Writers › Writer / Poet
Luo Yin
Late Tang poet and essayist who failed the jinshi examination ten times, wrote the satirical Slanders, and spent his last two decades serving Qian Liu of Wuyue
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 Benming Heng · Zi Zhaojian · Hao Jiangdongsheng · Luo Jiangdong
Luo Yin, originally named Luo Heng, courtesy name Zhaojian, came from Xincheng in Yuhang. Beginning in the late Dazhong era he sat the jinshi examination in Chang'an ten times without success, and took the name Yin, 'hidden', after his failures. During those years he put together the Slanders (Chanshu), a collection of short prose pieces aimed at the government of the day, along with the Huainan Fables, and his poems are often barbed: 'The Bee' ends by asking for whom the bees toil and for whom the honey is sweet. In 887 he joined Qian Liu, military governor of Zhenhai, and served him as magistrate of Qiantang, secretary, administrative assistant and deputy salt-and-iron commissioner. He died in January 910, in the twelfth month of the third Kaiping year of the Later Liang; his poetry survives as the Jiayi ji, and the Old History of the Five Dynasties gives him a biography in chapter 24.
Life and times
Dates 833 CE–910 CE