Yu Yue

Life

At the age of four, Yu Yue moved with his parents from Deqing to the Yao family home in Linping. He lived there for thirty years, until entering official service at thirty-two, and in his youth tried to supplement the Linping Record and toured the scenery of Linping.

In 1850, the thirtieth year of the Daoguang reign, he received the jinshi degree as nineteenth in the second class of the Gengxu examination, was selected as a shuji shi, and was appointed a Hanlin compiler. Zeng Guofan served as an examination reader; Yu’s examination poem began, “花落春仍在，天時尚艷陽,” and won Zeng’s admiration.

In the fifth year of the Xianfeng reign (1855), Yu was appointed educational commissioner of Henan. The following year, censor Cao Dengyong impeached him over the charge that an examination question had “割裂經義”; he was dismissed and never again held office. After his dismissal, he lived in Suzhou and lectured at the Ziyang and Qiuzhi academies in Suzhou and Shanghai; he spent the longest period, thirty-one years, teaching at Hangzhou’s Gujing Jingshe.

His friends included 馮桂芬, 曾國藩, 吳慶坻, 潘祖蔭, 彭玉麟, and 李鴻章. Among his pupils were 王仁俊, 章炳麟, 吳昌碩, 譚獻, 袁昶, and 吳慶坻. Other pupils included 朱一新, 吳大澂, 劉恭冕, 施補華, 黃以周, and 戴望. His Japanese pupil 楢原陳政 is also given as 井上陳政.

In 1875, with financial assistance from friends, Yu purchased a ruler-shaped abandoned plot in Suzhou. He designed it himself, dug ponds, arranged rocks, planted flowers and bamboo, and built more than thirty bays; taking the sense of “曲則全” in the Laozi, he named the garden Quyuan and styled himself the Quyuan Jushi. The garden contained Chun Zaitang, where he received literary visitors and lectured; he also built Yulou beside Xiling Seal Society on Solitary Hill at West Lake in Hangzhou, and the Six-Immortals Bridge in Nandai Village, Deqing.

In late autumn 1906, at the request of Chen Kuilong, governor of Jiangsu, Yu wrote and engraved a stele of “楓橋夜泊.” It is located at a pavilion at the southern end of the eastern corridor of Xuyuan in the Nanjing Presidential Palace and at Hanshan Temple in Suzhou.

Family

His grandfather was 俞廷鑣, and his wife was 姚文玉 (1820–1879). His daughters appear under the two forms 俞繡孫 and 俞琇孫; his sons were 俞祖仁 and 俞紹萊, and his descendants included the grandson 俞陛雲, the granddaughter 俞慶曾 (1865–1897), the granddaughter’s husband 彭見貞, and the great-grandson 俞銘衡.

俞陛雲 placed first in the palace examination and received the title of tanhua in the twenty-fourth year of the Guangxu reign; he was one of the compilers of the Draft History of the Qing. Yu Yue’s great-grandson 俞平伯 was a modern scholar and a specialist in Dream of the Red Chamber studies, while the kinsmen 俞恆潤, 俞恆澤, and 俞奎垣 all passed the jinshi examination.

Scholarship and writings

In his study of the Classics, Yu followed the father-and-son line of the Gaoyou Wangs, Wang Yinzhi and Wang Niansun. He regarded the essentials of classical study as correcting the division of sentences, examining the meanings of characters, and understanding phonetic loans in ancient texts, applying the same method from the Classics to individual graphs.

His classical and philosophical writings included 《群經平議》 and 《諸子平議》. He also wrote 《古書疑義舉例》. Other works included 《春在堂隨筆》, 《茶香室叢鈔》, 《詁經精舍自課文》, 《賓萌集》, and 《春在堂詩編》. 《右臺仙館筆記》 is a collection of classical-language fiction, while 《梓潼傳》 is a chuanqi.

Beyond classical studies, Yu wrote poetry, ci, and popular literature. His prose was concise, his poetry was compared with that of Yuan Mei, and his ci was described as plain yet capable of surprise.

Legacy

Yu Yue was regarded as a master of late-Qing evidential scholarship, and his reputation extended to Japan. He was highly esteemed in modern Japan and was even placed alongside Li Hongzhang and Zeng Guofan.