Hán Bāngqìng 韓邦慶 (1856–1894), pen name Huāyě Liánnóng 花也憐儂 (“Pity-the-lotus one who loves flowers”), was a late-Qīng novelist and journalist. CBDB id 89772; CBDB records his dates as Xiánfēng 6 (1856) to Guāngxù 20 (1894), consistent with Wilkinson’s citation.
Hán was a native of Sōngjiāng 松江 (present-day Shanghai municipality). He failed the imperial examinations and made his living as a journalist and writer in treaty-port Shanghai, contributing to the newspaper Shēnbào 申報. He founded his own literary journal, Hǎishàng Qíshū 海上奇書, in which he serialized his major work, Hǎishàng Huā Lièzhuàn 海上花列傳 KR4k0124, beginning in 1892; the complete novel was published in 1894, the year of his death at thirty-eight. The novel, written partly in Shanghainese dialect (Húyǔ 滬語), is widely regarded as the first major dialect novel in Chinese literary history and a landmark of late-Qīng realism. It was championed by Hú Shì 胡適 in the 1920s and translated into Mandarin and then into English by Eileen Chang (Zhāng Ài-líng 張愛玲) in the late twentieth century. Wilkinson (§27.5) describes it as one of the major late-Qīng novels.