Ji Yun
1724–1805
Biography
Ji Yun (紀昀, 1724–1805) was a Qing scholar and senior official, known by his courtesy name Xiaolan (曉嵐). He came from Xian County in Hebei, rose through the examinations to high office under the Qianlong emperor, and held the posts of Minister of Rites and assistant Grand Secretary. He was one of the leading literati of his age, respected both for his scholarship and for his writing.
He was one of the chief editors of the Siku quanshu (四庫全書), the vast imperial anthology of classical texts compiled under the Qianlong emperor, and that work gave him a central place in Qing scholarship. His own fiction is best known through Notes of the Thatched Abode of Close Observations (閱微草堂筆記), a collection of short tales about ghosts, foxes and other strange events, written in classical Chinese. In many of these stories he weighs what he has been told against his own views, which gives the collection a reflective tone.
The Notes, on this site under their Chinese title, belong to the long Chinese tradition of anecdotal writing about the strange, known as zhiguai. They are valued for their learned, measured tone and for the wide view they give of Qing society. Many of the stories are presented as things he heard from named acquaintances, and that habit of naming sources is part of their appeal. Ji Yun is often paired with Yuan Mei, the other major literary figure of the period. Reading the Notes gives a sense of how an educated official of the time thought about ghosts, reports and the line between hearsay and proof.
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Books
閱微草堂筆記
by 紀曉嵐
Ji Yun's notes from a thatched cottage on ghost stories, fox tales and odd happenings, told with a dry sense of humour and a Confucian suspicion of superstition. Plain moral comment follows the stories he hears from friends and servants. This book contains scenes of violence as…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.