Mèng Jiāo 孟郊 (751–814), zì Dōngyě 東野, was a Húzhōu Wǔkāng 湖州武康 native (modern Zhèjiāng Déqīng). He passed the jìnshì late, in 796 (Zhēnyuán 12) at the age of 46, after multiple failed attempts. His subsequent appointment as Lìyáng wèi (sub-prefect of Lìyáng) was the only substantive office of his career; he resigned shortly after, citing the impossibility of writing while administering a county. Hán Yù 韓愈 was his closest literary friend and his principal champion; on Mèng’s death, Hán composed the Zhēnyào xiānshēng mùzhìmíng 貞曜先生墓誌銘 (the source of Mèng’s posthumous epithet Zhēnyào).
Mèng’s verse is the canonical expression of the kǔyín 苦吟 (“painful chanting”) aesthetic: spare, archaic, dark in tone, syntactically wrenched, philosophically pessimistic. The Yóuzǐ yín 遊子吟 (“Song of the Roving Son” — a four-line poem on a mother stitching robes for her departing son) is one of the most-quoted Táng poems, taught universally in Chinese primary education. The Liènǚ cāo 烈女操 and Qiū huái 秋懷 series are central to his canon. Sū Shì’s later dismissal of Mèng’s verse (kōngáo xiǎoyú — “empty claws and small fish”) and Yuán Hàowèn’s gāotiān hòudì yī shīqiú (“vast sky, broad earth — one prisoner of poetry”) generated a divided critical tradition that persisted through the MíngQīng.
Principal work in the corpus: Mèng Dōngyě shījí KR4c0058 in 10 juǎn, 511 poems + 2 prose pieces; the standard text is Sòng Mǐnqiú’s 宋敏求 mid-11th-century synthesis from multiple variant Sòng-initial recensions. CBDB id 93952. Catalog meta gave 766–794, but those are Lǐ Guān’s dates 李觀; CBDB and standard reference works (Hán Yù’s epitaph, Xīn Tángshū) agree on 751–814, used here.