ABSTRACT
FOR THE MOST part, Yuan Mei's earliest surviving verse consists of highly allusive poems on historical topics written in the heptasyllabic regulated form. 1 Although he had largely discarded this style of poetry by 1741, his interest in historical verse revived whenever he traveled to areas of China rich in historical relics, and poems on historical themes constitute a part of his oeuvre that cannot be ignored. Nor was Yuan alone among his contemporaries in his interest in historical verse, for Jiang Shiquan wrote a number of excellent historical poems, and the historian-poet Zhao Yi is probably most famous today for his verse on China's past.2
