What are the Plum Blossom Poems?
The Plum Blossom Poems (梅花诗, Meihua Shi) are attributed to Shao Yong (1011-1077), one of the greatest Neo-Confucian scholars of the Northern Song dynasty. Known by his courtesy name Yaofu and posthumous title Kangjie, Shao Yong was one of the "Five Masters of Northern Song," alongside Zhou Dunyi, Zhang Zai, Cheng Hao, and Cheng Yi — the founders of Song-dynasty Neo-Confucianism. He spent most of his life as a recluse in Luoyang, dedicating himself to the study of the I Ching and developing the "Pre-Heaven I Ching" (Xiantian Yixue) system, also known as Plum Blossom Numerology.
The collection comprises ten seven-character regulated poems (lüshi), each containing eight lines. Unified by the elegant, solitary imagery of the plum blossom, each poem prophesies a dynasty or major historical period — from the fall of the Northern Song (Jingkang Incident) all the way to a future era of universal harmony. The poems employ ingenious cryptic language, using literary allusions, homophones, and character decomposition to encode major historical events. They are ranked alongside the Tui Bei Tu and Shaobing Song as one of China's three great prophetic texts.
Shao Yong's prophetic system is rooted in the numerological philosophy of the I Ching, using the numbers of heaven and earth to deduce the transformations of all things. He believed that everything in the universe could be expressed through numbers, and that the rise and fall of history followed mathematical patterns. The Plum Blossom Poems are the concentrated expression of this philosophy. However, scholars debate the poems' authenticity and date of composition — some believe the surviving versions may have been supplemented by later writers. This site presents all ten original poems with verification analysis for reference.
- Poem 1 — Fall of Northern Song / Jingkang Incident
- Poem 2 — Southern Song and Mongol conquest
- Poem 3 — Rise and fall of the Yuan dynasty
- Poem 5 — Fall of Ming and Manchu conquest
- Poem 8 — War of Resistance and China's revival
- Original text sourced from the transmitted edition of the Plum Blossom Poems; authorship and date of composition remain debated (Wikipedia: Shao Yong)
- Shao Yong's I Ching treatise Huangji Jingshi is the core text of his scholarly system (Wikipedia: Huangji Jingshi)
- Some 'verified' poems may have been added or modified retroactively
- Verification based on historical records and public sources; editorial opinions do not represent academic consensus
- Site icon: Five-petal plum blossom — the plum blossom is the symbolic motif of Shao Yong's numerology, and gives the poems their name