Ke Changyi is a Chinese author about whom little public information is available; neither his birth and death years nor the details of his life are known. According to library records, only one work appears under his name, a critical biography of Wang Anshi, classified under general biography. The book takes Wang Anshi, the Northern Song statesman and man of letters, as its subject, and belongs to the genre of biographical criticism, which typically combines a narrative of the subject's life with an assessment of his achievements and thought. In theme, the author attends to Song-dynasty political reform and the spirit of the literati, an important topic in traditional Chinese historiography, and adopts a style that relies on historical sources while interweaving narration and commentary. Because background material is scarce, his academic lineage and the full scope of his writing cannot be established, but readers may use this biography to understand his basic approach to historical figures and to evaluating the gains and losses of reform.
