Qu Yuan
Chinese poet and politician (c.340-278 BC) · China · Writers · Lived 343 BC to 278 BC · aged 65
Qu Yuan is read about 445 times a day, in 58 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 7 October 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 382 days, one point a day.
Something wrong?A poet whose drowning became a festival. Qu Yuan wrote grieving verses for a crumbling kingdom, then - according to legend - walked into a river. Two millennia later, dragon boats still race in his name.
Also in Deutsch
Photos 8
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In their own words 1
, O Soul come back to watch the birds in flight! / He who has found such manifold delights / Shall feel his cheeks aglow / And the blood-spirit dancing through his limbs.
About this person
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 endures is the link to the Dragon Boat Festival and a body of verse that defined classical Chinese poetry - even if exactly how much he wrote remains an open question.
Writers from China 6
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