Expanded Biographies of Immortals 广列仙传

Compiled by Zhang Wenjie, the Mountain Man of Shaogu, in the Ming Dynasty.

Consisting of seven volumes, it has a preface dated the 11th year of the Wanli reign (1583), which states the origin of the book: *"Reflecting on the Biographies of Immortals by Liu Xiang and Tao Hongjing—which only record figures from the Han and Jin dynasties and earlier, leaving a gap from the Six Dynasties up to the present day, a deficiency lamented by readers—I thus collected materials from numerous books, together with those previously recorded in the two biographies, totaling 304 figures. These I compiled and engraved into a book, naming it the Expanded Biographies of Immortals."*

Expanded Biographies of Immortals

A Bibliography of Collected Works is listed at the beginning, including fifty-five titles in all. Besides various immortal biographies, it also draws from historical records of successive dynasties, mountain gazetteers, philosophical texts, novels and notes. The immortals recorded range from Laozi in ancient times to Wang Tanyang, a female immortal of the Ming Dynasty whose biography was written by Wang Shizhen.

Among the newly compiled immortal biographies of the Ming Dynasty, this is a relatively important work, and it is included in the Biographies of Immortals category of the Extra-Taoist Canon.