Xiāo Yì 蕭繹 (508–555), zì Shìchéng 世誠, biéhào Jīnlóuzǐ 金樓子, posthumously Emperor Yuán 元帝 of the Liáng (full posthumous title Xiàoyuán huángdì 孝元皇帝, r. 552–555), was the seventh son of Liáng Wǔdì 梁武帝 Xiāo Yǎn 蕭衍 by his consort Ruǎn Lìngyíng 阮令嬴. CBDB id 33252 records his birth in 508 and death in 554; the Liáng shū and the Nán shǐ both give 555 (the discrepancy turns on the dating of his execution by Western Wèi at Jiānglíng — the Liáng calendar 12th month of Chéngshèng 3 ≡ early 555 in the Julian calendar). The standard biographical sources are Liáng shū 5 (Yuándì basic annals) and Nán shǐ 8.
Blind in one eye from childhood, he was nevertheless reputed the most learned of all his father’s sons. He held the title Prince of Xiāngdōng 湘東王 from 514 and the governorship of Jīngzhōu 荊州 from 526 — a long western tenure, based at Jiānglíng 江陵, that gave him forty years to assemble what may have been the largest private library of pre-Táng China (his own Jīnlóuzǐ · Jùshū piān 金樓子·聚書篇 claims 80,000 juan, which Wilkinson §73.5 treats as the upper-end figure for Southern-Dynasties imperial collections). When the Eastern-Wèi defector Hóu Jǐng 侯景 stormed Jiànkāng 建康 in 549 and starved Liáng Wǔdì to death, Xiāo Yì gathered a coalition of Liáng princes, defeated and killed Hóu Jǐng, and ascended the Liáng throne at Jiānglíng in late 552 as Emperor Yuán. His reign lasted barely three years: in late 554, when Western Wèi forces under Yú Jǐn 于謹 invested Jiānglíng, the emperor — by then a convert to a strict Buddhist asceticism — ordered his entire library of more than 140,000 juan (according to the Liáng shū) burnt rather than fall to the conquerors, an event remembered in Chinese cultural history as the Jiānglíng fénshū 江陵焚書 (“Burning of Books at Jiānglíng”). He himself was put to death shortly afterward.
Xiāo Yì was extraordinarily prolific. The Suí shū · Jīngjí zhì records over a hundred juan under his name in the four bibliographic divisions. The principal surviving works are the Jīnlóuzǐ 金樓子 (KR3j0012; recovered for the Sìkù from the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn) and the Sèngzhì biànpǔ 篆隸辨譜 (lost) — the famous Zhígòng tú 職貢圖 (an illustrated catalogue of foreign tribute embassies, of which one Sòng-period fragment in the National Museum of China survives) — fragments of his commentaries on the Zhōuyì 周易, the Lǎozi, the Sūnzi bīngfǎ 孫子兵法 (preserved in the Tàipíng yùlǎn and elsewhere), the autobiographical fù Guān wǒ shēng fù 觀我生賦 (preserved in Bei-Qí shū 45 and consulted by Yán Zhītuī 顏之推 — Wilkinson §73.4 notes its early use of the four-branches jīng / shǐ / zǐ / jí taxonomy), and a substantial body of fù and yuèfǔ poetry collected in the Quán Shànggǔ Sāndài QínHàn Sānguó Liùcháo wén 全上古三代秦漢三國六朝文 and the Yǐ Wén lèi jù 藝文類聚.