author
active 18th century Lang Chen
Best known for the Qing-dynasty novel Xue Yue Mei, this elusive writer is remembered more through the story than through a well-documented life. What survives suggests an older literary figure who wrote with a feel for romance, heroism, and moral testing.
1 Audiobook
雪月梅傳
by active 18th century Lang Chen
About the author
Lang Chen is the name used by Project Gutenberg for Chen Lang (陳朗), a Chinese novelist active in the 18th century. The surviving record is thin, but sources agree that he lived around the mid-Qing, during the Qianlong era, and that he also used the style name Cangming and the sobriquets Xiaoshan and later Jinghu Yisou.
He is known for Xue Yue Mei (also called The Tale of Snow, Moon, and Plum or Xiaoyi Xue Yue Mei Zhuan), a long vernacular novel generally dated to the 1770s. Modern descriptions note that the book mixes the mood of a scholar-beauty romance with the sweep of a heroic tale, setting private love, family duty, and larger public conflict side by side.
A few later reference works add that Chen Lang had served more than once as a local yamen secretary or adviser before retiring home to write poetry and prose, and that he was already past sixty when he completed Xue Yue Mei. Because so little about his life can be confirmed, he remains one of those authors whose personality has to be glimpsed through the texture of the work itself.