Cai Yong (133–192 CE) was a renowned literary scholar, calligrapher, and musician of the Eastern Han dynasty, and the father of the famous poet and composer Cai Wenji. His courtesy name was Bojie, and he was a native of Yu in Chenliu Commandery (modern-day Qixian, Henan).
In 175 CE (the fourth year of the Xiping era), Cai Yong, together with Yang Ci and other officials, petitioned Emperor Ling to standardize the texts of the Six Confucian Classics, which had suffered from textual corruption due to repeated copying. The emperor approved the proposal, and Cai Yong personally transcribed portions of the canonical texts in clerical script (lishu). These were carved onto stone steles and erected outside the Imperial Academy – collectively known as the Xiping Stone Classics, China’s first officially sanctioned stone-script canon.
During Emperor Ling’s reign, Cai Yong served as a Court Gentleman for Consultation (Yilang). After submitting a memorial criticizing government misconduct, he was falsely accused, sentenced to exile in Shuofang (northern frontier), and later pardoned. Fearing further persecution, he went into hiding, wandering “among rivers and lakes” for over a decade.
When the warlord Dong Zhuo seized control of the court in the late 180s, he forcibly recruited Cai Yong into service, appointing him Imperial Censor and later General of the Gentlemen of the Household for the Left (Zuo Zhonglang Jiang), a title that earned him the enduring sobriquet “Cai Zhonglang.” After Dong Zhuo’s assassination in 192 CE, Cai Yong was implicated by association – reportedly lamenting Dong Zhuo’s death – and was imprisoned, where he soon died.
Cai Yong was a polymath: deeply versed in the Confucian classics, history, music theory, and astronomy, and exceptionally skilled in literary composition. His prose, especially funerary inscriptions and stelae texts, exemplifies the stylistic transition in late Han literature toward greater emotional depth and rhetorical refinement.
In calligraphy, he mastered the clerical script with precise, balanced structure and is credited with inventing the “flying white” (feibai) technique – a brush style characterized by streaked, dry-brush strokes that evoke speed and ethereal lightness. This innovation was highly admired by later generations.
He was also a connoisseur and maker of musical instruments; tradition holds that he crafted the “Jiaowei Qin” (“Burnt-Tail Zither”), one of the Four Great Guqins of Ancient China, said to have been made from fire-damaged paulownia wood.
His writings were posthumously compiled into the Collected Works of Cai Zhonglang.
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