Writers › Writer / Poet
Handan Chun
Late Han writer and calligrapher who as a young man composed the Cao E stele inscription and later compiled the joke collection Xiaolin.
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 Zishu · Zi Zili · Handan Zhu
Handan Chun, also named Zhu, courtesy names Zishu and Zili, came from Yingchuan. In 151, when Du Shang, magistrate of Shangyu, reburied the filial daughter Cao E and set up a stele for her, he had his young student Handan, then barely twenty, write the inscription, which he finished at a sitting: this is the Cao E stele. Learned in early lexicons and in seal and clerical scripts, he lived in Jingzhou in the Chuping years; when Jingzhou submitted, Cao Cao summoned him and sent him to serve Cao Zhi. Early in the Huangchu era of Wei he was made an erudite, and his rhapsody on pitch-pot earned him a gift from Cao Pi. He compiled the Xiaolin, a collection of jokes.
Life and times
Dates Dates unknown; wrote the Cao E stele in 151 and was still active early in the Huangchu era of Wei (c. 220–221)