Writers › Writer / Poet
Qiu Wei
Tang poet from Jiaxing, a specialist in five-character verse, remembered for Visiting a Hermit on West Mountain Without Finding Him; long-lived, he ended as Right Attendant of the Crown Prince.
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.
Qiu Wei, from Jiaxing near Suzhou, was a poet of the High to mid-Tang who specialised in five-character verse. After passing the jinshi he rose to Right Attendant of the Crown Prince and retired in 788 as Left Attendant Cavalier-in-Ordinary. His best-known poems are Visiting a Hermit on West Mountain Without Finding Him, Inscribed on a Farmer's Cottage and Pear Blossoms by the Left Palace Gate; the Complete Tang Poems preserves thirteen of them.
Life and times
Dates c. 702–c. 797 CE (another reckoning: c. 694–c. 789)