Writers › Writer / Poet
Li Panlong
Licheng poet who led the Later Seven Masters with Wang Shizhen, holding that prose after the Western Han and poetry after the High Tang were not worth reading
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 Yulin · Hao Cangming
- Roles
- Writer / Poet
Li Panlong, courtesy name Yulin, came from Licheng in Shandong and gained his jinshi in 1544, joining the Ministry of Justice. There he formed a poetry society with Xie Zhen, Wang Shizhen and others, later joined by Zong Chen, Liang Youyu, Xu Zhongxing and Wu Guolun, and as leader of these Seven Masters he was paired with Wang Shizhen as Wang and Li. After serving as prefect of Shunde he became education intendant in Shaanxi, but refused to write to order for the governor and retired to Jinan, where he built the White Snow Tower and turned away visitors for nearly ten years. Recalled in 1567, he rose to surveillance commissioner of Henan, then went home to mourn his mother, fell ill from grief and died in 1570. He held that nothing after the Western Han in prose or the Tianbao era in poetry was worth reading, and the Ming History (Mingshi) notes that some of his imitation ballads changed only a few words of the old texts.
Life and times
Dates 1514 CE–1570 CE