Writers › Writer / Poet
Xue Daoheng
Sui poet and statesman who predicted the fall of the Chen, wrote the line about swallows' mud falling from empty beams, and was strangled on Emperor Yang's order in 609
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 Xuanqing
- Roles
- Writer / Poet
Xue Daoheng, courtesy name Xuanqing, came from Fenyin in Hedong. He served the Northern Qi and the Northern Zhou, and under the Sui became a vice director of the secretariat; sent as envoy to the Chen, he wrote there his short poem Thinking of Home on Human Day. Before the 588 invasion Gao Jiong asked him how the war would go, and he gave four reasons why the Chen must fall. Recalled by Emperor Yang from the far south, he presented a hymn to the late Emperor Wen that the new emperor read as a rebuke to himself; later, when a new legal code stalled in debate, he remarked that it would have long been settled had Gao Jiong lived. He was strangled in 609 at sixty-nine. Liu Su's Tang anecdote collection says Emperor Yang asked at his death whether he could still write the line about swallows' mud falling from empty beams.
Life and times
Dates 540 CE–609 CE