Jiang Yan, a famous strategist, politician and writer in the Southern Dynasties, was born in Kaocheng, Jiyang and Songzhou, and experienced the replacement of Song, Qi and Liang generations. Jiang Yan was very studious and clever when he was a teenager, and he could write very good poems at the age of six. At the age of thirteen, his father died, and young Jiang Yan cut wood to support his mother, striving for progress in the cold. At the age of twenty, he started his political career by working under Ziyuan Liu, the king of Xin 'an.
There is a passage in the biography of Nan Shi Jiang Yan that records Jiang Yan's "talent exhaustion". When Jiang Yan was appointed as the magistrate of Xuancheng, he dreamed that a man who claimed to be Zhang Jingyang (a writer in the Western Jin Dynasty) said to Jiang Yan at night on his way home, "I sent him a piece of brocade before, and I can still see it now." Jiang Yan handed him the brocade from her pocket. Zhang Jingyang looked at a few feet of brocade and said angrily, "That's all." After this incident, Jiang Yan's writing was obscure and not as good as before.
It is also recorded in "Poetry". It is said that one night he dreamed of a man who called himself Guo Pu. He said to Jiang Yan, "I have a five-color watercolor pen that I have left for you for many years. Please give it back to me! " Jiang Yan took it out of her arms and gave it back to the man. Since then, his articles have gone from bad to worse. At that time, people called it "exhausted", so there was a saying that "Jiang Lang was exhausted".