Hong Liangji 洪亮吉

Hong Liangji 洪亮吉 (1746-1809), courtesy name Junzhi 君直 or Zhicun 稚存, style Beijiang 北江, was a mid-Qing period 清 (1644-1911) scholar. He hailed from Yanghu 陽湖 ( modern Changzhou 常州, Jiangsu) and was junior compiler (bianxiu 編修) and education intendant (duxue 督學) in the province of Guizhou. During the Jiaqing reign 嘉慶 (1796-1820) he was exiled to Ili 伊犁 because of his critique towards the Qing court, but he was soon pardoned and allowed to return. From then on he lived as a private scholar and adopted the style Gengsheng jushi 更生居士 "Scholar of the new life".

Hong was expert in etymology and phonetics and carried out a lot of text-critical work of ancient books, partly in collaboration with Sun Xingyan 孫星衍 (1753-1818). Hong Liangji was especially strong in poetry and rhymed prose (pianwen 駢文). For his research he often visited the large private libraries of his friends and also owned a considerable number of books. Hong Liangji adopted the bibliographic theory of Hu Yinglin 胡應麟 (1551—1602) and was practically the first to distinguish several theoretical groups of bibliophiles, namely persons collecting (shoucang 收藏), persons doing textual research (kaoding 考訂), the collators (jiaochou 校讎), conoisseurs (shangjian 賞鋻), and book traders (lüefan 掠販).

Hong Liangji wrote the books Chunqiu Zuozhuan gu 春秋左傳詁, Beijiang shihua 北江詩話; his collected works are called Hong Beijiang quanji 洪北江全集.