Bi Zhongyou

Life

He initially entered service through his father's protection as a Taimao zhailang (太廟齋郎). In the third year of Xining, he earned the jinshi degree in the same cohort as his brother Zhongyan and was appointed registrar of Huoqiu in Shouzhou; he later served as registrar of Huoqiu and Zhecheng and as magistrate of Luoshan and Changshui.

After Emperor Zhezong's accession, early in Yuanyou he served as an assistant in the Directorate of Military Equipment (軍器監丞), then as an assistant at the Court of Imperial Insignia (衛尉寺丞), and was summoned to an examination at the Academy of Academicians. Nine candidates took the examination, including Huang Tingjian, Zhang Lei, and Chao Buzhi; Su Shi found his writing exceptional, and Bi ranked first, receiving the additional appointment of Collator at the Jixian Institute (集賢校理). The military appointment is also summarized as 軍器衛尉丞.

He was sent out as judicial commissioner for the Hebei West and Hedong circuits and was regarded as incorruptible; Han Zhen called him “truly pure”. He then served as assistant judge in Kaifeng Prefecture and acting director of rites, as judicial commissioner for the Qin-Feng and Yongxing circuits, as prefect of Yaozhou, and, because of the Su Shi faction case, as prefect of Langzhou.

When Huizong succeeded to the throne, he became judicial commissioner of Lizhou Circuit and then prefect of Zhengzhou and Yunzhou; another account gives the latter two prefectures as Zhengzhou and Dengzhou. He also served as vice transport commissioner for the Jingdong and Huainan circuits; the Huainan appointment is dated 1099–1101, and another office entry places him as prefect of Guozhou in 1095–1096. He later entered the Ministry of Personnel as a langzhong (吏部郎中).

While serving as vice transport commissioner in Huainan, he was entered in the Yuanyou Party Register and demoted to supervise Songshan Zhongyue Temple. After being removed from the register, he managed the Western Capital Left-Behind Censorate, was put in charge of Nanjing Hongqing Palace, and retired. He died in the third year of Xuanhe (1121), aged seventy-five; his later life ended in hardship and scattered appointments.

Intellectual and literary work

His prose was vigorous, broad-ranging, and argumentative, with close attention to practical affairs. In a memorial to Sima Guang he argued that the New Policies, although abolished, could be restored; in a letter to Su Shi he urged caution in poetry and prose, and both matters turned out as he had anticipated. He also wrote a preface for a book by Song Minqiu; Chen Tian wrote his epitaph.

He wrote Xitai ji (西臺集), in twenty juan; it is also reported as fifty juan, and the original has been lost. Qing court bibliographers reconstructed twenty juan from Yongle dadian, remarking that it had “almost restored its former form”. The edited poems use the Wenyuange Siku quanshu printing as their base text, collated against the Wuyingdian juzhen edition and others, with newly collected poems outside the original collection appended at the end.