ABSTRACT
Shortly after his request for sick leave, Yuan Mei went to Hangzhou to visit his parents, after which he took his cousin Yuan Shu and his nephew Lu Jian back to Nanjing to live together with him in Harmony Garden. 1 Yuan’s sojourn with his parents in Hangzhou was the subject of his best narrative poem to date (translated on page 568,) and this period also saw the first significant examples of his didactic poetry (see, for example, page 573,) in which he explained his philosophy of life and commented on numerous topics relevant to eighteenth-century Chinese society and culture. Although his most original poetry at this time tended to belong to one of these two categories, he continued to make important contributions to other genres.
