Li Yu

Also known as Zhe Fan · Li Weng

Li Yu, first named Xianlu with the courtesy name Zhefan, later took the name Yu and the sobriquet Liweng. His family came from Lanxi in Zhejiang, but he was born in Rugao in 1611. After failing the provincial examination he abandoned an official career when the Ming fell and lived by writing and publishing, later settling in Nanjing, where he built the Mustard Seed Garden and ran a printing house. He toured with a troupe drawn largely from his concubines; his plays were collected as Ten Plays of Liweng, and his stories as Silent Operas (Wusheng xi) and Twelve Towers (Shier lou). His Casual Expressions of Idle Feeling (Xianqing ouji), printed in 1671, covers everything from drama to gardens, and its chapters on plot and dialogue amount to a theory of playwriting. He returned to Hangzhou and died there early in 1680. A year earlier he had prefaced the Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, compiled by Wang Gai for his son-in-law Shen Xinyou, long a standard primer for painters.