Qū Yuán 屈原 (traditional dates ca. 343–278 BCE), personal name Qū Píng 屈平, zì Líng jūn 靈均 (in the Lí sāo: “the name they gave me was Zhèng zé 正則, the zì they styled me Líng jūn”). Aristocratic minister of the southern state of Chǔ 楚 under King Huái 楚懷王 (r. 328–299 BCE) and King Qǐngxiāng 楚頃襄王 (r. 298–263 BCE), traditionally credited as the founding voice of the Chǔ cí 楚辭 anthology and as the author of Lí sāo 離騷, Tiān wèn 天問, the Jiǔ zhāng 九章 group, most of the Jiǔ gē 九歌, and (variously) Yuǎn yóu 遠遊, Bǔ jū 卜居, Yú fù 漁父, and Zhāo hún 招魂.
The earliest connected biographical narrative is Sīmǎ Qiān’s Shǐ jì 84 (Qū Yuán Jiǎ Shēng liè zhuàn 屈原賈生列傳), which casts him as a loyal Chǔ minister slandered by court rivals, exiled south of the Yangzi, and ultimately drowning himself in the Mìluó 汨羅 river — a death conventionally placed on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month (the origin myth of the duānwǔ 端午 festival). The historical Qū Yuán is, however, almost entirely a Hàn editorial construct: no pre-Hàn source names him, the Sīmǎ Qiān biography embeds two contradictory dating sequences, and modern philology (Schneider 1980; Du 2019) treats Qū Yuán as a figure assembled by Liú Xiàng and Wáng Yì to anchor the Chǔ cí anthology around a virtuous-minister archetype.
In the Kanripo corpus the body of poetry attributed to him forms the core of KR4a0001 Chǔ cí, with the standard commentaries KR4a0002 (Wáng Yì), KR4a0003 (Hóng Xīngzǔ), KR4a0004 (Zhū Xī), KR4a0005 (Wú Rénjié), KR4a0007 (Jiǎng Jì) all built on his persona.