Selected Works of Liu Zongyuan (Complete 4 Volumes)

Author: (Tang) Liu Zongyuan
Publisher:
Publish Date: 1979-12-01
Features: Liu Zongyuan, styled Zihou, was an outstanding litterateur and renowned thinker of the Tang Dynasty in China. His ancestral home was in Hedong, and he was also known as Liu Hedong. He was once exiled to Liuzhou and thus also called Liu Liuzhou. Born into a bureaucratic landlord family, he passed the imperial examination at the age of twenty-one and, at twenty-six, passed the Bixue Hongci examination, being appointed as a Zhengzi at the Jixian Dian Academy. Later, he served as the county magistrate of Lantian and the Assistant Censor-in-Chief. In the twenty-first year of the Zhenyuan era, he joined the Wang Shuwen group, which advocated political reform, and was promoted to the position of Assistant Director of the Ministry of Rites. Soon after, the reform failed, and he was exiled as the Magistrate of Yongzhou. Ten years later, he was reassigned as the Prefect of Liuzhou. Four years later, he died in Liuzhou at the age of forty-seven. Throughout his life, Liu Zongyuan experienced the reigns of the Tang emperors Daizong, Dezong, Shunzong, and Xianzong, but his main activities took place during the Zhenyuan and Yuanhe periods. By then, after an eight-year An Lushan Rebellion, the Tang Dynasty had begun its decline, and the so-called "Golden Age" of the Tang, as praised by later historians, had long been gone. After this great upheaval, the contradictions between the landlord class and the peasant class, as well as the conflicts among different strata and factions within the landlord class, not only did not ease but were further intensified. Warlord factions still controlled troops and territories, and their influence had expanded from the Four Towns of Hebei into the central plains.