陳琳

Chén Lín 陳琳

Chén Lín 陳琳 (?–217 CE), zì Kǒngzhāng 孔璋, was a native of Guǎnglíng 廣陵 (modern Yangzhou, Jiangsu). He was one of the Jiàn’ān qīzǐ 建安七子 (Seven Masters of the Jiàn’ān Era). His biography appears in Sān guó zhì (Wèishū 魏書, juǎn 21), alongside those of Wáng Càn 王粲 and others.

Chen Lin initially served as a subordinate official in the court of the late Hàn. Following the power vacuum after the death of Hé Jìn 何進, he joined the camp of Yuán Shào 袁紹 in the north. In that capacity he composed the famous 〈為袁紹檄豫州文〉 (Proclamation Denouncing Cáo Cāo on Behalf of Yuán Shào, ca. 200 CE), a forensically savage indictment of Cáo Cāo 曹操 that became the model of the zhànwén 戰文 genre and is preserved in Wén xuǎn 文選 (juǎn 44). After Yuán Shào’s defeat at the Battle of Guāndù 官渡 (200 CE), Chen Lin surrendered to Cáo Cāo and served the latter as a literary secretary (jì shì 記室). Cáo Cāo reportedly remarked that he had a headache while reading Chen Lin’s proclamation but that it was cured by Chen Lin’s literary power — a possibly apocryphal anecdote preserved in the Diǎn lüè 典略. Chen Lin died in the epidemic of 217 CE that also killed Wáng Càn, Yīng Yáng 應瑒, Liú Zhēn 劉楨, and Xú Gān 徐幹.

His verse is notable for the yuefu 樂府 ballad 〈飲馬長城窟行〉 (Watering Horses at the Great Wall Moat), an antiwar lament of great emotional power. Zhōng Róng 鍾嶸 in the Shī pǐn 詩品 placed him in the middle grade. The Suíshū Jīngjí zhì records a collected works in ten juǎn, now lost. A jíyìběn reconstruction is in the Kānripo corpus as KR4b0088.