Ma Zhiyuan


Ma Zhiyuan, courtesy name Dongli, Chinese dramatist, playwright, and poet during the Yuan dynasty.
Among his achievements is the development and popularizing of the sanqu lyric type of Classical Chinese poetry forms. The poem "Autumn Thoughts" is the most widely known of his sanqu poems.
His sanqu poems were collected in the book "Dongli Yuefu", where there were 104 single sanqu and 17 song suites.

Works

Poems

Ma Zhiyuan's sanqu poem "Autumn Thoughts", composed to the metric pattern Tianjingsha, uses ten images in twenty-two monosyllables to preamble a state of emotion, and is considered as the penultimate piece in Chinese poetry to convey the typical Chinese male literati's melancholy during late autumn:

Plays

Only seven of his 15 plays are extant, of which four have been translated into English: Autumn in Han Palace, 漢宮秋. This play tells the story of Han Emperor Yuandi and Wang Zhaojun, and is considered the best example of Yuan theatre.The Yellow-Millet Dream, 黃粱夢 Yueyang Tower, 岳陽樓 Tears on the Blue Gown, 青衫淚
  • 任風子
  • 薦福碑
  • 陳搏高臥