At fourteen she was chosen to sustain the Emperor’s annual wish for young girls to be groomed for concubinage. I live by the Tao of Lao-Tzu, perceiving the whole world from my doorstep.īut I long for the reclusive life, to leave this court for my family’s estate in the valley my peasant mother lived as a child. Surely a sign of enlightment and progress he boasts! Yet in these creations my observations are parochial: early morning frost on the cabbage leaves in my garden the sound of geese on their late afternoon flight to Star Lake the disposition of the heavens on an Autumn night. The Emperor Wu is proud to present as welcome gifts such poetic creations executed in fine calligraphy, and from a woman of his court. Occasionally a Rhapsody is requested for an important visitor. Yet I receive commissions I cannot waver: to honour a departed official to celebrate a son’s birth to the Second Wife to fulfil in verse my Lord’s curious need to know about the intimate sorrows of his young concubines, their loneliness and heartache. I regularly feign illness and fatigue to avoid petty conflict and difficulty. I only participate at my Lord’s express command. I am physically distant from the hub of daily ceremonial. I must be thankful that my own life is maintained on the periphery. He revels in a world of chatter, gossip and intrigue he appears to fear the wilderness life. He has already achieved notoriety and influence through his writing on the social conditions of town and city. My brother, should he so wish, could present a petition to revoke his position as a man of letters, an official commentator on the affairs of state. I am woman first, a poet and calligrapher second. To gain the status of the recluse, open to my male counterparts, is forbidden to women of the court. I escape the daily commerce of the court and belong to a world that for the rest of the year I have to imagine, the world of the recluse. For a few precious days I rest and meditate, breathe the mountain air and the resinous scents of the trees. Carried in a litter up the mountain paths we are left in a commodious hut, its open walls making those simple pleasures of drinking, eating and sleeping more acute, intense. In the hot, dry summer days my maid Mei-Lim and I have sought a temporary retreat in the pine forests above Lingzhi. There, walking with my cat Xi-Lu in the afternoons, I imagine a solitary life, a life suffused with the emptiness I crave.
But I live close to the surrounding walls of the Zu-lin Gardens with its astronomical observatories and bold attempts at recreating illusions of celebrated locations in the Tai mountains. Unlike my male counterparts, some of whom have lately found seclusion in the wilderness of rivers and mountains, I have only my personal court of three rooms and its tiny garden and ornamental pond. At twenty I was summoned to this life at court and have made of it what I can, within the limitations of the courtesan I am supposed to be, and the poet I have now become. Don't ever complain about what you cant understandĪs a woman, and in the service of my Lord the Emperor Wu, my life is governed by his command.