Writers › Writer / Poet
Meng Qi
Late Tang writer whose Benshi Shi recorded the stories behind poems, preserving idioms such as 'a broken mirror made whole'.
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 Chuzhong · Meng Qi (variant graph)
- Roles
- Writer / Poet
Meng Qi, courtesy name Chuzhong (his name is also written with a variant character), was a late Tang scholar who passed the jinshi examination in the Qianfu era and rose to Director of Merit Assessments. In 886 he completed the Benshi Shi ('Original Incidents of Poems'), which arranges the stories behind Tang poems into seven categories. Idioms such as 'a broken mirror made whole' and 'the Minister of Works is used to it' survive through this book.
Life and times
Dates Dates unknown; active c. 836–886 CE (late Tang)