Yè Shàowēng 葉紹翁 (fl. c. 1190s–1230s), zì Sìzōng 嗣宗 (per Lì È 厲鶚, Sòng shī jì shì 宋詩記事) — though within his own KR3l0075 Sìcháo wénjiàn lù 四朝聞見錄 he is addressed by Chéng Gōngxǔ 程公許 as Jìngyì 靖逸; self-styles as a man of Lóngquán 龍泉 (Chǔzhōu 處州, modern Zhèjiāng), but Lì È gives Jiànān 建安 (Fújiàn), and his own Sìcháo wénjiàn lù entry on Gāozōng’s sea-flight names Lǐ Yǐngshì 李頴士 of Pǔchéng 浦城 (in Jiànzhōu) as his natal grandfather — so Jiànān or Pǔchéng is the ancestral place, Lóngquán the residence. CBDB has two entries under this name (id 22701 — Sòng, with note “see documentation for probable lineage kin, Huan”; id 511755 — empty stub); the 22701 entry is the canonical Yè Shàowēng. Birth-clan was originally Lǐ 李 — adopted into the Yè 葉 line of Lóngquán, which is why his “natal grandfather” carries the surname Lǐ. CBDB has no firm birth/death years; Chinese reference works typically give fl. 1175–1230 or fl. 1190–1264, neither fully secured.
Career largely unrecoverable: the Sìkù compilers, working from the Wényuāngé and the contemporary sources at their disposal, could not fix his official titles. Internal evidence in the Sìcháo wénjiàn lù — a reference to Zhōu Cháoduān 周朝端 mocking his discussion of the 1220 capital fire, and the entry on privately collating diànshì (palace-examination) papers with Zhēn Déxiù 真德秀 — suggests he held some court office, but its identity is not detailed. He was a friend and protégé of 真德秀 Zhēn Déxiù and moved in the circles of 朱熹 Zhū Xī’s direct disciples; his intellectual affiliation is solidly Dàoxué 道學, though not partisan (he openly criticises Zhū Xī’s son Zhū Zài 朱在 for the sale of the Wǔyí estate).
His principal extant work is the KR3l0075 Sìcháo wénjiàn lù 四朝聞見錄, the indispensable yěshǐ 野史 source for the four Southern-Sòng reigns Gāozōng through Níngzōng (1127–1224), composed c. 1225–1235, and the single most-cited primary source for the Qìngyuán dǎngjìn 慶元黨禁 (1195–1202 anti-Dàoxué proscription) and Hán Tuōzhòu’s 韓侂胄 regency.
Yè is independently famous as a poet — one of the Jiānghú 江湖 (River-and-Lake) school, the loosely organised mid-Southern-Sòng poetic network whose anthology Jiānghú jí 江湖集 was suppressed by Shǐ Míyuǎn in 1225. His seven-character quatrain Yóu yuán bù zhí 遊園不值 (“Visiting a Garden Where the Owner Was Out”) — with the much-anthologised closing couplet “Chūnsè mǎn yuán guān bú zhù, yī zhī hóngxìng chū qiáng lái 春色滿園關不住，一枝紅杏出牆來” (“Spring’s full glory cannot be locked within the garden; / A spray of red apricot blossoms breaks out over the wall.“) — is among the most-anthologised Sòng quatrains and is universally taught in Chinese primary-school curricula. A modest collection Jìngyì xiǎojí 靖逸小集 in one juàn preserves about forty of his poems.