Li Qingzhao,who is considered China’s greatest female
poet, was born in Shandong (Shantung)
Province to Li Gefei (Li Ko-fei), a famous prose
writer; her mother was also a poet. Being born into
such a family allowed Li Qingzhao to cultivate her
natural talents as a writer at a time when women
were not often permitted to be educated.
At the age of 18, Li Qingzhao married Zhao
Mingzheng (Chao Ming-cheng), a student at the
Imperial Academy who later served in the imperial
administration. During this time, Li Qingzhao
was able to write poetry, acquire a vast collection of
books, and, with her husband, collect antiques
such as bronze vases, goblets, pots, and stone inscriptions.
She also wrote a book on antiquities
with her husband called Critical-Analytical Studies
of Metal and Stone Inscriptions.
Li Qingzhao and her husband loved each other
very much, and their poems to each other, vivid
and sensuous, reflect their delight in the married
state. In “Plum Blossoms” the poetess speaks of
their love as a flower and compares the reunion
with her lover to the coming of spring, saying:
I come, my jade body fresh from the
bath . . .
Even Heaven shares our joy.
In 1126, Zhao Mingzheng was appointed the
Magistrate of Zizhuan (Tzu-chuan) in Shandong.
As first lady of the province, Li Qingzhao retained
her vigorous love for both poetry and the beauty
of nature. Relatives told stories of how she would
climb the city walls, even in the middle of a snowstorm,
to gain poetic inspiration from the view
of the mountains in the distance. Then tragedy
struck in 1127, when the city was invaded by the
Jin (Chin), a tribe of barbarians from the north,
who burned Li Qingzhao’s home, including her
10 rooms of books.When her beloved husband
fell ill and died, her poetry acquired a tone of terrible
sadness. In “Remorse,” the narrator wanders
in a dark room, looking at the rain, and says in
her grief:
Every fiber of my soft heart
Turns to a thousand strands of sorrow.
Even after she remarried, Qingzhao wrote poetry
to her first husband that expressed her loss
and her longing, as in “Boat of Stars,” where she
writes:
. . . since you’ve gone
even the wine has lost its flavor.
Several of her poems lament the passing of
time, as in “The Washing Stream,” with its tone of
wistful sadness:
The pear blossoms fade and die
and I can’t keep them from falling.
Poetry of Li Qingzhao’s time was largely set to
music, and the manuscripts of her poems contain
directions for the tune to which each poem is to
be performed. The work of her mature years lack
the patriotic fire of some earlier poems, but they
still reflect her continued sense of the beautiful and
the artistic. Often her later poems contain a haunting
sense of exile and loneliness, as in these lines
from an untitled lyric:
This year I am at the corner
Of the sea and the edge of Heaven.
I am old and lonely.
Li Qingzhao was the only Chinese woman author
to write in both the shi (shih) and ci (tz’u)
forms of poetry, and she used a wide variety of styles
and imagery. She had a great feeling for nature and
lived a life filled with love and loss. Translator Sam
Hamill calls her a “stylistic innovator” whose writing
is “remarkable for its emotional integrity, poetry
at once beautifully erotic, coyly charming, while retaining
an inner tensile strength of self-assurance.”
Altogether she wrote six volumes of poetry, and the
50 poems which remain in existence today are
enough to justify her title as the “Empress of Song.”
English Versions of Works by Li Qingzhao
Li Ch’ing-chao: Complete Poems. Translated by Kenneth
Rexroth and Ling Chung.New York:New Directions,
1979.
The Lotus Lovers: Poems and Songs. Translated by Sam
Hamill. St. Paul,Minn.: Coffee House Press, 1985.
Plum Blossom: Poems of Li Ching-chao. Translated by
James Cryer. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Carolina Wren
Press, 1984.
Works about Li Qingzhao
Ho, Lucy Chao. A Study of Li Ch’ing-chao, her life and
works. South Orange, N.J.: Seton Hall University
Press, 1965.
Pin-Ching, Hu. Li Ch’ing-chao. New York: Twayne,
1966.
Pollard, D. E., ed. Translation and Creation: Readings
of Western Literature in Early Modern China. Amsterdam:
Benjamins, 1988, 105–126.