Wang Feng

Life

By the age of twenty he had acquired a literary reputation. In the middle of the Zhizheng era, he composed the River-Clearing Eulogy (《河清頌》); recommended jointly by the xingtai (行臺) and censorial offices, he declined each recommendation on grounds of illness.

His family had long lived at Huangshan along the river, and he styled himself Ximao Shanren. During the upheavals, he first took refuge at Lianghong Mountain in Wuxi, then moved to Qinglong River in the Song region (淞之青龍江); he named the place Wuxi Studio (「梧溪精舍」) and called himself Wuxi Zi (「梧溪子」). His grandmother Xu had planted two Chinese parasol trees at Hengjiang in their ancestral home, and the name preserved his wish not to forget it. He later moved to Wujing in Shanghai, also written Wunijing, where he built a thatched hall, named it the Garden of Leisure (「最閒園」), and called himself Zuixian Yuanding (「最閒園丁」).

While Zhang Shicheng controlled Wu, Wang Feng refused his summons and remained lying down rather than take office. One account says he advised Zhang's regime to submit to the Yuan in order to resist Zhu; that account is also questioned in the discussion surrounding it.

At the beginning of the Ming, he was selected for office on the basis of literary talent. In the fifteenth year of Hongwu (1382), the authorities pressed him to set out, but he remained in bed; his son, pleading in tears that his father was old, secured the cancellation of the appointment. His recorded titles include xuelu (學錄), xiansi (憲司), tongshi (通事), and tongshilang (通仕郎). He died in 1388, at the age of seventy.

Poetry and associations

His poetry often looked to the past and lamented the present, and expressed particular feeling over the fall of Zhang's regime. One view held that his poetry was committed to the Yuan and therefore placed him among the yimin, or loyalists of a fallen dynasty; that classification and the supposed “longing for the former state and ruler” (「故國舊君之思」) were also questioned.

His seven-juan 《梧溪詩集》 is also titled 《浯谿詩集》 and 《梧溪集》. It treats figures and affairs at the Yuan–Ming transition and preserves much that historians had not covered.

The works associated with 《梧溪集》 include farewell poems and prefaces, elegies, colophons on books and paintings, and exchange poems; the head of the collection carries prefaces by Wang Zemin, Zhou Boqi, and Yang Weizhen, and it includes exchange poems with Zhang Yu and Zhu Jing. His friends included Tao Zongyi and Shao Hengzhen.