Qiji admired the poet Zheng Gu 鄭谷 and traveled to Chang'an to meet him around the turn of the tenth century. The second time they met, while Zheng Gu was posted at Yichun 宜春 in 905, Qiji presented a poem to his hero on “Early Plums” 早梅, which contained the couplet: "In the deep snow of the village ahead, / A few branches bloomed last night." Zheng Gu laughed at this couplet, saying, "A 'few branches' wouldn't be early. It would be better if it were 'a single branch.'" A mortified Qiji knocked his head in thanks and ran away. From then on, the literati called Zheng Gu Qijiʼs 'one character teacher'  一字師 (or 一字之師), a phrase which has survived as an idiom to the present day. The above story must be regarded with caution, as it comes from relatively unreliable anecdote collections, some of which cannot even agree on which poem Zheng Gu corrected.

Around the year 915, Qiji moved some 442 kilometers (275 miles) east to Donglin temple 東林寺 on Mt. Lu 廬山. In 921, Qiji planned to travel to Chengdu, which had been having a sort of cultural renaissance since breaking away from the Tang empire in the early 900s, attracting many renowned poets and esteemed religious figures. However, when Qiji reached Jingzhou 荊州, he was detained by the warlord Gao Jixing 高季興. But not all was lost for Qiji: Gao, now the first king of Jingnan 荆南, built him a new temple in which to live and made him the new kingdomʼs Saṃgha Rectifier 僧正. Qiji would live out the rest of his days here, dying probably in 937 (though some sources imply that he lived until 940 or 943).

Qiji, along with Jiaoran 皎然 and Guanxiu 貫休, is considered one of the greatest poet-monks in Chinese history. Qiji is perhaps best known as a master craftsman of regulated verse, particularly for his poems on natural objects, such as “Early Plums” 早梅 and “Listening to a Spring” 聽泉. In this regard, he is considered one of the inheritors of the 'bitter chanting' (kuyin) 苦吟 aesthetic, associated with Jia Dao 賈嶋 and Zheng Gu. However, Qiji had wide-ranging tastes in poetry and also tried his hand at a number of bold, song-style poems in the vein of Li Bai 李白, Li He 李賀, and Guanxiu.

An important critic as well as poet, Qijiʼs main work is the Exemplary Forms of Poetry 風騷旨格. This manual gathers hundreds of couplets written by contemporaries and recent predecessors (including himself) and organizes them categorically. Though the Exemplary Forms lacks prose commentary, its innovative approach to literature is clear. Qiji is the first to propose ten 'powers'  勢 for poetry, giving them such colorful names as 'The Power of a Lion Pouncing Back'  獅子返擲勢 and 'The Power of a Surging River Tilting Oneʼs Palm'  洪河側掌勢. This schema would be imitated by later critics. Even when Qiji uses the traditional categories of literary criticism, such as 'Great Elegantiae'  大雅, he redefines them to better cohere with his own poetic practice. Another section of Exemplary Forms, titled “Poetry Has Forty Gates” 詩有四十門 demonstrates Qijiʼs indebtedness to the vocabulary of the burgeoning tradition of Chan literature (and, at least one scholar has proposed, to the Weiyang school 潙仰宗 in particular). But Qiji was no mindless cheerleader for the Chan tradition. In his only other extant work of criticism, a preface to the collected gāthās 偈 of the monk Judun 居遁, he makes it clear that he regards such didactic verse as something less than poetry.

More than anyone else in the early tenth century, Qiji seems to have been the most invested in the idea of the poet-monk as the harmonizer of the Confucian and Buddhist traditions. In addition to maintaining close ties to both religious and secular social worlds, his poems are littered with allusions to previous monks who were admired by the literati for their artistic gifts, from Zhi Dun 支盾 and Jiaoran 皎然 to Jia Dao and Guanxiu. The contemporaneous poet-monk Qichan 栖蟾, writing about Qijiʼs work, wrote, 'Your poems are Chan for Confucians'  詩爲儒者禪 and 'Your literary star lights up the Heavens of Chu'  文星照楚天. The comparison between poetry and Chan was still new at this point, and would not become a critical cliché until at least the Song dynasty. To Qiji, the job of both poet and monk was to discover the deep patterns of the world through intense concentration on objects and phenomena. Unlike many earlier poet-monks, he expressed no conflict or ambivalence about his dual identity. Aside from poetry, Qiji was skilled at the zither 琴, chess 棋, and calligraphy, with copies of his brushwork circulating into the Yuan dynasty. He was also a connoisseur of tea, writing often of its fine flavors in his verse.

In 938, poet/historian Sun Guangxian 孫光憲 collected all of Qijiʼs surviving poetry and published them without edits as The White Lotus Collection 白蓮集, 810 poems in 10 fascicles. The entire collection is extant, along with three poems and four scattered couplets which may be found in Quan Tangshi bubian. His one-fascicle critical work, Exemplary Forms of Poetry 風騷旨格, and his preface to Judunʼs gāthā collection also survive. These works may be found in the two modern, annotated editions of his work edited by Wang Xiulin and Pan Dingwu.

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