Zhang Bochun

Life

As a boy, he was skilled in calligraphy. When he entered the boys’ examination at the end of the Song, he wrote the character tian (“Heaven”) in the center of the paper; questioned about it, he answered, “Heaven alone is great; Yao alone took it as his model,” and was selected. He subsequently passed the jinshi examination and rose through office to become a recorder at the National University.

Under the Yuan, he was appointed Professor of Confucian Learning for Hangzhou Route in the twenty-third year of Zhiyuan, then transferred to be a secretary in the Eastern Zhejiang Surveillance Commission; in the twenty-eighth year he was promoted to secretary in the Fujian Surveillance Commission. After a little more than a year he was summoned to the capital, where he presented dozens of proposals on the urgent affairs of the day. The Shizu Emperor was moved by the directness of his arguments; Zhang was ordered to report to the Secretariat for important employment, but firmly declined, and was instead made a Hanlin Academician.

After requesting leave, he returned home and was appointed Administrator of the Qingyuan Route General Administration Office. When the provincial administration ordered him to investigate doubtful cases in Qu and Xiu, he got to the truth in every case. In the fourth year of Dade (1300), he was appointed Hanlin Academician Expositor-in-Attendance while at home; the following year he went to court and accompanied the imperial entourage to Shangdu, and he died the year after.

Family and associations

His father was Zhang Hu. His son Zhang Cai served as Deputy Pacification Commissioner for Hedong, and his eldest grandson Zhang Jiong as magistrate of Wukang County. Zhang referred to Zhao Mengfu, the Duke of Wei, as his younger brother-in-law, and served alongside Deng Wenyuan of Baxi in the Hanlin literary establishment; they were close. Deng described his prose as avoiding angularity in favor of a spacious, flowing manner, “ringing like the interplay of metal and stone”; he added that Zhang did not pride himself on literary polish, and that no complete manuscript survived him.

Works

His writings are known under the titles *Yangmeng wenji* and *Yangmeng ji*. After his death, Zhang Cai and Zhang Jiong searched for surviving pieces and arranged them in ten juan; Yu Ji wrote the preface, and the collection was printed at the Right School in the sixth year of the Zhizheng era.