Fan Qin

Life

He began as a prefectural school student (庠生), passed the Zhejiang provincial examination in 1528, and in 1532 passed the metropolitan examination as a jinshi of the Renchen year, ranking thirty-eighth in the second class. His first post was magistrate of Suizhou in Huguang, after which he was promoted to a vice directorship in the Ministry of Works. While the court carried out extensive construction in the capital under the supervision of the marquis Guo Xun of Wuding (武定侯郭勛), Fan offended him, was imprisoned and beaten with rods at court, and was then sent out as prefect of Yuanzhou. Yan Song, a grand secretary and a native of the same prefecture, had a son, Yan Shifan, who wished to take over the Xuanhua official residence; Fan refused, and when Shifan wished to have him removed, Yan Song remarked that Fan had once defied Guo Xun and that attacking him would only raise his reputation, so the matter was dropped. He was soon promoted to vice surveillance commissioner in charge of defense at Jiujiang, where he ordered the garrisons to station their troops on both land and water in mutual support, and the bandits dispersed.

He went on to serve in the provincial administrations of Guangxi, Fujian, Yunnan, and Shaanxi, rising to be vice commissioner (參政) of Guangxi, surveillance commissioner of Fujian, and right and left administration commissioners of Yunnan and Shaanxi respectively; he returned home for mourning and, when the mourning period ended, was reappointed administration commissioner of Henan. He was then promoted to vice censor-in-chief and appointed governor of the Nan-Gan and Ting-Zhang region, where he captured the rebel leader Li Wenbiao and destroyed his stronghold and killed the great robber Feng Tianjue; he also memorialized for the building of a walled town at Chengxiang and the appointment of an assistant prefect to check the troubles of Yuzhang and the Fujian-Guangdong frontier. In 1559, as vice censor-in-chief, he was placed in command at Nan-Gan, and in the eighth month of the following year he was promoted to right vice minister of War. Yan Song was then in power, and in the tenth month of that year Fan was impeached by the Nanjing censor Wang Zongxu and others and ordered to return home to await investigation; seeing that the government was going from bad to worse, he resigned and returned to his native place.

After his retirement he built an ancestral hall, was affectionate toward his younger brothers, and gave much care to his kinsmen. Zhang Shiche and Tu Dashan, natives of the same prefecture, were also living at home, and the three passed their leisure in poetry and song, dominating the literary scene of the region; they were known as the "Three Simas of the Eastern Sea" (東海三司馬). Fan exchanged poems and writings with many officials of his day, wrote a funerary inscription for Ye Yun, and composed sacrificial addresses for Zhang Shiche, Wen Yuan, Yu Youding, and Tu Dashan. His family had long lived in Yin County; his great-grandfather was Fan Chao, his grandfather Fan Xin, and his father Fan Bi, and his mother was a woman of the Wang family. He had an elder brother, Fan Yong, and younger brothers Fan Jun, Fan Tang, Fan Gao, Fan Ju, Fan Zong, and Fan Xian; he married a woman of the Yuan family and had a son, Fan Dachong, and a nephew, Fan Dache. One account gives his age at death as eighty-three.

The Tianyi Pavilion

Fan Qin was passionately fond of books: wherever he went he sought out local editions, and when he could not buy them he hired copyists; he built the Tianyi Pavilion in his residence, bought up rare editions from all over the country, arranged them in four categories, and was especially good at collecting works on the classics and the writings of earlier authors that had not been transmitted. He also compared catalogues each year with the household of Wang Fengzhou of Wumen, and the two copied from each other whatever they had not seen. Among the collectors of eastern Zhejiang the Fan family's Tianyi Pavilion ranked first, holding 70,000 volumes; his methods of collecting were the best, and the volumes remained in good order. The Tianyi Pavilion still survives. His great-grandson Guangxie once opened all four sections of the library for a compiler to examine, and the works recorded there were mostly ones that earlier anthologists had never seen, a great service to the literature of his home region.

Works

He wrote the Tianyi ge ji (天一閣集) in thirty-two juan, as well as the Fuzhang ji (撫掌集).