Lín Tóng 林同 (d. 1276), zì Zǐzhēn 子真, sobriquet Kōngzhāi 空齋 (“Hall of Emptiness”), was a native of Fúqīng 福清 in Fújiàn — one of the prominent late-Sòng yímín 遺民 figures of the Fújiàn region. He came of a substantial scholar-official family: his grandfather Lín Zhuàn 林瑑 was ZhíBǎozhānggé 直寶章閣 (Auxiliary of the Hall of Treasures Compositions), and his father Lín Gōngyù 林公遇 zì Yǎngzhèng 養正 declined office in order to care for his parents, building himself the Hánzhāi 寒齋 retreat. Lín Tóng was Gōngyù’s eldest son; his younger brother 林合 (Lín Hé) zì Zǐcháng 子常 likewise had a retired temperament. According to Liú Kèzhuāng’s preface to the Xiào shī, Lín Tóng “before the age of forty, indignantly gave up the examinations” (年未四十,慨然罷舉) and never held office.
He is principally known as the author of the Xiào shī 孝詩 (KR4d0360) — a structured cycle of three hundred five-character regulated quatrains, each on a single exemplar of filial piety, arranged in five categories (sages, worthies, immortals-and-Buddhas, foreign realms, and animals) — for which Liú Kèzhuāng wrote the preface dated Chúnyòu gēngxū 淳祐庚戌 (1250). Lín Xīyì’s 林希逸 Juānzhāi xùjí 鬳齋續集 preserves much of the correspondence between Xīyì and the Lín brothers; Lín Tóng also produced a Rénshēn chóuchàng jí 壬申酬倡集 (now lost) for which he wrote his own colophon.
In 1276, when the Yuán forces took Fúzhōu, Lín Tóng refused to submit, bit his finger and wrote the oath on the wall in his own blood (according to Liú Línruì 劉麟瑞’s Zhāozhōng yìyǒng 昭忠逸詠 and the Sòngshǐ Zhōngyì zhuàn), and died for principle.
Prosopographical correction. The Sòngshǐ Zhōngyì zhuàn confused Lín Tóng with his (unnamed) son, splitting one historical figure into two and erroneously attributing to “Kōngzhāi” both a jìnshì degree and county magistracies that Lín Tóng never held. The Fújiàn tōngzhì further compounded the confusion by separating a “Lín 仝 zì Zǐ貞 ” from “Lín 同 zì Zǐzhēn”, which the Sìkù tiyao to KR4d0360 convincingly shows to be one and the same man — Lín Tóng — with corruptions in the graphs.