Chinese poets, in response to the massive tenth-century importation of foreign tunes during the periods of the T'ang and the Five Dynasties, create ci, verse of irregular line lengths.

Ci most often express feelings of desire, often in an adopted persona, but the greatest exponents of the form (such as Li Houzhu and Su Shi) used it to address a wide range of topics.

Li Qingzhao, perhaps China's most famous woman poet, is one of the most eminent exponents of “ci.” Born in Licheng to a family of officials and scholars, her father had been a friend of Su Shi.

Muqi Fachang, abbot of a Chan Buddhist temple in the Song capital of Hangzhou and a renowned master of the vigorous, intuitive style of the Chan school, produces a series of ink monochrome masterpieces characterized by rapid and spontaneous brushwork, including the painting “Six Persimmons;” the triptych “Guanyin (Kuan-yin), Monkeys, and Crane;” and a surviving set of four sections of an original set of Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers.

His birth name is unknown; Muqi is a hao or pseudonym, and Fachang a monastic name.

Muqi's artwork covers a wide range of subjects, including portraits, landscapes, and still lifes.

His work, and that of his imitators, is actually more popular in Japan than it is in China.

(His paintings on Chan themes stimulated many copies in Japan; thus, it is there that paintings likely to be authentic works by Muqi are now found, though the Japanese painter Mokuan, who flourished in the early fourteenth century, traveled to Muqi's monastery and is said to have received two of Muqi's seals from the abbot of the temple, making some paintings in Japan somewhat suspect.)