Qu Yuan

Qu Yuan was an aristocrat in the State of Chu during the Warring States period, c. 340–278 BC. He's credited with shaping the Chu Ci anthology, one of ancient China's two greatest verse collections alongside the Shi Jing, and is widely accepted as the author of "The Lament." The historical record is thin and contested: the first reference to him surfaced in 174 BC, when an exiled official named Jia Yi wrote of a earlier man who'd met a "similar fate." Eighty years later, Sima Qian drafted the first biography in his Records of the Grand Historian, though it's riddled with contradictions. What e…