Yan Hui is the tradition's strangest exemplar because there is almost nothing of him. He wrote nothing, held no office, is quoted saying very little, and died at around forty. What survives is Confucius's regard: the famous description of him living on one bowl of rice and one ladle of water in a mean lane, which others could not have endured, without it altering his joy; the remark that he never repeated a mistake; and the observation that of all his students only Yan Hui truly loved learning. When he died, Confucius broke down — crying out that Heaven was destroying him, weeping with a violence the disciples found excessive, and answering their objection by asking for whom he should show such grief if not for this man. He also refused to give his own carriage to fund an outer coffin, on the grounds that it would breach the propriety due his own former rank, which sits uncomfortably beside the grief and is preserved anyway. He occupies the first place among the correlates in every Confucian temple.