Writers › Writer / Poet
Liu Zongyuan
Mid-Tang prose writer exiled to Yongzhou after the failed Yongzhen reform, author of the Eight Records of Yongzhou and later prefect of Liuzhou
Mural of River Snow, a work by this person.
A lone fisherman waits in a small boat beneath snowbound peaks, his dark figure nearly lost in the empty winter river. The sparse scene echoes the poem’s solitude and resolve.
Also known as Zi Zihou · Liu Hedong · Liu Liuzhou
Liu Zongyuan, courtesy name Zihou, came from Xie county in Hedong (modern Yuncheng, Shanxi) and was known as Liu Hedong. He passed the jinshi examination in 793 and in 805, as a vice-director in the Ministry of Rites, joined the reform led by Wang Shuwen and Wang Pi; when it collapsed he was demoted to marshal of Yongzhou, one of the eight officials exiled alongside the two Wangs. In ten years at Yongzhou he wrote eight landscape essays later grouped as the Eight Records of Yongzhou, along with The Snake Catcher and the essay On Enfeoffment (Fengjian lun). In 815 he became prefect of Liuzhou, where he let bonded servants work off their debts and go free, earning the name Liu Liuzhou. He died there in 819. Han Yu wrote his epitaph, and Liu Yuxi gathered his writings into the Collected Works of Master Hedong.
Life and times
Dates 773 CE–819 CE
- 805Yongzhen ReformTook partage 32
- 805Two Wangs, Eight Adjutants Banishedage 32