Writers › Writer / Poet
Shen Yue
Writer and historian who served the Song, Qi and Liang courts, compiled the Book of Song, and laid down tonal rules for verse in his Register of the Four Tones
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 Xiuwen
Shen Yue, courtesy name Xiuwen, came from Wukang in Wuxing; his father Shen Pu was executed at the end of the Yuanjia era of the Liu Song. He held office under the Song and the Qi, and under Emperor Wu of Qi he was one of the Eight Friends who gathered around Xiao Ziliang, Prince of Jingling, together with Xiao Yan and Xie Tiao. Ordered in 487 to write the Book of Song (Songshu), he finished its annals and biographies the next year. As the Qi collapsed he urged Xiao Yan to accept the throne and drafted the abdication documents, then served the Liang as vice director and director of the Department of State Affairs. His Register of the Four Tones argued for tonal patterning in verse, though Emperor Wu cared little for it. He died in 513; officials proposed the posthumous name Wen, but the emperor changed it to Yin. His Songshu, in a hundred chapters, is one of the Twenty-Four Histories.
Life and times
Dates 441 CE–513 CE