Yuan Mei

Also known as Zi Cai · Jian Zhai

Yuan Mei, courtesy name Zicai, came from Qiantang (Hangzhou). As a young man he was recommended for the special erudite examination of 1736 but was not chosen. He passed the metropolitan examination in 1739 and served as magistrate of Lishui, Jiangpu and Shuyang before moving to Jiangning (Nanjing). He soon withdrew on grounds of illness and, after mourning his father, left office for good to care for his mother, settling at the Sui Garden on Xiaocang Hill for the next fifty years. He held that poetry should express the writer's own nature (xingling); his books include Remarks on Poetry from the Sui Garden (Suiyuan shihua), the tale collection What Confucius Did Not Speak Of (Zi bu yu) and the cookbook Recipes from the Sui Garden (Suiyuan shidan). He died in the second year of Jiaqing, aged eighty-two. The Draft History of Qing (Qingshi gao) notes that visitors from Ryukyu sought his books, while recording the charge that his writing was facile.