Writers › Writer / Poet
Jiang Shiquan
Qianshan poet and playwright, a Hanlin compiler who left office to teach, ranked with Yuan Mei and Zhao Yi as a leading poet of the Qianlong era
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 Xinyu · Hao Cangyuan
- Roles
- Writer / Poet
Jiang Shiquan, courtesy name Xinyu and known as Cangyuan, came from Qianshan in Jiangxi; his family was poor, and when he was four his mother taught him characters by laying out strips of bamboo. He served as a drafter in the Grand Secretariat after passing the provincial examination, gained his jinshi in 1757 and became a compiler in the Hanlin Academy, but soon pleaded illness and went home to head academies in Shaoxing, Hangzhou and Yangzhou. When Peng Yuanrui spoke of him to the Qianlong emperor, who wrote of two famous scholars of Jiangxi in a poem to Peng, Jiang returned to the capital despite poor health to serve in the State History Office, but soon retired again. As a poet he was ranked with Yuan Mei and Zhao Yi, and he wrote plays such as Linchuan meng about Tang Xianzu, printed together as the Nine Plays of the Cangyuan, while his poems and essays form the Zhongya tang ji.
Life and times
Dates 1725 CE–1785 CE