Hú Liǎn 胡璉 (fl. mid-16th century) was a Míng-era clansman and editorial descendant of Hú Cìyàn 胡次焱 (1229–1306) of Wùyuán 婺源. In the Jiājìng 嘉靖 period (1522–1566) he gathered the surviving manuscripts of his ancestor’s poetry, prose, and fù — which had never been edited in Hú Cìyàn’s lifetime and which the major Sòng / Yuán catalog-tradition had passed over — and prepared a first compilation in ten juàn. His nephew Pān Zī 潘滋 then collated the text and saw it through the press in Jiājìng 10 (1531), with a preface dated that year. This editorial work is the principal route by which the Méiyán wénjí 梅巖文集 KR4d0393 has come down.
Hú Liǎn is not securely identifiable with any single one of the several Míng officials of the same name in CBDB (the homonym density of “Hú Liǎn” in the Míng is high, and at least three figures of national stature share it: the Zhèngdé-era jìnshì military official, the Jiājìng-era jurist, and at least one Wùyuán-local scholar). Pān Zī’s preface to the Méiyán wénjí identifies our editor only as a clansman of Hú Cìyàn (a 族孫 “clan-grandson”) and as Pān Zī’s maternal uncle’s brother, without giving an exam-rank or office. The CBDB id is therefore left blank pending a defensible identification; the figure should be understood for present purposes as a mid-Míng Wùyuán-resident bibliophile.