Writers › Writer / Poet
Zu Yong
High Tang poet who passed the jinshi examination in 724, never won office and ended his days as a fisherman-farmer; best known for Viewing the Remaining Snow on Zhongnan.
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
Zu Yong of Luoyang was a High Tang poet. He passed the jinshi examination in 724 but received no post and eventually lived as a fisherman and woodcutter, a friend of Wang Wei. His verse is spare and polished; the best known are Viewing the Remaining Snow on Zhongnan, famously written as an exam piece in only four lines, and Gazing at Jimen. A Ming editor compiled the Zu Yong Ji, and the Complete Tang Poems preserves one fascicle of his poems.
Life and times
Dates c. 699–c. 746 CE