Wang Wei

Wang Wei was a renowned poet and painter of the Tang dynasty. His courtesy name was Mojie, and he styled himself the Lay Buddhist Mojie. A native of Puzhou in Hedong (present-day Yongji, Shanxi), he passed the imperial examination during the Kaiyuan era and rose to the post of Vice Minister of the Secretariat, known to later generations as "Wang Youcheng." His poetry mostly celebrates landscapes and rural life; he is grouped with Meng Haoran as "Wang-Meng" and honored as the "Poet Buddha." Su Shi remarked that his work holds "painting within poetry and poetry within painting," highlighting the interplay of the two arts in his writing. Some four hundred of his poems survive, and his collected works are preserved in the Wang Youcheng Collection. The library holds twenty-seven of his works, including Wang Wei's Poetry Collection and The Complete Poems of Wang Wei, as well as selections such as Tang Poetry in Intoxicating Rhyme and the Approaches to Poets series. His common categories span literary appreciation, classical poetry, and Eastern philosophy, showing that his landscape and rural verse remains valued in contemporary reading and study.