Yuan Mei
1716–1797
Biography
Yuan Mei (1716–1797) was a poet, essayist and literary critic of the Qing dynasty, from Qiantang near Hangzhou in Zhejiang province. He passed the highest civil service examination at the age of twenty-four and then served for some years as a county magistrate in several places in the Yangtze region. At about thirty-eight he gave up office and settled in Nanjing, where he made the Sui Garden (隨園) his home and a centre for his circle, and he spent the rest of his life there writing, editing and teaching.
He was one of the most widely read literary figures of his time. His criticism of poetry, the Suiyuan Shihua (隨園詩話, Sui Garden Talks on Poetry), argued that a poem should express the poet's own feeling and character, and it pushed back against the rule-bound imitation of earlier models that many scholars favoured. He also took women writers seriously and welcomed women as students and poets within his circle. His essays on food, the Suiyuan Shidan (隨園食單), are still read as a cookbook and as a record of the cooking of his day.
On this site his book is 子不語 (Zi Bu Yu), a collection of tales about the strange, written in classical Chinese. Its title comes from a line of the Analects in which Confucius declines to speak of prodigies, feats of strength, disorder and spirits, and the book is made almost entirely of such tales. Many of the stories were told to him by word of mouth, and some resemble stories by his contemporary Ji Yun, so Chinese writers often pair the two as the south Yuan and north Ji of their age. Chinese sources count twenty-four volumes, with a ten-volume sequel.
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Books
子不語
by 袁枚
Yuan Mei took his title from the saying that the Master did not speak of prodigies, and then spoke of little else. Its many short tales of ghosts, strange deaths and the afterlife are told with wit. This book uses the racial and other slurs of its period as written; the Book…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.