Shi Nai'an
c. 1296–1372
Biography
Shi Nai'an is the writer to whom tradition assigns Shuihu zhuan, the Water Margin, one of the four great classical novels of the Chinese canon. He is placed in the late Yuan and early Ming periods, roughly 1296 to 1372. The record of his life is thin. Scholars disagree about where he was born, and a few have questioned whether he existed at all, so the attribution rests on tradition more than on documents that settle the question.
The Water Margin tells of outlaws who band together and defy the government. Its episodes circulated for generations in oral storytelling and popular retellings before they were gathered into a long novel. Some traditions make Luo Guanzhong, the reputed author of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a pupil of Shi.
The site holds the book itself, 水滸傳, so readers can meet the text that the tradition is about. The credit to Shi Nai'an should be read as a traditional attribution, not as settled fact. Anyone who wants to test it will find the scholarship on how the novel took shape more useful than his biography, which is thin.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
水滸傳
by Shi Nai'an
In the last years of the Northern Song, corrupt officials drive one honest man after another into outlawry, until a hundred and eight heroes gather in the marshes of Liangshan. Told as a chain of linked adventures, it follows brawlers, scholars and fugitives on their way to the…
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.