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Writers › Writer / Poet
Eastern Jin scholar and poet who annotated the Erya and the Classic of Mountains and Seas and was executed by Wang Dun for predicting his rebellion would fail
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 Jingchun
Guo Pu, courtesy name Jingchun, came from Wenxi in Hedong. Widely read and fond of archaic scripts, he was also expert in divination, and the History of Jin calls his rhapsodies the finest of the Eastern Jin restoration. When war reached Hedong at the end of the Western Jin he took his family south, served on the staffs of Yin You and Wang Dao, and under Emperor Yuan became an assistant court historian, presenting his Rhapsody on the Yangzi and Rhapsody on the Southern Suburb Sacrifice. In 324 Wang Dun, preparing to rebel, asked him to divine the outcome; Guo answered that it would fail, and Wang had him beheaded on the southern ridge at forty-eight. He wrote commentaries on the Erya, the Fangyan, the Mu Tianzi zhuan, the Classic of Mountains and Seas (Shanhaijing) and the Chuci, several hundred thousand characters in all. Zhong Rong's Shipin ranks his Poems on Wandering Immortals in its middle grade and credits them with breaking the flat manner of the Yongjia era.
Dates 276 CE–324 CE
The Book of Jin says Guo Pu wrote the Jiang fu, whose style it calls grand and praised by the age, and later the Nanjiao fu, which Emperor Yuan admired; he also annotated the Erya and wrote a pronunciation guide and picture charts for it, and annotated the Shanhai jing, the Mu tianzi zhuan and the Chuci. He served as editor and secretary and then as Wang Dun's secretary-registrar, and was killed by Wang Dun aged forty-nine.