About the author
Liu Meng's life is very sparsely documented in publicly available sources: his exact place of origin, dates of birth and death, and official career cannot be verified. The only work reliably attributed to him is the Liu Family Chrysanthemum Manual (Liu Shi Ju Pu). The book belongs to the traditional Chinese genre of specialized treatises (pulu), focusing exclusively on chrysanthemums and covering variety identification, morphological description, cultivation, and critical appraisal. It reflects the literati habit of expressing character and sentiment through plants. In bibliographic classification the work is often placed under Eastern philosophy, indicating that its content goes beyond horticultural technique to include moral reflection and the pursuit of principle through the observation of things. Given the scarcity of source material, a full picture of Liu Meng awaits further discovery; readers should attend to the text of the Manual itself, appreciating its choice of subject, descriptive format, and prose style, and its place within the older tradition of Chinese chrysanthemum monographs.