active 1126-1147 Yuanlao Meng

Active in the years around 1126 to 1147, Yuanlao Meng is known as the author of Dongjing Meng Hua Lu (Dreams of Splendor of the Eastern Capital), a memoir of Kaifeng, the Northern Song capital. Sources describe him as a refugee after the fall of Kaifeng in 1126, and his book looks back on the city he had known before that upheaval.

What makes his writing so memorable is its attention to ordinary life. Rather than focusing only on emperors or battles, he recorded festivals, markets, restaurants, performers, customs, and the rhythms of the city, creating one of the richest surviving portraits of urban life in Song China.

Because so little certain biographical detail survives, he is remembered mainly through this single remarkable work. Even so, that book has given later readers and historians an unusually vivid window into a lost world.