Chinese · 699–761
Wang Wei passed the highest examination at about twenty-one and held office almost continuously for forty years, rising to deputy minister. He was also a painter, a musician and a serious Buddhist, and after his wife died in his thirties he never remarried. In middle age he bought an estate on the Wang River at Lantian, south of the capital, and wrote a sequence of twenty four-line poems about its places — a deer enclosure, a bamboo grove, a lakeside pavilion — which is the single most translated short sequence in Chinese. When the An Lushan rebels took Chang'an he was captured and forced to serve them; after the recovery he was tried for collaboration and saved by a poem he had written in captivity and by his brother's intercession. Later criticism called him the poet-Buddha, and Su Shi said there was painting in his poems and poetry in his paintings. Almost none of the paintings survive.