戡 Kān

Kan, courtesy name Dingchen, lost his father when young. From about the age of ten he loved learning; in the bitter cold he gathered firewood to warm himself, and at night, having no lamp oil, he went over in silence what he had memorised. At thirty he had mastered the Six Classics and was put forward for the presented scholar examination. When he went to sit the examination of the Ministry of Rites, the candidates were let in only as the clerks called out their names, and Kan was ashamed of this. The next day he went straight back to Jiangdong and lived in retirement in his village at Yangxian. When the people of Yangxian had quarrels they could not settle, they did not go to the authorities but came to Kan to have them judged. In all he wrote several hundred essays and treatises. He always disliked the poems of Yuan and Bai of the Yuanhe era, which were mostly delicate, ornate and unrestrained, yet the world vied in prizing them. So he collected the poets who resembled the ancients and arranged them as Tang Poems, to criticise and correct those failings. Wang Yanwei, Military Commissioner of Pinglu, recommended him in a memorial as Inspector. When the headquarters was moved he returned to Luoyang, and died. Edit