Background and Early Career
Traditional historical sources do not give a date for Wei Zhuang's birth, although the modern literary historian Xia Chengtao (夏承燾), using textual clues from Wei's poetry, asserted that Wei was born in 836. His family was from Duling (杜陵), a town southwest of and near the Tang Dynasty capital Chang'an, and it traced its ancestry to Wei Jiansu, a chancellor during the reign of the middle-Tang Emperor Xuánzong. Of Wei Zhuang's immediate male-line ancestors, it is only known that his great-grandfather Wei Shaowei (韋少微) served as a mid-level official in the imperial government of Emperor Xuānzong (note different tone).
It was said that Wei Zhuang had a relaxed disposition and did not care about details. In his youth, he became known for writing beautiful poetry. When he became of age and was supposed to be submitting himself for imperial examinations, the Tang imperial governance was disrupted by the major agrarian rebellion led by Huang Chao, who captured Chang'an, forced then-reigning Emperor Xizong to flee, and for some time claimed imperial title as the emperor of a new state of Qi around the new year 881. Wei wrote a long poem, the Ballad of the Lady Qin, recounting the catastrophe from the view point of a woman from the Qin region (i.e., the Chang'an region). Wei finally submitted himself for imperial examinations in 894 and passed the Jinshi class examinations. He was initially made a secretary to a regional governor, and then recalled to the imperial government to serve as Zuo Bujue (左補闕), a low-level advisory official at the examination bureau of government (門下省, Menxia Sheng).
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