Zhèng Yù 鄭玉 (1298–1358), zì Zǐměi 子美, hào Shīshān 師山, was a late-Yuán Confucian scholar and martyr from Shèxiàn 歙縣 (in present-day Huīzhōu 徽州, Ānhuī). CBDB id 30793: 1298–1358, dynasty Yuán; the entry instructs the user to check funerary inscription; the standard reference is Wèndào yīn (WDY), vol. 3, pp. 1916–18.
He withdrew from the examination system to private scholarship and was known to his disciples as Master Shīshān (Shīshān xiānshēng). At the close of the Yuán he was offered the post of Hànlín dàizhì 翰林待制 (Hànlín Editor) by the Yuán court but declined the appointment on grounds of illness. When the founding-Míng armies of Zhū Yuánzhāng entered Huīzhōu, the Míng commanding general (in 1358) sought to compel his service; Zhèng Yù refused to surrender to the Míng — who at that point still styled itself the Wúguó and was in active rebellion against the Yuán house — and committed suicide rather than serve. He died at sixty suì. His refusal earned him an honored place in the late-Yuán Confucian-loyalist tradition; together with the figures behind whom he stands (e.g. Yú Quē 余闕 in the same prefecture), he is among the principal exemplars of late-Yuán dynastic loyalism.
His Shīshān jí 師山集 collects his prose, prefaces, and tomb-inscriptions; it is also entered in the SKQS. His major scholarly work is the Chūnqiū quēyí 春秋闕疑 in forty-five juan (KR1e0065) — completed in Zhìzhèng 15 (1355), three years before his death. The work follows the form of Zhū Xī’s 朱熹 Tōngjiàn gāngmù 通鑑綱目 (KR2g0002): the classic-text in large characters as the gāng (main outline), the zhuàn-material in small characters as the mù (sub-entries), with Zuǒ taking precedence for narrative facts, Gōngyáng and Gǔliáng for principles, and Zhèng’s own dialectic appended; on questions where the classic is corrupt or the evidence missing, Zhèng leaves the matter explicitly quē (vacant, in doubt), refusing to force a reading. The work’s title is Chūnqiū quēyí 春秋闕疑 (“Doubts Left Open in the Spring and Autumn Annals”) — see the work-note for the catalog form (quēkuǎn 闕欵) and its likely origin as a copyist’s corruption of quēyí 闕疑.