Sun Zhu

Sun Zhu, who styled himself Hengtang and in old age 'the Retired Scholar of Hengtang', was born in 1711 at Wuxi in Jiangsu. He passed the highest examination in the Qianlong reign, served with integrity as a county magistrate and in old age taught at the prefectural school of Jiangning. Dissatisfied with the haphazard choice of poems in the popular primer Poems of a Thousand Masters, he and his wife Xu Lanying selected some three hundred poems from nearly fifty thousand Tang poems and published them in 1763 as Three Hundred Tang Poems. The book spread at once across the country; for more than two hundred years almost every household has owned it, and everyone knows the saying, 'Learn the three hundred Tang poems by heart, and even if you cannot write poems you can chant them.'