Chén Guàn 陳瓘
Style name Yíngzhōng 瑩中; hào (sobriquets) Liǎowēng 了翁 (“Done-Old-Man”) and Liǎozhāi 了齋 (“Done-Studio”). Native of Yánpíng 延平 in Nánjiàn 南劍 prefecture (modern Nánpíng 南平, Fújiàn). Lifedates 1057–1124 (CBDB and standard references; the Kanripo catalog gives 1062–1126, a less-supported variant). The Sòngshǐ (juan 345) carries his canonical biography in the Zhōng yì zhuàn.
Jìnshì of 1079 (Yuánfēng 2) in the highest examination class. Held a long succession of court and provincial appointments under Zhézōng and Huīzōng. Best known as the most prominent single voice of impeachment against Cài Jīng 蔡京 and Cài Biàn 蔡卞 in the Jiànzhōng jìngguó (1101) and Chóngníng (1102–1106) eras: more than fifteen extant memorials target Cài directly, plus impeachments of Zēng Bù 曾布 and others. Repeatedly demoted, exiled, recalled, and re-exiled across the post-1101 factional cycles. Struck from the rolls under Huīzōng’s anti-Yuán-yòu reaction and exiled to Hépǔ 合浦 in Guǎngxī, where he died in 1124.
His scholarly work on the Yì is recorded in the KR1a0018 Liǎozhāi Yì shuō (in the present compressed one-juan recension printed by his grandson Chén Zhèngtóng 陳正同 in the early Southern Sòng Shàoxīng era) and in the lost Yì cè 易測. Féng Yǐ 馮椅 reports having seen a fuller Yì jiě of more than one juan, no longer extant. His intellectual lineage on the Yì runs from Shào Yōng 邵雍’s xiāntiān numerology to Liú Ānshì 劉安世’s correction toward an integrated xiàngshù-and-yìlǐ reading.
His political-ethical treatises Sì míng zūn yáo 四明尊堯 (“Four-Pronouncements Honouring [Emperor] Yáo”) and Liǎozhāi yáo lùn 了齋謠論 are the principal record of his late-Northern-Sòng anti-Cài-faction prose. His collected works Liǎozhāi jí 了齋集 survive in fragmentary form, not in a single critical edition.
In the SòngYuán doxographic genealogy of Dàoxué, Chén is placed in the moralist-Confucian yìlǐ network that links the late Yuányòu Liú Ānshì circle to the early Southern-Sòng Yáng Shí school — an intellectual position bridging the moral-statecraft Confucianism of the late Northern Sòng and the metaphysical Lǐxué of the Southern Sòng.