1. Xie Lingyun and known as the Duke of Kangle was one of the foremost Chinese poets towards the end of the Southern and Northern Dynasties and continued in poetic fame through the beginning of the Six Dynasties, so Xie is considered to be part of the Six Dynasties poetry era.
Xie Lingyun was a descendant of two of the most important families of the later Eastern Jin times, the Xie and the Wang families.
Xie Lingyun was born in Yangxia County, Henan, but his father died early.
Xie Lingyun was consequently brought up by a Buddhist monk, Du Ming, in what was then Qiantang but now Hangzhou, a cosmopolitan metropolis at the southern end of the Grand Canal, a market nexus for maritime trade and transport to and from the north, and an area widely famed for its scenery with surrounding hills and the spectacular West Lake.
Although, returning home from the monastery in 399, when he would have been in his mid-teens, Xie retained a lifelong Buddhist practice.
The family home on the northern hill had been terraced and developed with well-planned and situated orchards, gardens, walking paths, and ornate pavilions, all done with a mind to preserve and increase the viewer's pleasure: the southern hill during the youth of Xie Lingyun was left as somewhat of a wild preserve; but, between the two there was a whole range of fields and crops as well as wild plant and animal life.
Xie Lingyun served as an official in the Eastern Jin, during which time the rebellion was quashed by general Liu Yu; however, this would turn out to be just a step in general Liu's career, later on he would overthrow the Eastern Jin dynasty and establish the Liu Song dynasty, as Emperor Wu.
The Xie Lingyun family backed an alternative general, and the factional intrigues went on for years, before and after the eventual triumph of the Liu as the Liu Song dynasty.
At this point, as an official in the Liu Song government, Xie Lingyun received a demotion, to marquis, with only 500 households in fee.
Xie Lingyun then was demoted to a position in a remote area, and so effectively exiled, to Yongjia.
Meanwhile, the political changes went on unabated, and Xie Lingyun became enmeshed in them.
In 431, he was relegated to what is Fuzhou in Jiangxi, then the next year further exiled to Guangzhou: Xie Lingyun was then sentenced to death on a pretext, in 433, at which point he wrote his final poem, lamenting that his death was not to be on one of his beloved hilltops; and, then was executed.
Xie Lingyun has been considered a nature or landscape poet focusing on the "mountain and streams", in contrast to the "field and garden" landscape poetry.
Xie Lingyun's poetry is allusive and complex, with possible Buddhist influence.
Xie Lingyun was influenced by a tradition of fu-style poetry, or literature.
The Fu tradition often included eloquent descriptions of the beauties of nature; indeed, Xie Lingyun himself wrote his renowned "Fu on returning to the Mountains" in this style: however, Xie Lingyun's breakthrough was to distill the essence of this type of Fu and adapt and compress it into the shi more purely poetic form.
The Wangchuan ji by Wang Wei and Pei Di which describes the landscape features of Wang's estate near Chang'an particularly shows the influence of Xie Lingyun's poetry describing the landscape features of his estate near West Lake.