Writers › Writer / Poet
Lin Chuqiao
Obscure lyricist of the late Tang or Five Dynasties known only from a single song preserved in the early Song anthology Before the Wine Cup
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.
- Roles
- Writer / Poet
Nothing reliable is known of Lin Chuqiao's life, home or dates; his name survives only in anthologies of song lyrics. The early Song collection Before the Wine Cup (Zunqian ji) preserves a single lyric of his to the tune 'Pusaman', which opens on a painted hall with pearl blinds lowered on a spring day and describes a woman's drowsy boudoir. The Qing-compiled Complete Tang Poems (Quan Tangshi) took it into chapter 899 and listed him among the lyricists of the Tang and Five Dynasties. The modern scholar Liu Yupan, in his History of the Ci (Cishi), guessed that he might belong to the same generation of a family as the Five Dynasties poet Lin Chucai, though without firm evidence. Nothing of his was included in Among the Flowers, and no other work is attributed to him.
Life and times
Dates Dates unknown; Five Dynasties ci poet