Yuan Mei

Yuan Mei a Chinese poet, critic and essayist of the eighteenth century (1716-1797) who was one of the most popular and influential literary figures of his age and the author of a theory of poetry that stressed personal feeling and natural expression. He was also a noted writer on food and a colourful, controversial personality.

Early Life and Official Career

Yuan Mei was born in 1716 in Qiantang, present-day Hangzhou, in the province of Zhejiang, into a family that had known better days. He was an exceptionally gifted student and passed the imperial examinations at a young age, earning the highest degree and entering the prestigious Hanlin Academy. His early success seemed to promise a distinguished career at court.

His progress in the capital was checked, however, and he was posted to provincial office, serving as a magistrate in Jiangsu. He proved an able and humane administrator, but he found the constraints of official life increasingly irksome. In middle age, after the death of his mother, he resigned from office on the grounds of filial mourning and did not return to the bureaucracy.

He moved to Nanjing and acquired a neglected garden, which he restored and renamed the Garden of Contentment. There he built a celebrated private residence where he lived for the rest of his life as a man of letters, surrounded by books, disciples and friends.

Poetry and Literary Theory

Yuan Mei was a prolific poet and one of the most influential literary critics of his time. He championed a theory often called the theory of spiritual disposition, which held that the essential quality of poetry is the genuine expression of personal feeling and innate sensibility rather than the imitation of ancient models or the accumulation of learned allusion. Poetry, he argued, should move and delight rather than merely display erudition.

This view brought him into conflict with more conservative critics who insisted on the authority of tradition and the importance of moral instruction in literature. Yuan Mei defended the legitimacy of individual emotion, including romantic and domestic feeling, and he refused to subordinate the poet's personal voice to a narrow orthodoxy.

He praised spontaneity, wit and freshness, and he valued the poetry of ordinary life and of women and lesser-known writers. His critical writings, expressed in essays and in his evaluations of individual poets, shaped literary taste for a generation and are still studied as a classic statement of the expressive theory of poetry.

The Garden of Contentment and Literary Life

The garden that Yuan Mei created in Nanjing became one of the most famous literary households of the age. He filled it with rocks, ponds, pavilions and rare plants, and he opened it to visitors, students and friends, making it a gathering place for writers and artists. His hospitality and his wit made him a central figure in the cultural life of the Jiangnan region.

He taught a large number of students, especially talented women, which was unusual for the time. His encouragement of female poets and his willingness to publish their work made him a notable, if controversial, advocate for the literary recognition of women, and his collection of poetry by women writers was widely read.

He corresponded with writers across the country, commissioned and edited anthologies, and maintained an extensive network of literary friendships. His letters and informal writings give a vivid picture of eighteenth-century literary society and of the pleasures and quarrels of a life devoted to poetry.

Writings on Food and Other Subjects

Yuan Mei is famous for his writings on cookery, in which he recorded recipes and discussed the principles of good cooking with unusual care and taste. His book on the subject is one of the classic works of Chinese gastronomy, valued for its precise observations on ingredients, timing and flavour, and for its insistence on simplicity and the quality of fresh produce.

He wrote on a wide range of other topics as well, including supernatural tales, anecdotes, and reflections on art, religion and morals. His collection of ghost stories, written in an elegant and often sceptical style, combined entertainment with a detached curiosity about the unexplained.

His essays and notes display a lively, sceptical and humane intelligence, and they are admired for their clarity and their freedom from pomposity. He wrote for a broad public as well as for scholars, and his works were widely reprinted and read throughout the nineteenth century.

Influence and Legacy

Yuan Mei was one of the most widely read authors of the Qing period, and his poetry and criticism exercised a lasting influence on later Chinese literature. His insistence on the value of individual feeling and his defence of the poet's personal voice anticipated, in their own terms, concerns that have continued to occupy writers and critics.

His reputation has fluctuated with changing literary fashions and moral attitudes, and some later critics attacked his unconventional opinions and his interest in the pleasures of life. Yet his wit, his learning and his genuine devotion to literature have secured him a permanent place in the history of Chinese letters.

He died on 3 January 1797 in Nanjing, at the age of eighty, having lived a long and productive life as poet, critic, teacher and host. He is remembered as a representative of the refined and pleasure-loving culture of the eighteenth-century Yangtze delta and as an advocate of the freedom of the individual literary imagination.

See also

• Chinese poetry
• Garden of Contentment
• Eighteenth-century literature
• Gastronomy