HANSHAN was traditionally thought to be a reclusive seventh-century Buddhist monk who lived on a mountain in southeast China, writing his poems on rock walls. More recently it has been argued that the poems attributed to him were probably written by two or more people and that they may date from the seventh or eighth to the early ninth century.

PETER HARRIS graduated from Oxford in classical Chinese and has a Ph.D. in Asian history from Monash. He lived and worked for many years in different parts of Asia including China, where he was representative of the Ford Foundation and a visiting professor at Nanjing University. He is now a Senior Fellow in the China Research Centre at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Other volumes he edited for Everyman's Library include The Travels of Marco Polo, The Art of War, Zen Poems, and Three Hundred Tang Poems.