Shen Fu
(1763 - c. 1825)
Shen Fu was born in 1763, married in 1780, and embarked one year later upon his career as a private secretary. He was writing his autobiographical reflections at the age of forty-six in 1809; nothing about him is known after this year. With its title presumably alluding to lines by the poet Li Bai—“Ah, this floating life, like a dream…True happiness is so rare!”—Six Records of a Floating Life was published for the first time in the 1870s and contains only four of the six records.