Writers › Writer / Poet
Song Zhiwen
Court poet of Empress Wu's era who with Shen Quanqi fixed the rules of regulated verse, and whose flattery of the powerful ended in exile and a forced death in 712
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 Yanqing
- Roles
- Writer / Poet
Song Zhiwen, courtesy name Yanqing, came from Fenzhou according to the Old History of the Tang, or Hongnong according to the New. He passed the examination in 675 and became a favourite poet at Empress Wu's court; the Sui Tang jiahua says that at a poetry contest at Longmen his verses won him a brocade robe already given to Dongfang Qiu. He fawned on the Zhang brothers, and when they were killed in 705 he was banished to Longzhou, slipped back to Luoyang, hid with Zhang Zhongzhi, then informed on his host's plot against Wu Sansi and was rewarded with a court post, to general contempt. In the Jinglong years he attached himself to Princess Taiping and then Princess Anle and was demoted to Yuezhou. Ruizong exiled him to Qinzhou, and in 712 he was ordered to take his own life. The New History says he and Shen Quanqi avoided tonal faults and fixed the length of lines and poems, and later poets followed them as the Shen-Song school.
Life and times
Dates c. 656 CE–712 CE