Ma Zhiyuan


Ma Zhiyuan, courtesy name Dongli, was a Chinese poet and celebrated playwright, a native of Dadu 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" from the book '东篱乐府' is the most widely known of his sanqu poems.

Works

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:
Only seven of his 15 plays are extant, of which four have been translated into English: