active 17th century Erzeng Yang

Yang Erzeng was a Chinese writer and publisher from Hangzhou in southeastern China, active around 1590–1602. He is known today mainly as the author of The Story of Han Xiangzi, a seventeenth-century vernacular novel centered on one of the Eight Immortals.

That novel blends adventure, poetry, religion, and fantasy, taking readers across the human world, the heavens, and the underworld. Modern descriptions of the book note its strong Daoist message and its connection to ideas of inner alchemy, which helps explain why it has remained of interest to readers and scholars.

Very little biographical detail about him seems to be firmly established beyond his activity as a writer-publisher and his link to Hangzhou. He also appears to have written under more than one literary name, a reminder of how elusive many early modern authors can be.