Liu Zongyuan was a Chinese writer, Chinese poet and prose writer who lived in Chang'an during the Tang dynasty. He was a master of the free and simple guwen prose of the early Chinese philosophers. Together with Han Yü, he was a founder of the Classical Prose Movement, and is traditionally classed as one of the Eight Great Prose Masters of the Tang and Song Dynasties.

Liu Zongyuan was born in Changan, the capital of the Tang dynasty, in 773. He was rapidly promoted in civil government and had a highly successful early career. When Shunzong came to power in the second month of 805, Liu Zongyuan supported his efforts to reform the administration and suppress the power of corrupt eunuchs in the court. These efforts were moderately successful, but after only six months on the throne, Shunzong became ill following a stroke and was forced by corrupt officials to abdicate in favor of his son. Shunzong died soon afterwards in the Xingqing Palace, and it was rumored that he had been murdered. Liu Zongyuan fell from official favor because of his association with Shunzong and his involvement with Wang Shuwen and his reformist movement.

He was exiled to a military command post in Yongzhou (永州), (Hunan province), and a decade later, he was banished even farther away to serve as a regional chief in the ethnic minority area of Liuzhou (modern Guangxi province).There he won the esteem of the people by working to improve productivity, develop education, reform unhealthy local traditions, and emancipate servants. After three years in Liuzhou, Liu Zongyuan died in 819.

Liu's ten years in exile at Yongzhou contributed to the most important part of his essay writing. The exile to Yongzhou was a personal setback for Liu Zongyuan, but it allowed his literary career to flourish. No longer able to exercise his abilities in the political arena, he turned his attention to literature, and his works in exile are considered to be his finest. The writings done in the capital were bureaucratic in nature, and he considered them primarily as a means to advance his career; in exile, he wrote a number of delightful didactic pieces. He is particularly known for his allegorical writings and for his fables, which like Aesop's fables, are often tales about animals.

Liu Zongyuan’s essays were often allegorical, many of them contain references to his own political misfortunes. Liu Zongyuan took fables from the writings of early Qin Dynasty authors and turned them into independent works. One widely-known fable, "Discourse of the Snake－Catcher," compared government taxes to the venom of a snake.

Poems in Yongzhou
Yongzhou (永州), in the southern part of modern Hunan Province, was remote and isolated during the Tang Dynasty. The scenic landscapes there had a charm which inspired Liu Zongyuan’s best-known travel pieces, the Eight Records of Excursions in Yongzhou (永州八游記)

River Snow (江雪)
Liu Zongyuan’s autobiographical poem, “River Snow,” is considered an example of how a few words can be used to convey a great deal of meaning. It has been the subject of numerous landscape paintings

Liu Zongyuan was a master of the free and simple guwen style of prose which had been used by the early Chinese philosophers. In its literary sense, guwen refers primarily to the prose style of the Confucian classics as well as to literary models dating from the Chinese antiquity to the Han era. This style resurfaced in the eighth century as an intentional break with the parallel style which had dominated prose writing since the Six Dynasties period.

Liu Zongyuan supported his contemporary, the poet Han Yu, in his efforts to liberate writers from the strictly formal p'ien-wen, “parallel prose” style ,which had been the fashion among Chinese writers for almost one thousand years.? Along with Han Yu, he was a founder of the Classical Prose Movement, and came to be traditionally classed as one of the Eight Great Prose Masters of the Tang and Song Dynasties.

Even after he was demoted and exiled to Yongzhou, Liu Zongyuan continued to believe that political reform could bring about better circumstances for the society. Unlike some of his contemporaries, who believed that “Heaven,” or the natural order of things, dictated human events, Liu believed that there was no connection between natural forces and human activities.

He emphasized that human beings had no effect on the affairs of Heaven, such as the occurrence of natural disasters and the creation of the physical universe; and that the state of human society, whether one of social disorder or of good governance according to laws and principles, was solely the consequence of human actions. The natural sphere and the sphere of human society were independent and did not interfere with each other.

Another essay subgenre Liu Zongyuan developed at Yongzhou was the fable. Before Liu, the fable had often appeared merely as an illustrative part of Chinese philosophical writings; Liu was probably the first writer to treat it as a separate and viable literary genre. The 11 fables he composed at Yongzhou are mainly animal stories allegorized into moral or social criticism, often with philosophical dimensions. Among them the most famous are the San jie (Three cautionary fables), including "Linjiang zhi mi" (The deer of Linjiang), "Qian zhi lü" (The donkey of Guizhou), and "Yong mou shi zhi shu" (The rats of a certain family at Yongzhou), in which Liu satirizes three types of morally inferior people represented respectively by these animals. Their tragic endings also signify "the ultimate dominance of nature over human bias and the futility of man's desire to control his own fate".

His prose features forceful arguments, incisive style, poignant irony and rich combativeness while his travel notes are descriptions of scenery and objects, most of which are used to express his emotions and feelings.

Liu's exile involved him with local people and sensitized him to their suffering. As a result, his biographical sketches break the conventional formula of recording only gentlemen's deeds and instead focus principally on the lives of ordinary people. His historical narratives often protest against social evils and corrupt government, as exemplified in three of his most-read biographies.

Liu Zongyuan wrote as many as 600-odd articles in all his life, his achievement in prose being greater than that in poetry. His works were kept and compiled by Liu Yuxi of the Tang Dynasty into a literary collection - the Anthology of Liu Hedong.