Li Qingzhao

Li Qingzhao a Chinese poet of the Song dynasty (1084-1155) who is widely regarded as the greatest woman writer in the Chinese tradition and the finest master of the ci lyric in its delicate and personal mode. Her songs of love, loss and exile transformed the genre and gave a woman's voice a central place in classical poetry.

Family and Marriage

Li Qingzhao was born in 1084 into a family of scholars and officials, in a household where literature and art were cultivated with unusual seriousness. Her father was a noted writer and official, and her mother came from a distinguished family of the same class, so the young Li grew up amid books, paintings and scholarly conversation.

In 1101 she married Zhao Mingcheng, a young scholar of similar background and temperament. The marriage was a partnership of intellectual equals: together they collected ancient inscriptions, bronzes and books, and they shared the ambition of building a great private library and preparing a scholarly catalogue of their antiquities.

Her early lyrics celebrate the happiness of this companionship, the pleasures of the garden and the seasons, and the small dramas of courtship and marriage. They are written with a fresh and sensuous immediacy that made her famous among the literary men of the capital, and they established a new register for the ci.

The Catastrophe of the Dynasty

The happiness of her early life was shattered by the fall of the Northern Song. In 1127 the Jurchen Jin captured the capital and the emperor, and the court fled south. Li Qingzhao and her husband, like thousands of others, abandoned their home and their collections and joined the exodus across the Yangzi.

Her husband died in 1129 while travelling to a new post, and she was left a widow in a time of chaos. She attempted to follow the fleeing court and to save what she could of the family's treasures, but the collection was dispersed, stolen or destroyed, and she spent the rest of her life in poverty and displacement.

The later years of her life were spent in the south, in Hangzhou and other cities of the Southern Song, where she wrote poetry, engaged in scholarly work, and endured the dependence and loneliness of a widow without secure means. She died around 1155, and the details of her last years are obscure.

The Ci of Li Qingzhao

Li Qingzhao wrote in the ci form with a mastery that few have equalled. Her early songs are celebrated for their vivid sensory detail and their delicate evocation of mood: the scent of flowers, the chill of autumn, the weight of wine, the small movements of a woman in her chamber. She made the intimate world of a woman's experience a serious subject of art.

Her later songs, written after the catastrophe, are among the most moving poems of grief in the language. They speak of the loss of a husband, of a homeland, and of a whole way of life, and they use the ruined garden and the unseasonal weather as images of inner desolation. The contrast between the early and late work gives her oeuvre a tragic completeness.

She also composed a celebrated essay on the art of the ci, in which she distinguished the genuine lyric from mere verse and criticised the great male writers of the day for treating the form as a game. Her confident assertion of critical authority on equal terms with men was unusual for a woman of her time.

Scholarship and the Record of Antiquities

Li Qingzhao was not only a poet but a scholar. After her husband's death she completed and preserved the preface and the notes for the catalogue of their collection of antiquities, adding her own recollections of the building of the library and of its destruction in the wars.

Her account of the collection is a valuable record of the antiquarian culture of the period, and it is also a personal memoir of a marriage and of a vanished world. The preface, written in 1134, describes the careful acquisition of inscriptions and bronzes and the ruin that overwhelmed them, and it is admired as one of the finest autobiographical essays of the Song.

Her writings on the arts of poetry and painting show her wide learning and independent judgement. She moved as an equal among the scholars and officials of her circle, and her scholarship, no less than her poetry, earned the respect of contemporaries and of later ages.

Influence and Legacy

Li Qingzhao occupies a unique place in Chinese literature. She is universally acknowledged as the greatest woman poet of the classical tradition, and her best songs are counted among the finest lyrics ever written in the language. Her name is inseparably linked with the ci and with the expression of intimate feeling.

Later women writers looked to her as a model of intellectual independence and artistic authority. Anthologists placed her work at the summit of the feminine voice in poetry, and her songs of love and loss were memorised and quoted across the centuries by readers of every class.

She died around 1155, and her reputation has only grown. Modern criticism has emphasised both the technical mastery of her lyrics and their historical testimony to the suffering of the Southern Song transition, and she is read today as one of the supreme poets of China, a writer of universal and enduring power.

See also

• Ci poetry
• Su Shi
• Southern Song dynasty
• Zhao Mingcheng