Shang Qin was born in Sichuan, China, in 1930, but has lived in Taiwan since the late 1940s, when he, like so many others, fled the mainland after the "fall of China." The author of four volumes of poetry and an artist of significant accomplishment, he is among the first poets in Taiwan to have expressed a significant interest in surrealism and is, without question, one of the finest poets writing in Chinese on either side of the Formosa Strait.