Xú Yín 徐夤 (also commonly written 徐寅; zì Zhāomèng 昭夢, fl. ca. 880s–910s), of Pǔtián 莆田, Mǐn 閩 (Fújiàn). Late-Táng fù-writer and jìnshì of Qiánníng 初 (894) under examiner Lǐ Zé 李擇, who admired his “止戈為武” fù. Posted as Mìshūshěng zhèngzì 秘書省正字 (Rectifier of Texts at the imperial library) — the official designation that became his sobriquet “Xú zhèngzì” 徐正字. With the disorder following the Huáng Cháo rebellion he returned south to Mǐn, where Wáng Shěnzhī 王審知 received him into his entourage but treated him with insufficient ceremony; Xú dramatically broke off (“a foot or so of water with weirs in front and dams behind — how could it hold a ten-thousand-bushel ship?”) and retired to Yánshòu xī 延壽溪. Earlier, he had reportedly presented fù to Zhū Wēn 朱溫 (Liáng Tàizǔ) at Biàn but, having violated a name-tabu in his cups, retreated south to recover his standing by composing a Yóu Dàliáng fù 遊大梁賦 with cleverly flattering allusions.
Xú’s fù — especially Rénshēng jǐhé 人生幾何, Zhǎnshé jiàn 斬蛇劍, and Yùgōu shuǐ 御溝水 — were the work for which he was most famous in his own day. According to his own preface, copies of these fù in gold ink were displayed as folding-screens in every household of Bóhǎi (Parhae) when its envoy Gāo Yuángù 高元固 visited Mǐn. He was a literary correspondent of Hán Wò 韓偓 and Wú Róng 吳融 and a contemporary of Luó Yǐn 羅隱 羅隱. Both his works in the corpus — KR4c0101 (the SBCK ten-juǎn Sòng-recension Diàojī wénjí compiled by his descendant Xú Shīrén in 1129) and KR4c0107 (the WYG two-juǎn Xú zhèngzì shī fù compiled later from anthology-gleanings) — preserve overlapping but textually distinct portions of his oeuvre. CBDB id 447201 (Táng, no specific dates given). The orthography 徐夤 / 徐寅 reflects a long-standing graphic alternation in the textual tradition; both refer to the same person.