[In the following essay, Hsu presents an overview of Li Ch'ing-chao's life and her writing, from her early poems to the more serious verse she composed after her husband's death. The critic also discusses the poet's contribution to the development of classical Chinese poetry.]

Light breeze and fine rain, soughing and soughing
Again quicken the endless tears.
The flute player is gone, leaving an empty pavilion;
Forlorn. Who is to lean on the railing together with me?
Picking a twig of beauty, but—
                    On earth or in heaven—
                    To whom can I send it?

(from “Poem No. 38”)¹

These words of Li Ch'ing-chao, regarded by many as the greatest woman poet in Chinese history, were written shortly after the death of her husband, who had been her devoted companion and faithful comrade in letters. His death was the strongest influence in her life, bringing to her poems a depth of feeling that, like a colorless blue in the flame of her genius, gave them brilliance and intensity. To be sure, Li Ch'ing-chao had earned a position in Chinese poetry long before her husband's death, largely because of her rare sensitivity to the aesthetic and poetic quality of the world in which she lived. While her poetry reflected a limited world of nature and of man, she more than compensated for this apparent lack with the depth of her imaginative penetration.

She wrote in the first part of the twelfth century, when such lyrical sensitivity was virtually absent in western poetry. Many of the western national literatures were yet to be awakened. The French epics were influential; the chansons set the tune to which English and German minstrels danced. The Norman conquest had had slight literary influence on the English, who continued to hear in their new ballads the old refrains of their earlier battle poems. The Germans had barely begun to parody courtly love in simple, folksy ditties. The Italians still wrote in Latin. By contrast, Li Ch'ing-chao's accomplishment appears all the more remarkable.

Among the sixty poems of unquestioned authenticity, certain aspects of her life are revealed which may be used to trace, at least tentatively, the process of her poetic growth.² Such an attempt may show the contrast between the qualities of her earlier poems and her later achievement and may bring out more clearly the influence of her husband's death.

Li Ch'ing-chao came from a family where literary discipline was a tradition.³ Her parents were both quite distinguished in the literary circles of their time. Li Ch'ing-chao's early youth was passed in an atmosphere of opulence and gaiety. Games, poetry-writing sessions, and family parties filled her daily life. She played on a swing in the garden, and told herself afterwards:

After pushing on the swing,
She got off, too exhausted to care for her dainty hands.
A delicate flower under heavy dew—
Perspiration moistened her light robe.
Seeing someone enter,
She ran in embarrassment,
Letting her stockings drag and hairpins drop.
Yet she leaned on the door and looked back,
Pretending to sniff at a twig of plum blossoms.

(“Poem No. II, 5”)

Or after an outing, she would record the event:

Often remembered are the evenings on the creek
          When wine flowed in the arbor and we lost our way.
It was late, our boat returned after a happy day
          Entering, by mistake, the thicket of lotus clusters.
                    As we hurried to get through,
                                        Hurried to get through,
A flock of herons, startled, rose to the sky.

(“Poem No. 3”)

She was a carefree girl of eighteen when she married Chao Ming-ch'eng, then a student at the Imperial Academy.⁴ As a student, Chao had yet to earn a regular income. Often, after his study, he would pawn one or two articles from his wardrobe to buy some stone rubbings as he passed by the booths of a well-known temple. When he got home, the young couple would immediately plunge into a discussion of the value of their new acquisitions over a cup of wine or tea. Chao Ming-ch'eng graduated two years later and started his government service. His income encouraged a widening of their collection to include paintings and antiques. However, their financial resources were not always sufficient to satisfy the needs of their connoisseurship. Once they discovered a painting by the tenth-century artist Hsü Hsi in the market. The dealer demanded 200,000 cash. They took the painting home, admired it for several days, and finally had to return it because they failed to raise that much money.⁵ For a long time afterwards they were unhappy over this episode.

Each time they acquired an article, the couple would catalogue, annotate, and study its background in their steadily growing library. Their favorite game, with a cup of tea or wine as the prize, was to check each other's knowledge of the relevant facts about each item in their collection. Frequently, as Li Ch'ing-chao wrote, they laughed so much in playing this game that the tea cup was upset in the lap of the winner, who did not get to drink it after all. The joy of their companionship filled her boudoir, and she unblushingly recorded it in her poem:

From the flower peddler's
She bought a twig of spring about to open.
Lightly touched with traces of tears,
It still bore the marks of sunrise and morning dew.
Afraid that he might suspect—
That her face was not as pretty as the flower—
She pinned it in her hair,
Just to let him compare.

(“Poem No. II, 2”)

These early poems suggest that her reputation as a daring, unconventional girl, even before her marriage, was probably not without basis. Indeed, if her early work could be recaptured, it might include several poems like the following:

Her blossom-like face beams at a smile,
Her duck-style locks fly across her cheeks.
A turn of her eyes starts people guessing.
Infinite grace rests in that charm;
Profound feeling finds expression on a page of tender
          regret.
Another meeting is arranged when the moon shifts the
          flowers' shadow.

(“Poem No. II, 14”)⁶

For a number of years Li Ch'ing-chao and her husband filled several rooms with their collection. This period, from her marriage in 1101 to 1125, was the brightest in her life. In their collection both she and her husband had found an ideal life together. Music, books, poetry, tea, and wine were the epitome of their happiness. In many ways they lived up to their exemplar, T'ao Yüan-ming, the fourth-century poet. Li Ch'ing-chao had always admired T'ao Yüan-ming's famed work, “Kuei-ch'ü-lai Tz'u” (“Return”). Their studio, where they played their literary games for tea, was named “Kuei-lai T'ang,” referring to the same fourth-century poem. When she had her portrait painted in 1114, her husband wrote a colophon on it, again quoting, the first line of the same poem. In her sixty poems, there are six direct references to T'ao. Chao Ming-ch'eng, to be sure, never followed in T'ao Yüan-ming's footsteps by walking out on his government assignment, but there is every indication that his heart was not in politics. His real life was by her side, in their studio, with their books. Their collaboration resulted in 502 chüan of annotated books and several catalogues of antiques and objets d'art.

During this period Chao Ming-ch'eng had to travel frequently. His first temporary absence from her occasioned a poem which she dedicated to him:

The scent of red lotus fades, and the mat feels cool.(7)
I loosen my robe
          To board the boat alone.
Who sends a message through the cloud?
          As the swans return in formation
          Moonlight floods the western chamber.
The petals shall fall and water shall flow.
          One kind of longing,
          Two victims of unnamed grief.
There is no way of getting rid of this thought;
          Just as it recedes from the eyebrows,
          In the heart, it swells.

(“Poem No. 16”)

Legend has it that she sent this poem to her husband, in typical story-book fashion, by writing it on a silk handkerchief. If true, that handkerchief proved to be more efficient than the bulletin board at Times Square in spreading the news, for almost overnight the poem became public property, particularly the last two lines. They captivated the most seasoned versifiers of her time with their disarming simplicity and their almost uncanny appropriateness. The ts'ai (just), and ch'üeh (however, represented in the translation by a comma) in these last lines were two extremely colloquial expressions at the time; their appearance in a poem of such stature was a breath of fresh air.

A woman writer in twelfth-century China, if her work was known at all, had the advantage of drawing greater attention than her male competitor could with a comparable accomplishment. And if her work expressed genuine personal feeling, such as that between husband and wife, her name would spread even more rapidly. This fact explains, at least in part, the general and enthusiastic recognition accorded Li Ch'ing-chao by her peers. The poem on a silk handkerchief started the men of letters talking, and their impression was further reinforced by a second poem Li Ch'ing-chao addressed to her husband on the ch'ung-chiu occasion (ninth day of the ninth month).

Light mist and dark clouds—it has been gloomy all
                    day.
          Rare incense burns in the animal-shaped censer.
Again comes the Double Ninth festival;
On my jade pillow and through the gauze mosquito
                    net,
          Evening chill arrives at midnight.
Serving wine after dusk near the chrysanthemum
                    hedge,
          A subtle scent fills my sleeves.
Don't say that it doesn't hurt:
          As western wind flutters the curtain,
                    She has grown thinner than the yellow blossom.

(“Poem No. 11”)

A story preserved in Chinese poetic lore tells of Chao Ming-ch'eng's reaction upon receiving this poem. He was jealous of its brilliance and he sought to outdo it. After several days of relentless effort, Chao wrote fifteen poems to the same melody and showed them, together with his wife's, to his friend Lu Teh-fu.⁸ To his infinite dismay, Lu singled out the very last three lines of Li Ch'ing-chao's poem as the best lines of the whole group. As these stories spread, Li's reputation as a poet became firmly established.

The political fortune of the Sung Dynasty was on the wane. The Tartars known as Nü-chen (Juchen) in the north invaded China proper and overran the Sung capital in 1126. Chao Ming-ch'eng had to report to various posts without his family. At forty-three, Li Ch'ing-chao for the first time really tasted the sorrow of parting as the uncertainties of life so cruelly dawned on her. Misfortunes followed one after another during the next two years. Li, often alone, fled the invading Tartars, who burned part of her library (over a dozen rooms full of books). In the summer of 1128, her husband died in Nanking.⁹ These tragic blows were too much for her to bear; a lengthy illness confined her to bed. When she finally regained enough strength to look beyond her window, she had lost her interest even in tea. Only the cassia branches in the garden offered her a measure of comfort:

Grey appears on my thinning temples after a spell of
                    illness.
From my bed I watch the waning moon climb over the window pane.
Cardimum seeds are boiled together with their twigs,
There is no need for tea.
Books of verses on the pillow are nice where time keeps its leisurely pace.
The view beyond the door captivates as rain falls.
All day long offering sympathy to me
Are the cassia flowers.

(“Poem No. 33”)

Left alone to face life, Li Ch'ing-chao managed to have their remaining 20,000-odd chüan of books and another 2,000 chüan of catalogues of art objects shipped to Hung-chou (Nan-ch'ang in Kiangsi). Before she could flee the increasingly threatened area, however, her life was made more unpleasant by a rumor telling of her secret offer of a jade jar to a certain Nü-chen chieftain. This alleged treasonous act was even reported to the emperor. Li Ch'ing-chao had to resume her wandering in southeast China, very much alone, in a futile effort to recapture a bit of her former peaceful life. She left Hung-chou barely in time to escape the sacking of that city by the enemy troops, but all her remaining collection and library were lost.

Li Ch'ing-chao in her fifties should have been a tired woman, exhausted and weary of the vicissitudes of life. Indeed, she was never again completely herself. But as memories returned to contrast her present with her past, the force of the tragic blows decreased along with the lapse of time, tears ran dry, and a pale languor settled on everything she saw, including the plum blossoms which had been her inspiration and joy in earlier years:

Every year when snow came
          Often I drank with plum blossoms in my hair.
I crushed all the petals in my hands, still without
                    knowing what to do,
          All I gained was a lapel full of tears.
This year I am far away from home;
          Gray appears on my thinning temples.
Looking at the way the wind blows tonight
          It will be hard to see those plum blossoms again.

(“Poem No. 10”)

She went to live with her brother at Chin-hua (in Chekiang) where she tried to withdraw from all social contacts into a cherished corner of her memory. She locked her doors and windows to while her time away with the most meaningless gestures, staring at a crushed flower petal or playing with the candle wick:

Deep, deep the courtyard—how deep!
Cloudy windows and misty bowers are always closed.
The tips of willow twigs and the buds near the railing
          gradually emerge.
As spring returns to the trees of Nanking,
In that ancient metropolis, people are growing old.
Much have I done in singing of the moon and the wind,
But now, already old, I have accomplished nothing.
Whose sympathy is there for the decline and the
          waning?
No interest have I to try playing with the lamp,
No desire to go out treading on the snow.

(“Poem No. 30”)

Drunk last night, I undressed late;
          A withered twig of plum blossoms stayed in my hair.
When I felt the wine no more, the flower scent dis-
          pelled my sleep,
          But hard it was to return from a distant dream.
The world was hushed, the moon lingering, and the
                    curtain low;
I crushed the fallen petals again,
          And again fingered the clinging fragrance
          To while away a few more hours.

(“Poem No. 9”)

On festive occasions, when her old acquaintances sought her out, she could not decline all the invitations. But she realized that her days of gaiety belonged to the past, and she preferred to retire behind the screens to listen to other peoples' laughter:

The molten gold of setting sun,
The blended marble of evening clouds:
Where is he?
Dense mist tints the willows,
          Plaintive flute plays the tune of plums.
          How can one know spring is in the air?
Fine festival of Yüan-hsiao,
          Balmy weather,
          But who can say no dreary days from now on?
Thanks to friends in wine and poetry
          Who come to invite me
          With scented carts and handsome steeds.
In the capital during its golden era
          The ladies had much leisure
          To celebrate, I remember, particularly this festival.
Elaborate king-fisher capes,
          Gold filigree brooches,
          Clustered together competing for decor.
It's all over now:
          With wind-blown locks and frosty tresses,
          I dare not go out in the evening.
Better stay behind the screens
          To listen to other people's laughter.

(“Poem No. 8”)

At times she had dreams and visions that lifted her, at least momentarily, out of that fog of melancholy. These were the moments of ethereal relief which she welcomed:

The sky is joined to surging clouds, and the clouds
                    to morning mist.
A thousand starry sails dance in the fading Milky Way
                    above.
It seems that I dreamed of going to the city of gods
Who asked me kindly, “Where are you returning to?”
I replied, “The road is long and time is late.”
I write poetry and sometimes there is a startling line.
The Roc soars on the rising wind of ninety thousand
                    miles.
Please don't stop, O wind,
          But carry my leaf-like boat to the three sacred isles.

(“Poem No. 20”)

It would be an error to envisage Li Ch'ing-chao in her late years as an old woman wasting away in utter despair. She nursed her infinite sorrow but her spirit was not broken. She had always been a person with an indomitable will to live and enjoy life, and she had not been completely unaware of the ugly reality around her, nor had she ever been totally lost in dealing with it. She met political strife even when she was a new bride. Because her own father disagreed with the political views of her father-in-law, her father was demoted. The petition that she wrote and sent to her father-in-law, who was in a position of power, restored some of her own father's lost prestige. In her late years she maintained some communication with many people still active in politics, mostly her father's former colleagues. She continued to study ancient art and wrote commentaries. She retained an outlook on life sufficiently sanguine for her to design a new game called Ta-ma t'u with a different verse for each of the numerous positions the players' chips could occupy. At sixty she was still very much a part of the literary life in the beleaguered land south of the Yangtze River. She was carrying her load of sorrow better than the boats in the Shuang Creek (near Chin-hua, Chekiang) could:

The wind pauses, the scent clings to the dust, but
                    flowers are no more.
It's getting late and yet I am too weary to comb my
                    hair.
Things are still the same, but he is gone, it is all over;
          Tears well up before any word could be said.
They say that Spring is still young at the Shuang
                    Creek.
          I thought of going to take a small boat there.
Only I fear the tiny boats of the Shuang Creek
          Can not carry this much care.

(“Poem No. 15”)

This was Li Ch'ing-chao talking to herself, making a private confession of the grief that gripped her unrelentingly from the death of her husband until her own death released her.¹⁰

Looking back at the development of classical Chinese poetry since Li Ch'ing-chao, it becomes quite clear that she contributed to the literary stream in several respects:

(1) Her dexterous injection of many extremely colloquial expressions into her poetry did much to enrich the classical Chinese poetic language. Such expressions as ch'i-lai (get off, get up) and ju-lai (enter) in “Poem No. II, 5” (already cited) and the modal particles sha, na in “Poem No. 43”

Kuan shih k'o lai sha
Te shih chiu shih na
Is it a visitor coming?
Not to say recapturing our
          old times!

had been quite outside the established tradition of poetic diction. Their debut in verse had appeared in the late T'ang works set to popular music, and as such they were yet to become accepted in dignified poetry. Li Ch'ing-chao's use of these expressions was a bold but successful attempt—successful because the total effect of her poem gave them that magic touch of delicate finesse, and they in turn contributed that inimitable freshness to her poem. Wang Shuo, another Sung Dynasty writer, remarked:

Li Ch'ing-chao wrote ‘long and short lines’ (tz'u), molding them so intricately to suit her will. They are light, skillful, sharp and original, with infinite moods and postures. The fantastically vulgar expressions of the back alleys and streets, whatever suited her mood, she would write down in her poetry. Since time immemorial among the lettered women of cultured families there had never been one so completely defiant of convention as Li Ch'ing-chao.¹¹

(2) Vernacular expressions and colloquialisms were not the only magic touches Li gave to her poetry; her epithets and perfectly fitting allusions also left her imitators in despair. “The molten gold of the setting sun / The blended marble of evening clouds,” the “wind-blown locks and frosty tresses” (“Poem No. 8”), the “pampered willow” (“Poem No. 39”), and numerous others are gems that dazzle the reader and arrest him with the exactitude of their descriptive and suggestive power. Like the reduplicative expressions she used, these phrases ring clear and loud, and make the reader repeat them to himself again and again until he becomes their captive. The allusions in her poems are brought in so effortlessly that the reader's perception of their significance is also obtained effortlessly. They speak Li Ch'ing-chao's language quite as plainly as Li's colloquial expressions. They betray no signs of literary strain and never obscure the meaning or soften the forceful impact of the poem. In this Li Ch'ing-chao is the opposite of Li Shang-yin (813-858) whose allusions remain subjects of endless dispute among the philologists.¹² In “Poem No. 16,” we find:

Who sends a (brocade) message from the cloud?
As the swans return in formation.
Moonlight floods the western chamber.

The swans flying in formation usually depict a figure resembling the Chinese character of i (one) or jen (man). They are suggestive messages from the cloud—suggestive of the change in season, the passage of time and the delayed return of someone, and the suggestion is clear and immediate. Even the allusions in Li's poetry referring to historical persons and events are readily identifiable, such as those in “Poem No. 14”:

Chung-hsüan grieved as he thought of his faraway
          home.
Might as well, then, accept my lot and drain the cup
          before me,
          And not let the chrysanthemum at the eastern hedge
                    turn golden in vain.

Chung-hsuan is the Han Dynasty poet Wang Ts'an (177-217) whose fu “On Climbing the Pavilion” almost every schoolboy knows by heart. In this poem Wang expresses his homesickness with moving poignancy. The eastern hedge is, of course, an image created by T'ao Yüan-ming which by the twelfth century had become part of common vocabulary. Li Ch'ing-chao's allusions are always so clear that they lend force to her poetry and help it to communicate directly with the reader.

(3) The reduplicative words in her poems are onomatopoetic in more than one way. The

Cheng tu,
          Cheng tu
Hurry to get through
          Hurry to get through

in “Poem No. 3” suggests the sound and motion of the oars, as well as the excited chatter and movement of the people in the boat. Elsewhere Li Ch'ing-chao used the same device to great advantage in heightening the poetic and musical effect of her poems. The

Chih fo,
          Chih fo?
Do you know it,
          Do you know it?

in “Poem No. 4” repeats the key question which the poet who knows sorrow and yet is unwilling to talk about it addresses to an apparently young and unsophisticated maid. These repetitions carry an irresistible force which works, as one critic said of Edith Piaf's songs of love and loss, like “a club bound finally to inflict a fatal blow” on the reader.¹³ The despair in “Poem No. II, 4,” and “Poem No. 40” comes forth in intensity to envelope the reader in the lines:

Wu na,
          Wu na
Nothing else,
          Nothing else

and

Hsiu,
          Hsiu
Let it go,
          Let it go

The loneliness suggested by a cool, hazy, desolate landscape and the fall of wu-t'ung leaves is driven home in “Poem No. 34”:¹⁴

Lin kao-ko
Luan-shan p'ing-yeh yen-
          kuang pao,
          Yen-kuang pao—
Ch'i ya kuei hou
Mu-t'ien wen chiao.
Tuan-hsiang ts'an-chiu
                    ch'ing-huai e
—ts'ui-ch'en wu-t'ung
                    lo
          Wu-t'ung lo
Yu hai ch'iu-se
Yu hai chi-mo.
I lean on a high balcony:
The random hills and im-
                    mense wilderness un-
                    der a filmy haze,
          A filmy haze—
After crows returned to
                    their perches,
A          bugle call echoes
                    through the evening
                    sky.
The incense is dead, the
                    wine tired, and the
                    feeling low.
—hastens the falling
                    wu-t'ung leaves,
          Falling wu-t'ung leaves
—
Still autumn colors,
Still solitude.

Li Ch'ing-chao's unforgettable “Poem No. 24,” of course, illustrates this tour de force most dramatically with its untranslatable

Hsün-hsün mi-mi
Leng-leng ch'ing-ch'ing,
Ch'i-ch'i ts'an-ts'an ch'i-
                    ch'i.
.....Wu-t'ung keng chien hsi-
                    yü
Tao huang-hun tien-tien
                    ti-ti
Search and search, look
                    and look again,
Lonely,
Chilly, and dreary
.....Fine rain on wu-t'ung
                    leaves
Keeps dripping and drop-
                    ping as evening ar-
                    rives.

This is such an unusual poetic feat that many later writers attempted, in spite of repeated judicious warnings, to imitate it, without success.¹⁵

(4) The musical quality of these poems reflects her mastery of the musical force of the language. She made use of the existing tz'u forms but was never enslaved by them. Her keen sense for the rhythmic movement in a poem enabled her to create many new tz'u forms of which “Poem No. 11” is one example. Even when she was using an existing form she almost always departed from the fixed rules to create a rhythmic effect entirely her own. The reduplicative word, Hsiu hsiu, in the first line of the second stanza in “Poem No. 40” keeps the rhyme of the entire poem, which was a departure from the rhyming scheme of this tune as it had been handed down to Li Ch'ing-chao's time. But since the effect created by this departure was so musically impressive, Li Ch'ing-chao's variation set a new pattern superseding the old.¹⁶

(5) Perhaps even more important than all these innovations that come close to technical perfection in poetry writing are Li Ch'ing-chao's metaphorically suggestive devices that identify an external landscape or a trivial object with the internal, most private sentiment of the poet. Through this device the reader is compelled to identify his own personal emotive response with the poet's because they share the common experience of viewing such a landscape or common object. This is part of the classical Chinese poetic tradition that dates back to high antiquity, but this Li Ch'ing-chao achieved with a combination of the wild fantasies of Ch'ü Yüan (author of the Ch'u-tz'u) and the transcendental serenity of Wang Wei (701-761). The plum blossoms are not merely an object of ethereal beauty to be described objectively in Li's world of poetry, otherwise her poems about them would not be able to transcend the boundaries of the trivial occasional poems in which classical Chinese poetry abounds. A twig of plum blossoms, viewed by a poet whose springtime is far behind, is nature's mockery of man:

Late winter, near the source of the creek,
          Several plum blossoms are seen
                    Cut out in perfection.
Like cream in haze, like sculptured gems the tender
                    scented sprays
          Purposely betray the arrival of spring.
.....While the wind is tender and rain soft,
          You had better pin these blooms to cover your hair.
For you must know, the flute without mercy
          Is again about to play the tune of the evening.(17)

(“Poem No. II, 15”)

On the other hand, a fallen petal is nature's sympathetic tear shed over the poet's sorrow:

The wind dies and fallen petals pile deep—
          Masses of red and snow beyond the curtain.
Long remembered is the season after the apple blos-
          soms have parted—
          A time to mourn the vanished spring.(18)

(“Poem No. 1”)

The more direct identification of the poet with the lean chrysanthemum that alone survives in frosty winter (Poem No. 41) was in the best tradition of Ch'ü Yüan and T'ao Yüan-ming. In these poems, objective correlatives were skillfully used.

When Li Ch'ing-chao paints a landscape in a few strokes to suggest a mood, it is a subtle device much more effective than any readily identifiable poetic fallacy. In the following poem, the last line, though a simple picture with no striking color, has a moving quality from which no reader can escape.

Rippling spring light in late April—
          A whiff of dying incense smoke hovers over the
                    burner.
          Waking from a dream I find my hairpin under the
                    pillow.
Swallows are yet to return, though people are playing
                    the game of weeds now.(19)
Plum blossoms are over, and catkins have appeared
                    on willow trees.
An evening drizzle wets the deserted swing.

(“Poem No. 2”)

Unlike Wang Wei at his best, who let himself merge with nature and be absorbed in nature, Li Ch'ing-chao here uses a landscape to heighten the emotional intensity of the poet. She is not only in the poem, but at its very center, yet her feeling is suggested by nothing more than a seemingly trivial personal effect—the fallen hairpin under her pillow. Did she have a pleasant dream? Could she possibly have a good dream? What kind of dream could she have had? All these questions are left to the reader's imagination. The passage of time, the changing of seasons that reminds man of his vanishing life, are suggested through several images of objects in nature—the growth and decay of plants and flowers. This last point is most poetically treated in “Poem No. II, 13”:

New shoots, under watch, have grown into bamboos
          in the garden,
And all fallen petals have joined the mud on the
          swallow's nest.

This, then, is the real secret of her success. Only on extremely rare occasions did she allow the intensity of her feeling to emerge on the surface. Most often she would point at the fading red on the branches to suggest, but never to describe, the world of vanishing beauty in which she was spending her last years:

Last night in light rain and gusty wind
My sound sleep dispelled not the lingering effect of
          wine.
I try to ask her who rolls up the screens.
“The apple tree,” she says, “is still the same.”
          But ah, do you know it,
          Do you know it?
The green may be thriving, the red must be thin now.

(“Poem No. 4”)

It is in this supremely quiet restraint, this nonchalance so artfully covering a sea of boiling emotion, that Li Ch'ing-chao lodges her claim as the greatest woman poet in classical Chinese literature.

Notes

1. My translations of Li Ch'ing-chao's tz'u are based on the following edition, which seems to be the most reliable because the editor has consulted a large number of editions and noted their discrepancies. Chao Wan-li, Chiao-chi Sung Chin Yuan jen tz'u (Collated Tz'u of Sung, Chin, and Yüan Poets, Nanking: Academia Sinica, 1931). Li Ch'ing-chao's poems are numbered as they appear in the draft of my translation. The tz'u genre began to flourish in the late T'ang Dynasty (ca. 1000). It has been regarded as a “liberation” from the shih genre, which required a rigid prosodic uniformity based on quatrains with a uniform number of syllables in each line. The tz'u was set to the tunes popularly known in the 10th century, hence the necessity to vary the number of lines and the number of syllables in each line. There is evidence that at least 924 tz'u styles existed.

2. I am grateful to Professor T'ien-yi Li of Yale University, who correctly pointed out, at the 1961 Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in Chicago, where the first draft of this paper was read, that the dating of Li Ch'ing-chao's poems will remain largely conjectural until further evidence has been uncovered. I attempt such a treatment of the subject only with the hope that her poetry may be better appreciated. A definitive chapter of literary history centering around Li Ch'ing-chao must await further extensive research.

3. Her father, a high-ranking government official, was a writer in his own right. Her mother was taught by her own grandfather Wang Kung-ch'en, a chuang-yüan (who passed the highest imperial examination at the very top of the list). The best single source of biographical information for Li Ch'ing-chao is still her own preface and postscript to the catalogue of objects of art which she and her husband collected. Slightly different versions of these two autobiographical essays are found in a number of works, e.g., Hsieh Wu-liang, Chung-kuo fu-nü wen-hsüeh shih (A History of Chinese Literature—Women Writers, Shanghai: Chung-hua, 1916?), Book III, pp. 5-9; Chiang Shang-hsien, Li Ch'ing-chao tz'u hsin-shang (An Appreciation of Li Ch'ing-chao's Tz'u, T'ai-nan: I-ming, 1960), pp. 63-68.

4. The year of her marriage has been disputed by many scholars, including Hu Shih. Here I accept the latest finding by Hsia Ch'eng-tao in his T'ang Sung tz'u lun-ts'ung (Essays on the Tz'u of the T'ang and Sung Dynasties, Shanghai: Kutien, 1956), pp. 190-197, which establishes Li's birth date as in 1084, making the age when she married eighteen.

5. The painting is preserved in the Palace Collection. See its reproduction in Three Hundred Masterpieces of Chinese Painting from the Palace Museum (Taichung, Taiwan: National Palace Museum, 1959), Plate 54.

6. Chao Wan-li, section “Sou yü tz'u,” 11a, notes the skepticism of several writers on the authenticity of this poem, but it seems that before definite counter-evidence is secured, these poems should continue to be treated as part of Li's writing that reveal another aspect of her life and thought.

7. One variant reading in certain editions, possibly a misprint, could change “the mat” in this line into a plant that flourishes in autumn.

8. Records differ on the number of poems Chao wrote to the same melody. Lang-huan chi (quoted in Chang Tsung-hsiao, Tz'u-lin chi-shih, chüan 19, 7a) has “fifteen”; T'an Cheng-pi has “over fifty” in his Chung-kuo nü-hsing te wen-hsüeh sheng-huo (The Literary Lives of Chinese Women, Shanghai: Kuang-ming, 1931), p. 247.

9. Li's family misfortune during these years included: Chao forced to go alone to assume the governorship of Tzu-ch'uan (near present-day Chi-nan, Shantung) in 1126; Chao's mother dead in Nanking in 1127; Li's home and library in Ch'ing-chou (I-tu, Shantung) burned by the Tartars in the winter of 1127; flight to Kan-shui (Kan-hsien, Kiangsi) in the spring of 1128; Chao reporting for duty alone at Hu-chou (Chia-hsing, Chekiang) while she stayed at Kuei-ch'ih in Anhwei; Chao's death from malaria in Nanking in the summer of 1128.

10. The legend about Li's second marriage seems to have been adequately disproved by Hsia Ch'eng-tao, op. cit.

11. In his Pi-chi man-chih, quoted in Chiang Shang-hsien, p. 21, and in Lu K'an-ju, Chung-kuo shih-shih (History of Chinese Poetry, Peking, Tso-chia, 1957), p. 666.

12. Take Li Shang-yin's “Ching-se” (“The Jewel-inlaid Lute”), for instance. See comment on this poem in Li I-shan chi (The Poems of Li Shang-yin), annotated by Feng Hao (T'ai-chung, Chung-yung, 1956), p. 342.

13. Milton Bracker, “Miracle of the ‘Sparrow Kid’,” The New York Times Magazine (22 Jan. 1961), p. 35.

14. The two missing characters from the second line of the second stanza have not yet been found. Wu-t'ung, a plant resembling paulownia, is one of those poetic images in Chinese literature whose rich associations defy translation.

15. Shu Meng-lan, Pai-hsiang tz'u p'u (The Pai-hsiang Tz'u Styles, Shanghai: Sao-yeh shan-fang), p. 84.

16. Shu Meng-lan, p. 83.

17. The flute (chiang-ti) in the line second to the last is actually a bugle-horn introduced into China by the northern non-Chinese troops. Its musical character, perhaps often suggesting the effect of the “tap” played by a skillful bugler, cannot be adequately conveyed in the word horn or bugle or flute alone.

18. Hai-t'ang, a plant frequently mentioned in classical Chinese poems, is identified as the crabapple. I took the liberty of using “apple blossom” instead, because of the sound of the word and the general association with the names of these plants.

19. The season is late and the grass has grown tall enough to be used in the traditional folk game. The game is played by two players each selecting a strong length of grass stem. A knot is tied at one end of the grass stem. The two pieces are then interlocked at the knotted ends while the players each pull the other ends to see whose grass breaks first. Another folk game played with grass is commonly associated with the Dragon Boat festival season. On that day, people collect specimens of grass, weeds, and shrubs in a contest which awards the most extensive collection.