Writers › Writer / Poet
Fan Peng
Yuan poet from Qingjiang who first came to the capital at thirty-six, served in provincial censorate offices and was one of the Four Masters of Yuan 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 Hengfu · Zi Deji
- Roles
- Writer / Poet
Fan Peng, courtesy names Hengfu and Deji, came from Qingjiang in Linjiang, in present-day Jiangxi; thin and poor, he was said to remember whatever he read. He was thirty-six before he went to the capital, where the censor Dong Shixuan engaged him as tutor in his household, and on recommendation he became a compiler in the Hanlin Academy and then a clerk in the censorate offices of Haibei-Hainan and of Fujian. In Fujian he wrote a poem exposing the embroidery bureau's practice of seizing girls from respectable families as workers; the surveillance commissioner sent it to the court and the practice was stopped. Appointed to a post in the Hunan censorate in 1329, he declined so that he could care for his mother, and he died of illness in the tenth month of the following year at fifty-eight. Yu Ji was his closest friend, and the two, with Yang Zai and Jie Xisi, are known as the Four Masters of Yuan Poetry.
Life and times
Dates 1272 CE–1330 CE