Mid-Míng 明 Shàngshū philologist, native of Jīngdé 旌德 county in Huīzhōu 徽州 (modern Ānhuī). Lifedates unrecorded; CBDB id 280360 has no firm dates. Jǔrén of Zhèngdé 8 / 1513 (癸酉). Career: served as Nánjīng Guózǐjiàn zhùjiào 南京國子監助教 (Assistant Instructor at the Nanjing Imperial Academy), ending his career as Yánkèsī tíjǔ 鹽課司提舉 (Salt Tax Office Director).
He is the founding figure of the systematic philological case against the Gǔwén Shàngshū 古文尚書 — the late-coming 25 chapters of the Shàngshū together with the Kǒng Ān’guó zhuàn, transmitted into the canon via the Eastern-Jìn figure Méi Zé 梅賾 — which Yán Ruòqú 閻若璩 (1638–1704) was famously to demonstrate as a forgery a century later in his Shàngshū gǔwén shū zhèng 尚書古文疏證 (1745). SòngYuán predecessors had suspected the gǔwén (Wú Yù 吳棫, Zhū Xī 朱熹, 吳澄) but only by impressionistic criteria of “ease vs. difficulty”; Méi Zhuó’s contribution is the first sustained line-by-line tracing of every passage of the gǔwén chapters and Kǒng zhuàn preface to identifiable earlier sources (the Zuǒ zhuàn, Lúnyǔ, transmitted commentaries, etc.). The Sìkù compilers — themselves writing in the Qīng kǎojù 考據 era when Yán Ruòqú’s case had become consensus — explicitly credit Méi Zhuó with the founding (“chuàng shǐ zhī gōng” 創始之功) of the entire anti-Gǔwén tradition.
His two known works on the Shàngshū forgery question are: (1) the Shàngshū kǎo yì 尚書考異 (KR1b0038) in 5 juǎn (Sìkù-divided; the original Zhèngdé / Jiājìng manuscript was undivided) — his rigorous philological case; and (2) the Shàngshū pǔ 尚書譜 — his more impressionistic argument, similar in thesis but methodologically inferior, which the Sìkù compilers explicitly chose not to recopy into the Quán shū. Méi Zhuó also gave evidence for placing the Gǔwén fabrication in the hands of Huángfǔ Mì 皇甫謐 (215–282), based on Kǒng Yǐngdá’s Zhèngyì citation of the lost Jìn shū Huángfǔ Mì zhuàn — an attribution Yán Ruòqú later refined.