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Yuan Wei
Cixi scholar whose Daoist prayer compositions won the Jiajing emperor's favour and carried him into the Grand Secretariat in 1561, one of the so-called qingci chief ministers
In a council hall, a long table holds an unrolled map scroll, a brass-cornered chest and a brush pot, with tall-backed chairs around it and a bronze lamp at the left; a figure stands with their back turned on the balcony at the right, with palace roofs beyond.
Also known as Zi Maozhong · Hao Yuanfeng
- Roles
- Chief Ministers
Yuan Wei, courtesy name Maozhong, came from Cixi in Zhejiang and placed first in the metropolitan examination and third in the palace examination of 1538. Assigned to the Western Park, he wrote the Daoist prayer texts known as qingci for the Jiajing emperor better than anyone, and within six years he rose from academician to minister of rites. When the court astronomers reported a partial eclipse in the seventh month of 1561, he memorialized that so small an eclipse was as good as none, and that winter he entered the Grand Secretariat as minister of revenue and grand secretary of the Wuying Hall. Gravely ill in the spring of 1565, he took leave and died on the road home, aged fifty-eight, with the posthumous name Wenrong. Contemporaries grouped him with Li Chunfang, Yan Na and Guo Pu as the qingci chief ministers, and his official biography notes his arrogance even toward his patron Xu Jie.
Life and times
Dates 1508 CE–1565 CE