Ji Yun

Background

Ji Yun was born in Xian County of Hebei Province. When he was young, he was deemed intelligent. His father Ji Rongsu was a civil minister and archaeologist.

Career

In 1747, Ji Yun rose to intellectual prominence after winning the highest distinction in the provincial examinations. Several years later, in 1754, he attained the jinshi degree, whereupon he entered the Hanlin Academy.

Ji Yun's career was not, however, smooth sailing. In 1768, he became an accessory in a bribery case after he tipped off a brother-in-law about the severity of charges pending against him, for which crime he was banished to Dihua in Xinjiang Province. He was also a rival of one of the most powerful officials in Qianlong's court, Heshen.

On his return from Xinjiang, Ji was received by the Qianlong Emperor in 1771 when the ruler happened to be returning from Jehol to Beijing, and he was ordered to write a poem on the return of the Turgut Mongols from the banks of the Volga. Ji's rendition of the inspiring tale of the return of the exiled Mongols, later celebrated in English by poet Thomas de Quincey (1785–1859) in his epic Revolt of the Tartars, delighted the emperor, for whom he became an unofficial poet laureate. The job of compiling the Siku Quanshu was his dubious reward.

One year later, Ji Yun was pardoned from his sentence, and, on his return journey in 1771, he wrote a travel account distilled into 160 poems titled Xinjiang zalu (Assorted verses on Xinjiang). This remains one of the most useful sources in Chinese on life in Xinjiang Province in the late-eighteenth century.

Late life

In the first year of the Jiaqing Emperor's reign, he was appointed as the secretary of defense. However, Ji Yun died of illness at the age of 82 in 1805.

In Ji Yun's late life, he was inspired by Pu Songling's Liaozhai Zhiyi to compile his own collections of remarkable tales, many of which were held to be satirical portraits of prominent Neo-Confucian scholars.

Achievement

Between 1789 and 1798, Ji Yun published five collections of supernatural tales, and in 1800 the five volumes were produced under the collective title Yuewei Caotang Biji (閱微草堂筆記; Jottings from the grass hut for examining minutiae).

In addition, Ji Yun was also well known as magnum opus of Qing editorial achievement, Siku quanshu (The Complete Library in Four Branches), where he edited this massive work together with Lu Xixiong, in compliance with an imperial edict issued by the Qianlong Emperor.

Poetry

One poem by Ji Yun is shown below:

"A Sail in the Glass"

Countless welcoming good mountains along the river,
My eyes are lit up as soon as I'm out of Hangzhou,
Misty river banks with mixed sky and green,
A sail in the glass.

Mansion

The mansion in which Ji Yun lived for the last thirty years of his life was originally the residence of General Yue Zhongqi (1686–1754), the twenth-first generational descendant of the renowned anti-Jurchen, Song dynasty loyalist and general Yue Fei, who is one of the most renowned figures in Chinese history. General Yue fought alongside General Nian Gengyao in quelling Tibetan rebels in what is today Qinghai, and was highly honoured in Beijing. He never lived for very long in the capital, his base being in Sichuan and Gansu. However, he was rewarded for his service to the throne by the Kangxi Emperor and raised to the position of duke of the third class.

Ji Yun lived in the mansion for thirty years and several features of the dwelling that the visitor can still see today are associated with him. A tree in the garden is said to be more than two hundred years old. Few original items from the time of Ji Yun remain in the house but the caretaker claims that the desk and mirror in the main study are original items. The glass mirror in the zitan timber frame is one of the earliest mirrors produced with lead paint in China.

After Ji Xiaolan's death, his descendants rented half of the mansion complex out to Huang Antao (1777–1847), a jinshi scholar, Hanlin scholar and poet, like Ji Yun. Huang was a renowned calligrapher; several of his calligraphic pieces are in the collection of the Palace Museum.