Fàn Yè 范曄
Zì Wèizōng 蔚宗. Native of Shùnyáng 順陽 (modern Xīchuān 淅川, Hénán). Member of the powerful Shùnyáng Fàn 順陽范氏 family. Active LiúSòng dynasty.
A child prodigy (“at six he could read; at nine he composed essays”), Fàn Yè entered the LiúSòng bureaucracy young and rose to Shàngshū lìbù láng 尚書吏部郎 and Tàizǐ zhānshì 太子詹事. From Yuánjiā 9 (432), demoted from the central court to the magistracy of Xuānchéng 宣城 prefect, he began the Hòu Hànshū (KR2a0009) — the běnjì and lièzhuàn — drawing critically on the dozens of earlier Eastern-Hàn-period histories, especially Huà Jiào 華嶠’s Hòu Hàn shū (now lost) and Sīmǎ Biāo 司馬彪’s Xù Hàn shū (lost except for its zhì).
In Yuánjiā 22 (445), Fàn Yè was implicated in the political conspiracy of Liú Yìkāng 劉義康 (Prince of Péngchéng, the emperor’s brother), tried, and executed at age 48. The zhì of the Hòu Hànshū — assigned to his fellow-conspirator Xiè Zhān 謝瞻 — were lost in the immediate aftermath; Fàn Yè’s eight surviving piān of jì and 80 of zhuàn were carried to the throne by relatives.
His autobiographical letter from prison (Yùzhōng yǔ zhū sheng-jì shū 獄中與諸甥姪書), preserved in his Sòngshū biography (Sòngshū 69) and in the Wén xuǎn, is one of the most affecting documents of Liú-Sòng-era literature and the principal first-person source on his historiographical method. Apart from the Hòu Hànshū, Fàn Yè’s surviving works are scattered in the Wén xuǎn and Yiwen leiju; he also composed extensive notes (shǐbǐ 史筆) on HànWèi calligraphy.