Zheng Banqiao's life was a Jinshi in the sixty-first year of Kangxi, a juren in the tenth year of Yongzheng, and a Jinshi in the first year of Qianlong. He has served as the magistrate of Fan County and Wei County in Shandong Province for more than ten years. Zheng Banqiao lived in Yangzhou before and after becoming an official and made a living by painting and calligraphy.
When Zheng Banqiao was a child, he followed his father who opened a private school as a teacher. Bamboo is planted in front of and behind Zheng's house. Banqiao had to be accompanied by bamboo when he was a child. In winter, her wet nurse asked her mother to make bamboo poles into window lattice and paste a thin layer of white paper, which is both bright and windproof. Sunlight throws the shadow of bamboo into it, and it shakes with the wind outside, becoming a floating ink bamboo painting. Zheng Banqiao's artistic cells may be gradually cultivated in this way.
In learning Chinese characters and writing poems, he was also carefully guided and taught by his grandfather, celebrity Lu Zhen, good friends and Gu. The Biography of the Qing Dynasty talks about Zheng Banqiao's "less work and regular script", and Zheng Banqiao claims in "Showing his brother's ink in the department" that "Ci was learned in the Han and Wei Dynasties, Cui Cai and Zhong You, and they broke the stone tablet and searched deliberately."
In the first year of Yongzheng (1724), the scholar Zheng Banqiao came to Yangzhou because of unemployment. This is also the first time he has entered Yangzhou for a long time, and he has been a "painter of Yangzhou for ten years". In the meantime, I have been to Jiangxi, Hunan, Hubei, Sichuan and Beijing for more than two years. I also stopped at Tianning Temple in Yangzhou to study the career of raising children, and occasionally went back to my hometown in Xinghua. But he has been living in Yangzhou, and selling paintings, writing and writing poems have become indispensable things in his life.
In the 18th year of Qianlong (1753), Zheng Banqiao entered the government for the benefit of the people. After more than ten years as an official, my sleeves were empty, so I had to go to Yangzhou to sell paintings. Several friends, such as Jin Nong, among the Eight Eccentrics in Yangzhou, are finally together. At the grand banquet, my friend Li Wei wrote a couplet for Zheng Banqiao: three unique poems, calligraphy and painting. When an official came back, everyone applauded.
Since then, Banqiao has been selling paintings in Yangzhou since he died in his hometown Xinghua for 30 years (1766). It can be said that Zheng Banqiao created a new world of China literati painting and calligraphy with his unique artistic style, and also established his position in Yangzhou painting school.