Ding Xuan

Born in 1832 in Tianchang, Anhui, Ding Xuan—better known by the name Xuan Ding—was a Qing dynasty writer and artist remembered for an unusually broad range of talents. Sources describe him not only as a novelist, but also as a dramatist, poet, painter, calligrapher, and seal carver.

Accounts of his life say his family circumstances declined after the death of his parents, and that later upheaval during the Taiping period pushed him into a wandering life. He is said to have supported a large household through many kinds of work, including selling paintings and writing while moving from place to place. That unsettled experience seems to have fed the mood and material of his fiction.

He is best known for Ye yu qiu deng lu (Tales by Lamplight on a Rainy Autumn Night), a late-Qing collection of strange and supernatural stories. Modern descriptions of the book note its place in the long Chinese tradition of uncanny tales, while biographical sources remember its author as a rare all-around literary and visual artist of the nineteenth century.