Ye Fang'ai

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Ye Fang'ai (1629–1682) was a Han Chinese official in the Qing dynasty. He came from a scholarly family in Kunshan, Jiangsu. His father, Ye Chonghua, passed the jinshi exam in 1628 and worked as an official in Shandong and Guangdong during the late Ming.

Ye passed the imperial exams in 1659, earning jinshi and the tanhua title for being the third-ranked candidate. He was appointed as a second-class compiler. In 1661, he was briefly dismissed over the Jiangnan Taxation Case, though it was later found to be a technical matter since he owed only one li of silver. He was pardoned and returned to duty.

He rose through the ranks, becoming an expositor and then a reader at the Hanlin Academy in 1676. In 1677 he began supervising the compilation of Xiaojing yani, which expanded the Classic of Filial Piety. In 1678 he became director-general in charge of the Huangyu biao, a work on the empire’s official geography. That same year he was invited to the Imperial Study with Chen Tingjing and soon became chancellor of the Hanlin Academy and vice-president of the Board of Rites.

In 1679 he was selected for the special exams called boxue hongci. He then directed the compilation of the History of Ming. In 1681 he was named junior vice-president at the Ministry of Justice, and he died the next year in 1682. He received the posthumous name Wenmin (文敏).