Writers › Writer / Poet
Zang Maoxun
Changxing scholar dismissed from the Nanjing Imperial Academy who in later life edited the Yuanqu xuan, the hundred-play anthology through which most Yuan drama is read
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 Jinshu
- Roles
- Writer / Poet
Zang Maoxun, courtesy name Jinshu, came from Changxing in Zhejiang, passed the provincial examination in 1573 and the palace examination in 1580, and taught at the Jingzhou prefectural school and then at the Imperial Academy in Nanjing. In 1585 he was impeached for dissolute conduct and dismissed, and he spent the rest of his life reading, editing and printing books; with Mao Wei, Wu Jiadeng and Wu Mengyang of his own prefecture he was known as one of the Four Masters. In his later years he collected printed and manuscript texts of Yuan zaju plays, chose a hundred of them and published them as the Selection of Yuan Plays (Yuanqu xuan), freely revising songs and dialogue to his own taste. The anthology circulated so widely that most later readers have known Yuan drama through his versions. His own poems and essays were collected as the Fubaotang ji, and he died in 1620 aged seventy-one.
Life and times
Dates 1550 CE–1620 CE