Lee Chi Ming Chronicle

Yueman, a famous litterateur and scholar of the late Qing Dynasty, who wrote Yuemantang Diary and Bai Hua Jiang Fu Ge Poems, also had a distinguishing feature about books collection and emendation. The study of Yueman in the past was concentrate on his Diary, poetry creation and the achievement of historiographic research. Yet the aspects of the lost works, poems about love, books collection and emendation still have no intensive study. In 1960s, Chen Zhongyu compiled Annals of Li Ciming, which has merely 40,000 words. Recently, Fu Zhenzhao compiled Annals of Li Ciming, which only ended at Yueman's twenty. What also needs to point out is that both of the two books just quote materials from the Diary. As so far, there has no in-depth research works of Yueman's biography.For the first time, this thesis analyzed comprehensively the works of Yueman and the contemporary, identified some of the disputes about Yueman's life, revealed his course of life, and also traced the diversification of his temperament and mentality. Moreover, it's the first time to explore the love and marriage, friends and relationship, the lost works, the course of the books collection, progress of academic, changing of poetry creation and poetic standpoint as well. The author searched and collected about a hundred of the lost works, some of which were brought into the thesis. Besides, the author also paid close attention to the other lost works which only had the title left, looking forward to finding some of them in the future. By synthesizing all materials and identifying the facts, the author attempted to give an objective description of Yueman's life, hoping that can impulse the related research of Yueman.