Chéng Dàchāng 程大昌
Style name Tàizhī 泰之; posthumous title Wénjiǎn 文簡. Native of Xiūníng 休寧 in Huīzhōu 徽州 (modern Ānhuī). Lifedates 1123–1195 (Southern Sòng). The Sòngshǐ (juan 433) gives him a substantial biography in the Rúlín section.
Jìnshì of 1151 (Shàoxīng 21). Held a long succession of court appointments under Xiàozōng, Guāngzōng, and the early Níngzōng — culminating in Lóngtú gé zhíxuéshì 龍圖閣直學士 (“Hànlin Reader-in-Waiting at the Dragon-Diagram Hall”) and acting Lìbù shàngshū 吏部尚書 (“Minister of Personnel”). One of the major Southern-Sòng court polymaths, with an unusually broad scholarly output across the canon, historical geography, statecraft, antiquarianism, and bǐjì.
His principal surviving works:
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Yǔ gòng lùn 禹貢論 + Yǔ gòng tú 禹貢圖 — the foundational Sòng-period historical-geographic treatise on the Yǔ gòng chapter of the Shàngshū; the most consequential Sòng work on the Yǔ gòng and a major source for early-Chinese historical geography.
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[[KR1a0029|Yì yuán]] 易原 in eight juan — the systematic-numerological treatise on the Yì’s underlying mathematical structure; “hard thinking and effortful searching, four years to completion” per the Sìkù tiyao. Largely lost between Sòng and Míng; recovered for the Sìkù from over a hundred essays scattered through the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn.
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Yōng lù 雍錄 in 10 juan — historical-geographic monograph on the western capital region (Chángān, the Wèi-water valley); a foundational Sòng-period work on the historical topography of the imperial capital cycle.
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Yǎn fán lù 演繁露 in 16 juan — broad-ranging philological-historical encyclopedic bǐjì; one of the major Sòng bǐjì corpora and a principal source for Sòng-period antiquarian, ritual, and lexical learning.
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Běi biān bèi duì 北邊備對 — strategic-political memorial on the northern frontier (Sòng-Jin boundary management).
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Kǎo gǔ biān 考古編 in 10 juan — antiquarian-philological essays on canonical, ritual, and lexical topics.
His distinctive intellectual position is canon-and-statecraft synthesis: the Yǔ gòng work integrates classical-text reading with practical historical-geographic inquiry; the Yì yuán integrates Yì-numerology with mathematical-philosophical structural analysis; the Yōng lù integrates classical history with ground-level topographic survey. Few Sòng polymaths attempt to bridge the canonical and the practical-empirical with this consistency.