Li Qingzhao

Li Qingzhao (1084 – ca. 1155), art name Yi'an Jushi, is regarded as one of the greatest poets in Chinese history. Born in 1084 in what is now Zhangqiu, Shandong, she came from a family of scholar-officials. Her father, Li Gefei, was an academic professor and a noted essayist who belonged to a literary circle led by Su Shi, while her mother, a renowned poet, was descended from a prime minister.

The family’s extensive library allowed Li to receive a comprehensive education from childhood. Her early poems, such as “Happy Memories: Dreamland,” reveal girlish innocence, a sharp mind, and a love of nature. As a teenager, she began her career by composing two shi poems in response to a friend’s work.

Marriage

By 1101, at age eighteen, her poetry was already well known in elite circles when she married Zhao Mingcheng. The couple shared deep interests in poetry, literature, bronze and stone sculpture, painting, and calligraphy. Though not wealthy, they collected inscriptions and calligraphy, and often wrote poems for each other. Her early married life was happy, and her poetic style became calmer and more elegant, reflecting her carefree days as a high-society woman.

However, the Jin-Song wars shattered this bliss. The Northern Song capital fell in 1127, fighting in Shandong burned their home, and the couple fled south of the Yangtze River with many of their possessions, settling in Nanjing for a year. Zhao died of typhoid fever in 1129 while traveling to an official post, and Li never recovered. She wandered aimlessly, tasked with preserving their remaining collection, and later described this turmoil in an afterword to her husband’s posthumous work.

Later life

Li eventually settled in Hangzhou, the new Song capital. Her later poetry became full of nostalgic memories of her husband and hometown, and she continued working on the Catalogue of Inscriptions on Metal and Stone, which documented calligraphy and artifacts they had collected.

According to some accounts, she briefly married a man who mistreated her, divorcing him within months. She died around age 71, though no records confirm this. Most of her poems were lost in subsequent turbulent years—an irreparable loss to Chinese literature—leaving only about a hundred surviving works, mostly in the ci form, which traces her varying fortunes.