Wú Zēng 吳曾 (fl. ca. 1131 – ca. 1170; CBDB id 10087, fl. latest year 1131; zì Hǔchén 虎臣), native of Chóngrén 崇仁 in Fǔzhōu 撫州 (modern Chóngrénxiàn in Jiāngxī). He never sat the jìnshì but rose into office through the patronage of Qín Huì 秦檜: in Shàoxīng 23 (1153) he presented his writings (shàngsuǒyè 上所業) to the throne and was rewarded with appointment, transferring from the Chìjú 敕局 to Yòu chéngfèng láng 右承奉郎 with the duties of Tàichángbù 太常簿. He subsequently served as Yùdié jiǎntǎo guān 玉牒檢討官 (compiler of imperial genealogy), Gōngbù lángzhōng 工部郎中 (Director of the Works Department), and went out as prefect of Yánzhōu 嚴州 (modern Jiàndé in Zhèjiāng), retiring from that post.
His political alignment with the Qín faction made his name controversial. After Qín Huì’s death in 1155 Wú briefly absented himself from public life (according to Zhào Yànwèi’s 趙彥衞 Yúnlù mànchāo 雲麓漫鈔), and his great bǐjì KR3j0034 Nénggǎizhāi mànlù 能改齋漫錄 (18 juan) drew sustained criticism from contemporaries: Liú Chāngshī 劉昌詩 picked out eleven errors; Zhào Yànwèi attacked his theological adventures; Zhōu Huī 周煇 reported that the book was at one point ordered struck from the woodblocks for slanderous content; and Shèng Rúzǐ 盛如梓 records the Mácháng magistrate Zhèng Xiǎnwén 鄭顯文’s denunciation of him to the Censorate, resulting in Wú’s demotion by two ranks. The work was eventually rehabilitated under Jīng Tāng 京鏜 and reprinted. Despite this troubled reputation, the Sìkù editors observed that Wú’s philological erudition was so wide that “later authorities of kǎozhèng could not avoid quoting him, putting him very nearly on a par with Hóng Mài’s Róngzhāi suíbǐ.”
The Nénggǎizhāi mànlù’s independent transmission was lost in the early Yuán; the surviving recension descends from a Míng manuscript copied from the Imperial Library, missing the original first and last juan. Wú’s son Wú Fù 吳復 wrote the postface that gives the original tally as “more than two thousand entries.” Only KR3j0034 survives in the Kanripo corpus.
Wú Zēng is the witness preserving the longer original title Xuélín xīnbiān 學林新編 of KR3j0037 Wáng Guānguó’s 王觀國 Xuélín 學林.