Yuan Mei

Yuan Mei was born in 1716 in Qiantang, in what is now Hangzhou, Zhejiang province. The exact day and month of his birth are not confirmed in the available record. He passed the jinshi examination, the highest degree in the imperial civil service system, in 1739 at age 23, and was immediately appointed to the Hanlin Academy in Beijing, the elite institution for scholarly compilers and editors. He went on to hold several local magistrate posts before retiring relatively young to devote himself to writing.

He spent much of his later life at his garden estate, Sui Yuan (the Garden of Accommodation), in Nanjing, where he wrote most of his major works. These include the Suiyuan Shihua, a wide-ranging collection of poetry criticism, and the Suiyuan Shidan, a celebrated compendium on food and cooking that remains influential in Chinese culinary writing. He was often paired with the scholar Ji Yun in the phrase "Yuan of the south, Ji of the north," reflecting his standing among Qing-era literati. Beyond poetry and prose, he practiced calligraphy, and surviving items such as letters and short inscriptions are among the works most often seen at auction today.

Yuan Mei died in Nanjing. Primary sources disagree on the exact year: Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons give 1797, while Encyclopedia.com gives 1798. The exact day and month of his death are not confirmed in any available source, and the discrepancy between years may reflect a difference between traditional reign-year reckoning and the Gregorian calendar rather than a factual dispute.

Within Chinese literary history, Yuan Mei is regarded as one of the leading poets and critics of the eighteenth century, known for informal, personality-driven poetics and for the influence of his Suiyuan Shihua on later poetry criticism. His Suiyuan Shidan is a standard reference in the history of Chinese food writing. He is not, however, discussed within the modern visual-art critical canon in the way a painter or calligrapher with a dedicated exhibition history would be, and no named art critic in a major outlet appears to have published a verbatim review of his calligraphy or painting. No exact quotes meeting that bar could be confirmed, so none are reproduced here.

Documentation of Yuan Mei's auction market is thin and inconsistent. The only specific, sourced sale identified is a work titled Letter by Yuan Mei, which sold for HKD 325,000 via the online marketplace Art.Salon in May 2016; whether a formal auction house was involved beyond this listing, and the exact sale date, could not be confirmed from available sources. The aggregator MutualArt lists 59 works by Yuan Mei that have appeared at auction, and cites realized prices reportedly reaching about USD 1,523,363 for works on paper and USD 24,879 for paintings, but does not identify the specific lots, houses, or dates behind those figures, so they cannot be treated as a verified record. Adding to the confusion, Artprice indexes market data for the same artist under the inverted name "Mei Yuan," a naming-order variant rather than a different person.

Material attributed to "Yuan Mei" requires careful verification. His name can appear in market databases under an inverted naming variant, "Mei Yuan," that refers to the same person, and he is easily confused with other historical figures sharing part of his name. The confirmed auction record for his own calligraphy and painting is scarce, so no single result, including aggregator ranges, should be treated as a reliable price benchmark. There is no catalogue raisonne and no modern authentication program, which means provenance research and specialist connoisseurship carry unusually heavy weight for anyone considering a work attributed to him.