CHU YI-TSUN

born Oct. 7, 1629, Hsiu-shui, Chekiang province, China died Nov. 14, 1709, Hsiu-shui also spelled Chu I-tsun, also called Chu Chu-ch'a, Pinyin Zhu Yizun, or Zhu Zhucha, courtesy name (zi) Hsi-ch'ang eminent Chinese scholar and poet of the early Ch'ing dynasty (1644-1911/12). The turmoil attending the collapse of the Ming dynasty in 1644 and the subsequent Ch'ing conquest prevented Chu from capitalizing upon his family's political prominence under the Ming, forcing him to spend much of his life as a private tutor and personal secretary to various local officials and men of letters. His considerable intellectual accomplishments, however, won him a summons to a special Ch'ing examination in 1678 and eventually an appointment to the prestigious Hanlin Academy at the court in Peking, where he became an editor on the official Ming history project. While at the capital he wrote a number of other histories, including a noted history of Peking and its environs (Jih-hsia chiu-wen; 1688), and produced his Ching-i k'ao (1701; expanded ed. 1755; "General Bibliography of the Classics"), a massive descriptive catalog of both lost and extant works in the Confucian canon. Preserving a lively interest in poetry throughout his career, Chu edited a collection of Ming verse and a definitive anthology of lyric tz'u poetry. Chu Yi-tsun is regarded as being perhaps the only one of the early Ch'ing poets whose work rivaled that of his famous contemporary Wang Shih-chen. Chu was a prolific composer of tz'u poetry, his work in that genre being traditional in form, though somewhat obscure and allegorical in approach.