Writers › Writer / Poet
Xie Zhen
One-eyed commoner poet from Linqing who led the poetry club of the Later Seven Masters until Li Panlong and Wang Shizhen struck him from it, and author of the Siming shihua
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 Maoqin · Hao Si Ming Shan Ren
- Roles
- Writer / Poet
Xie Zhen, courtesy name Maoqin, styled Siming Shanren, came from Linqing in Shandong and was blind in one eye from childhood. His songs were popular by the time he was sixteen. Travelling west to Zhangde, he became a long-standing guest of Zhu Houyu, Prince Kang of Zhao. In the capital he pleaded the case of Lu Nan, a scholar from Xun county wrongly jailed, until the verdict was reversed, and the affair made his name. When Li Panlong, Wang Shizhen and others formed their poetry club in the Jiajing reign, Xie, the eldest, was at first its leading figure, but he quarrelled with Li, and Wang and the rest took Li's side and struck Xie's name from the Seven. He remained a commoner all his life, and he died at Daming while writing a hundred birthday poems for a patron, putting down his brush after some eighty. His Siming shihua, also called Shijia zhishuo, urges poets to combine the strengths of the various High Tang masters.
Life and times
Dates c. 1495 CE–c. 1575 CE (by another account 1499–1579)