Rao Jie (ca. 1300 – 1367 AD) (Rao rhymes with ‘cow’ and Jie rhymes with ‘yeah’) was a leading calligrapher and poet of the later Yuan and early Ming period.
His work is a good example of the brief elevation calligraphy underwent during the late Yuan period.
And it shows calligraphy’s ability to survive – and even thrive – during chaotic, violent times.
Even when calligraphers themselves – like Rao – didn’t…
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Biography
Rao Jie (饶介), courtesy name Jie Zhi, appears to have been from Linchuan (today’s Fuzhou, Jiangxi Province).
He was born about 1/3 of the way into the Mongol-ruled Yuan dynasty (1279 – 1368 AD).
This was likely during Temür’s (also known as the Emperor Chengzong) reign (r. 1294 – 1307). (Temür was Ghenghis Khan’s great-grandson, and Kubilai Khan’s grandson).
He worked as an official under the Mongols and was active as a calligrapher and poet by the last Yuan ruler’s (Toghön Temür, or Emperor Huizong) final ruling period (Zhizheng period 1341 – 1368 AD).
He was a patron of the poet Gao Qi (1336 – 1374 AD), who would go on to be recognised as one of the Ming dynasty’s (1368 – 1644 AD) greatest poets.
The fall of the Yuan and rise of the Ming
During Rao’s lifetime, there were ten changes of Mongol ruler.
This was a sign of the Mongols’ declining grip on China, which was accelerated by famines and rebellions across the country.
In 1362, Rao joined the Red Turban Rebellion as Chief Official for Literary Affairs under Zhang Shicheng (1321 – 1367), then based in Suzhou.
Zhang was defeated in by Zhu Yuanzhang (1328 – 1398) in 1367, who soon after declared himself the Emperor Hongwu (r. 1368 – 1398) of the new Ming Dynasty.
Rao Jie was then one of many appointed as Ming official.
He was promoted from the Hanlin Academy to vice minister of Jiangsu and Zhejiang’s Supervisory Office. He was then promoted again to councillor of Huainan (today’s Anhui Province).
Hongwu’s purges
Many educated ethnic Chinese were pleased when the Mongols were overthrown by the ethnically Chinese Ming dynasty.
Hongwu came to power claiming he would restore the Confucian ways of former Chinese dynasties.
However, a peasant himself, he was distrustful of the educated elite. And, in practice, he was keener on legalist tyranny.
Many officials were executed.
Artists didn’t escape the violence. Many calligraphers and painters were invited to Nanjing to serve before being executed, often for unspecified reasons.
For example, the literati portrait painter Zhao Yuan (? – ?) was executed shortly after entering official service – presumably because Hongwu did not like his paintings.
And Chen Ruyan (ca. 1331 – 1371), a landscape painter, suffered the same fate in 1371.
Rao was an early victim of the same fate. Like thousands of others, we don’t know the exact causes or charges. It could have been because of his association with Zhang Shicheng’s regime.
He was executed 1367.
(Within the first decade of his reign, Hongwu had somewhere between 15,000 – 30,000 officials executed.)
Calligraphy in the Yuan dynasty
Early Yuan dynasty calligraphy was characterised by its bold, forceful styles.
The work of the powerful Khitan official Yelü Chucai (1190 – 1244 AD) is a good example of this.
Yelü’s style was heavily influenced by the Northern Song calligrapher Su Shi (1137 – 1101 AD) and Yan Zhenqing (709 – 785) from the Tang dynasty.
This influence can be seen in some of Rao’s work:
Zhao Mengfu (1254 – 1322 AD) soon established himself as the greatest calligrapher of his era.
He advocated for the restoration of calligraphy based on ancient models, especially Wang Xizhi (303 – 361 AD). This meant a more elegant and refined style predominated.
Subsequent Yuan calligraphers generally followed Zhao in shedding the influence of Southern Song period calligraphy and focusing on older Jin and Tang dynasty models.
Rao’s contemporaries
After Zhao, Jayaatu Khan (or Emperor Wenzong) (r. 1328 – 29) founded the Kui Zhang Hall, where artwork including paintings and calligraphy were stored and displayed.
Leading calligraphers recruited to work at the hall included Jie Xisi (1274 – 1344) and Rao’s friend Kangli Naonao (1295 – 1346).
Kangli was a standard and cursive script specialist who appears to have been almost fanatically devoted to practicing calligraphy. He claimed to write around 30,000 characters a day.
Rao’s work was influenced by Kangli’s and the work of the lesser known, more eccentric cursive script specialist Yang Weizhen (1296 – 1370).
Rao’s own work showed an innovative mixture of cursive script and the older ‘draft cursive’ variant.
Tao Zongyi (1316 – ?), author of Essentials of Calligraphic History, praised Rao’s cursive script.
And other contemporaries compared his work to the two great Tang cursive script calligraphers Zhang Xu (ca. 675 – 759 AD) and Huaisu (737 – 799 AD).
After Rao
We know that Rao also instructed the significant early Ming calligrapher Song Ke (1327 – 1387).
But more generally, his work (along with Kangli Naonao’s and Yan Weizhen’s) influenced early Ming calligraphers.
Record sale at Sotheby’s in April 2025
On April 7th 2025, a 20ft (6M) handscroll by Rao, Calligraphy in Cursive Script, sold for 250 million Hong Kong Dollars (32.2 million USD; 24.6 million GBP).
The piece originally had a guide price of 10 – 20 million HKD. But a 95-minute bidding war raised its sale price to 20x that.
This makes the work the most expensive piece of Chinese calligraphy ever sold at Sotheby’s.
View the full piece here on Sothebys’ website.