Writers › Writer / Poet
Mao Kun
Guian official and prose critic who broke the Yao strongholds in Guangxi and, after his dismissal, compiled the anthology that fixed the canon of eight Tang and Song prose masters
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 Shunfu · Hao Lumen
- Roles
- Writer / Poet
Mao Kun, courtesy name Shunfu and known as Lumen, came from Gui'an in Zhejiang and gained his jinshi in 1538. He served as magistrate of Qingyang and Dantu and in the ministries of rites and personnel before a demotion to assistant prefect of Guangping. As military intendant in Guangxi he argued against a full-scale campaign on the Yao and instead sent small columns to seize their leaders, taking seventeen stockades, and the local people built him a shrine. Later, as military intendant at Daming, he was praised by the supreme commander Yang Bo, but charges of corruption in an earlier post cost him his office, and Hu Zongxian took him onto his staff during the pirate wars. An admirer of Tang Shunzhi, who chose prose only from eight Tang and Song writers, he compiled the Anthology of Prose by the Eight Masters of the Tang and Song (Tang Song ba dajia wenchao), which circulated everywhere. Out of office, he grew rich managing his estates and died in 1601 at ninety.
Life and times
Dates 1512 CE–1601 CE