Writers › Writer / Poet
Yang Jiong
Early Tang poet, one of the Four Talents, a child prodigy at the Hongwen academy whose frontier poem Following the Army prefers a captain's life to a scholar's
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 Yang Yingchuan
- Roles
- Writer / Poet
Yang Jiong came from Huayin. Recommended as a child prodigy in 661, he waited on call at the Hongwen academy, became a collator of texts in 676 and a scholar of the Chongwen academy in 681. In 685 a cousin's part in Xu Jingye's rising cost him a demotion to a legal post in Zizhou. In 692 he presented a rhapsody on the Ullambana bowls displayed in the palace before being sent out as magistrate of Yingchuan, where, the Old History of the Tang says, he flogged clerks to death for small faults; he died in that post. He wrote fine five-syllable regulated verse, and his Following the Army declares that leading a hundred men beats being a scholar. Ranked among the Four Talents, he said he was ashamed to stand before Lu Zhaolin and loath to stand behind Wang Bo, and Zhang Yue judged him better than Lu and no worse than Wang.
Life and times
Dates 650 CE–death unknown