Writers › Writer / Poet
Tang Shunzhi
Wujin prose writer who topped the 1529 metropolitan examination and in his last years put to sea against Japanese pirates off the Jiangnan coast
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 Yingde · Hao Jingchuan
- Roles
- Writer / Poet
Tang Shunzhi, courtesy name Yingde, came from Wujin near Changzhou and placed first in the metropolitan examination of 1529 at twenty-three. Refusing to attach himself to his examiner Zhang Cong, he was soon sent home. Recalled in 1539, he joined Luo Hongxian and Zhao Shichun the next year in asking that the crown prince receive the court, and was struck from the rolls again; he then spent more than ten years reading in the hills of Yixing. When Japanese pirates ravaged the southeast he was recommended by Zhao Wenhua and sent to inspect the coastal armies, sailing himself from Jiangyin to the open sea and sinking thirteen pirate ships off Chongming, after which he was made governor of Fengyang. Still ill, he took ship again in the spring of 1560 and died at Tongzhou aged fifty-four; he was later named Xiangwen. His six anthologies, including the Wenbian, chose prose only from eight Tang and Song masters, the selection Mao Kun followed in his own anthology.
Life and times
Dates 1507 CE–1560 CE