Xue Tao

Xue Tao a Tang dynasty courtesan and poet (c. 768-831) of Chengdu, celebrated as one of the finest poets of her age and famed for the small coloured paper on which she wrote. She moved in the highest literary circles of the late Tang and exchanged poems with many of the leading officials and writers of the day.

Life in Chengdu

Xue Tao was born around 768 in Chang'an, the Tang capital, but her family moved to Chengdu in the region of Shu when she was young, and it was there that she spent almost all her life. Her father held a minor office and died early, leaving the family in reduced circumstances, and by her late teens she had entered the world of the entertainment quarters as a courtesan and performing artist.

The great city of Chengdu, capital of the western province of Shu, was a wealthy and cultured place and the seat of a powerful military government. Xue Tao's beauty, wit and literary talent soon made her a celebrated figure in this society, and she became the favourite companion of the ranking officials who governed the region, several of whom were themselves poets of distinction.

Her position was that of an entertainer and companion, but her reputation rested on her poetry, and she was accepted as a genuine participant in the literary culture of the time. She is said to have been appointed to a minor official post by a sympathetic governor, an honour very rarely granted to a woman, though the appointment seems not to have been confirmed.

Poetry and the Literary Circle

Xue Tao wrote in the regulated forms of Tang poetry, the five and seven character lines with their careful patterns and parallelisms, and she excelled in the quatrain. Her poems are notable for their clarity, their emotional precision and their command of the natural imagery through which Tang poets conveyed feeling: bamboo, willow, the moon, birds and the changing of the seasons.

She exchanged poems with many of the most prominent literary figures of the mid and late Tang, including the officials who governed Sichuan and such poets as Yuan Zhen and Bai Juyi, who were among the most celebrated writers of the age. These exchanges, in which poems were written and answered as a form of cultivated conversation, placed her at the centre of a network of literary friendship that reached across the empire.

Her work survives in a collection of a few dozen poems, including pieces on parting, on the beauty of the Sichuan landscape, on the pleasure of wine and on the passage of time. Several of her poems are written in the voice of a woman addressing a departing lover, and they combine tenderness with a clear-eyed acceptance of loss that later critics greatly admired.

The Red Paper and the Artistic Life

Xue Tao is associated with one of the most charming stories in Chinese cultural history: her dissatisfaction with the large sheets of paper then available for writing poems, and her use of small sheets dyed in delicate colours, especially a soft red or pink, for her short quatrains. The Xue Tao paper, as it came to be called, became a famous luxury of Sichuan manufacture, prized by poets and calligraphers for centuries.

The story reflects her cultivated taste and her concern for the material elegance of the writing act itself, in which the poem, the brush and the paper formed a single aesthetic object. The coloured paper became part of her legend, and Chinese writers later referred to it as an emblem of refined feminine literary culture.

She also involved herself in the administration of the arts in Chengdu, and tradition credits her with the supervision of a workshop producing the coloured paper and with other cultural undertakings. Whether or not all these accounts are accurate, they show how she was remembered as a figure who shaped the taste of her city as well as writing within it.

Later Years and Character

In her later years Xue Tao withdrew from the society of the entertainment quarters and lived as a kind of scholar-recluse in the western part of Chengdu, near the river and the famous well that still bears her name. She adopted the dress of a Taoist recluse, a common path for women of her position who wished to retire from the world with respectability and independence.

She remained a literary figure of importance to the end of her life, and her house became a place of pilgrimage for poets and officials visiting the region. She was known for her generosity to younger writers and for her independence of spirit, and the poems of her maturity show a mind at peace with the choices she had made.

She died around 831, in her early sixties, and was honoured with a tomb and memorial in Chengdu. The well by which she lived, and the paper that carries her name, became enduring emblems of her life and of the literary culture of the Tang city she adorned.

Reputation and Legacy

Xue Tao was recognised during her lifetime as a poet of the first rank, and her reputation endured. She is counted among the small number of women poets of the Tang whose work was preserved and transmitted, and she appears in later anthologies and critical discussions as an exemplar of the woman of talent.

Her four-character given name and the stories told about her made her a favourite subject of later poetry and painting, and the legend of the red paper became one of the most widely known anecdotes in Chinese literature. She stands as the most famous woman poet of the Tang after the great figures of the imperial palace, and as the leading literary figure of Chengdu's golden age.

Her legacy embodies the possibilities and the constraints of a woman of genius in Tang society. Denied the ordinary path to literary eminence, she built her reputation within the world of the entertainment quarters and the provincial court, and she won the respect of the most accomplished men of her time. Her poems, delicate and restrained, remain among the most admired of the late Tang.

See also

• Tang poetry
• Chengdu
• Yuan Zhen
• Women poets of China