Wèi Xuéyī 魏學洢 (1596–1625), zì Zǐjìng 子敬, hào Máoyán 茅檐 (whence his collected works); native of Jiāshàn 嘉善 (Jiāxìng, Zhèjiāng). Eldest son of the Dōnglín martyr 魏大中 魏大中 (1575–1625; one of the Dōnglín liù jūnzǐ 東林六君子). A zhūshēng (county licentiate) who never sat the huìshì; said to have composed verse from the age of seven and to have been known as the Xiàoliè xiānshēng 孝烈先生 (‘the filial-and-fierce Master’) by his fellow-villagers after his death. When his father was arrested in Tiānqǐ 5 / 1625 on the false charge (engineered by Xǔ Xiǎnchún 許顯純 of the Dōngchǎng) of having taken bribes of 3,300 liǎng of silver from Yáng Hào 楊鎬 and Xióng Tíngbì 熊廷弼, Wèi Xuéyī assumed a disguise and an alias and hid at the home of 鹿善繼 in Dìngxīng 定興; he raised funds by all means to ransom his father, but could not save him. He brought the coffin home, lay prostrate on the grass day and night weeping, and was then himself summoned by the same warrant for the unpaid restitution (the zhuībǐ 追比). His letter to his uncle Pān Màozhuāng 潘茂莊 — ‘the pursuit is upon me; I shall soon be on the road to the Zhèjiāng prison’ — and a letter of farewell to the village elders — ‘the warrant has come and I am to die in a day or two; my whole family is in ruin and there is nothing more to say’ — survive in the Máoyán jí (KR4e0243) and confirm that he died exhausted and bereaved, his accumulation of grief and grief-illness compounded by the prospect of further imprisonment and the eunuch faction’s wēinüè (terror). He died in the same year as his father, 1625. Under Chóngzhēn (1628) he was officially designated xiàozǐ 孝子 by imperial proclamation. His most-anthologised piece is the Hézhōu jì 核舟記 (Account of the Peach-Pit Boat) — an ekphrasis of a miniature carving of Sū Shì’s Red-Cliff outing by the carver Wáng Shūyuǎn 王叔遠 — preserved in his own collection and re-anthologised in Zhāng Cháo’s Yúchū xīnzhì 虞初新志, where it became one of the canonical pieces of late-Míng micro-essay prose and remains a Chinese-language secondary-school textbook standard. Younger brothers Wèi Xuélián 魏學濂 (1608–1644; jìnshì 1640, also a Míng martyr at 1644) and Wèi Xuézhū 魏學洙 also distinguished. CBDB 34759. Míngshǐ j. 244 (in his father’s biography).