to Hanlin academician-in-waiting and was ranked with Huang Jin, Yu Ji and Jie Xisi as the Four Masters of Letters
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 Daochuan · Hao Wu Shu Shan Ren
- Roles
- Writer / Poet
Liu Guan, courtesy name Daochuan, came from Pujiang in Wuzhou, in present-day Zhejiang, and as a young man studied the Zhu Xi school of moral philosophy under Jin Luxiang of Lanxi. Recommended for office, he began as Confucian instructor of Jiangshan county, spent many years in teaching posts and at the Directorate of Education, and late in life became an academician-in-waiting of the Hanlin Academy and compiler at the History Office. The Yuan History says his reading took in the classics, the philosophers, military and penal law, calendrics, numerology and medicine, and that his prose was dense and stately. With Huang Jin, his neighbour from Yiwu, and with Yu Ji and Jie Xisi he was called one of the Four Masters of Confucian Letters. He died in office at seventy-two, leaving a collection of forty chapters along with works on philology and on inscriptions, and Song Lian, the early Ming scholar, had studied under him.
Life and times
Dates 1270 CE–1342 CE