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Wei Zhuang
Late Tang poet whose long narrative Lament of the Lady of Qin recorded the sack of Chang'an, and who became a chief minister of the Former Shu state
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 Duanji · Huanhua Daoren · Qin Fu Yin Xiu Cai
- Roles
- Writer / Poet
Wei Zhuang, courtesy name Duanji, came from Duling near Chang'an. He was in the capital for the examinations when Huang Chao's army took it in 880, and in 883 at Luoyang he wrote the long narrative poem Lament of the Lady of Qin (Qinfu yin), in which a woman describes the city's ruin; contemporaries nicknamed him the Lament of the Lady of Qin graduate. He passed the jinshi examination in 894 and in 901 went to Sichuan as secretary to the military governor Wang Jian. When the Tang fell in 907, he urged Wang Jian to take the imperial title, and many of the new Former Shu state's institutions were his design; he rose to chief minister. He died at Chengdu in 910 and was named Wenjing. His brother Wei Ai compiled his poems as the Washing Flowers Collection (Huanhua ji), and the anthology Among the Flowers (Huajian ji) has forty-eight of his ci; the Lament itself was lost for centuries until Dunhuang manuscripts surfaced in the early twentieth century.
Life and times
Dates c. 836 CE–910 CE