A Study On The Collected Works Of Wang Pengyun

Wang Pengyun (1849-1904), styled Youxia, with a sobriquet as "Bantang Laoren" (Old Man of Half Pool), was born in Lingui County (Guilin City nowadays) Guangxi. In the ninth year of Emperor Tongzhi in Qing Dynasty (1870) he passed a certain exam and was given "Juren", but from then on he failed in all the exams for getting a "Jinshi". He had been given positions as Neigezhongshu, Chiduxueshi, Royal Supervisor of Jiangxi Province and Likegeishizhong for over 10 years. After failure of the Wu Hsu Reform in 1898, Wang quitted and went down to the South. He taught in Nanyang Public School, Shanghai, then traveled to Kaifeng, Nanjing, Yangzhou, etc. He died in the Two-Guang Office, Suzhou, and was buried in the cemetery of Tang's family, east to Guilin.The subjects of the thesis are Wang's collected works. Wang was the first among the "Four Masters in Late Qing Dynasty". "His works fell into eight rough drafts-the first, the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, the seventh and the eighth. He regarded it pitiful not to be the first in exams, so when he collected his works, he purposefully missed the first rough draft and started from the second one." Wang selected over 600 Ci (a form of poetry consisting of lines of different lengths) from his seven rough drafts and nine self-collected works and refined then into The Final Draft of Bantang.Wang was a patriotic poet. Most of his Ci concern about the country and current affairs. His Ci also express his emotion of having unrecognized talents, missing his hometown in the South, seeing of his friends, etc. Wangzhu Xiaozang remarked Wang's works as "originally learned from Bishan (Wang Yisun), then from Jiaxuan (Xin qiji), Mengchuang (Wu Wenying), finally came to the simple and honest style of Qingzhen (Zhou Bangyan)" (preface on The Final Draft of Bantang). In addition, Wang proposed his theory in writing Ci: heavy, simple, deep. He also made achievement in textual criticism.