Cheng Yuwen, whose dates of birth and death and native place are unknown, has very limited publicly available information, and the details of his life can no longer be reliably established. Judging from his surviving works, he was a man of letters interested in traditional seasonal customs and culture. Two of his works are held in the collection: The Calendar of a Hundred Flowers and The Mandarin Duck Register. The former ties floral events to the seasons, recording in monthly order the times at which various flowers bloom; it belongs to the genre of flower calendars, written in plain and concise prose with a sense of observing things in order to understand the seasons. The latter, judging by its title, concerns topics such as marriage and romantic fate, and may be a playful work on matchmaking or on judging character. One work concerns the rhythms of nature, the other human affairs, and together they suggest an author whose interests spanned both the seasons and human life, in a leisurely and refined style. Because his writings are mostly informal sketches and miscellaneous records, they did not circulate widely in later ages, and his name is not well known; he is commonly classified under Eastern philosophy and culture. Today Cheng Yuwen is known mainly through these two surviving works.
