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The cultural life of
Tang Dynasty China was a time of feverish creative energy and
diversity. Tang Dynasty poets were the pop stars of the age, and of
the female poets of that time, Yu Xuanji is considered to be the
most interesting and unconventional voice, even though, outside of
her poems, almost nothing is known about her life.
The story of her
execution was first written twelve years after her death in a
tabloid-style journal named ‘The Little Tablet from the Three
Rivers’. The forty-nine poems we have now are undoubtedly a
fraction of what she would have produced in her lifetime; many of
which are ‘occasional’ poems: written to mark an event or moment
with friends. They were collected during the Song Dynasty (when
foot-binding was becoming widespread) mainly for their ‘freak’
value, in an anthology which also listed poems by ghosts, monks,
priests, foreigners and women, ‘and others whose efforts might
provide amusement.’
The Tang Dynasty was
a time where East Asian women enjoyed a level of personal freedom
greater than any time up to the latter half of the Twentieth
century, and Yu Xuanji is unique in that in her short life she
experimented with three of the roles in which women could blur the
gender distinctions: concubine, Daoist ‘nun’ and courtesan.
This novel started
as a collection of translations of Yu Xuanji’s poems; her poems
formed the skeleton on which the rest of the book has grown, and her
poems remain grains of truth, embedded into my fiction.
Apart from Orchid,
the other characters in this book: Minister Li, Abbot Zhao Lianshi,
the Upright Magistrate and Official Liu were all real people to whom
Yu Xuanji addressed poems on topics as varied as playing polo;
welcome; and in response to their poems. There are a number of
poems which directly address Wen Tingyun: who is the first
distinctive writer of literary song lyrics, and was as famous for
his debauched lifestyle as for his poetry.
See also:
A ghost who wont let go published Independent on Sunday,
August 15th 2004.
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