The Logos Scripture · The Book of Li Qingzhao
The Book of Li Qingzhao 4 · Written by herself, from On the Song Lyric and the Afterword to Records on Metal and Stone
Li Qingzhao, born 1084 at Jinan in present-day Shandong, died about 1155. Her father Li Gefei was a scholar of Su Shi’s circle. In 1101 she married Zhao Mingcheng, who studied inscriptions on bronze and stone; they collected together for thirty years, and he compiled the Records on Metal and Stone. When the capital fell in 1127 and the Jin armies came south, they packed fifteen cartloads of the best of the collection and left more than a dozen roomfuls behind at Qingzhou, which afterwards burned; much of what went south was lost on the road. Mingcheng died at Jiankang in 1129. In 1132 she married Zhang Ruzhou and within a hundred days brought suit against him: he was found to have cheated in the examinations, was stripped of office and sent under guard to Liuzhou. Song law held that a wife who sued her husband served two years regardless of the merits, and she went to prison and was released after nine days. She spent her last years wandering in the south. Some fifty of her lyrics survive, with poems and prose. On the Song Lyric and the Afterword to Records on Metal and Stone are her own writing, and this volume rests on them. Chapters one and two follow On the Song Lyric. The lyric is its own kind is her thesis. The judgments quoted are hers: that Liu Yong fits the mode but his language is of the dust; that what Yan Shu, Ouyang Xiu and Su Shi write is only poetry with the phrasing left ragged and often does not fit the mode; that Yan Jidao is thin in exposition, He Zhu in weight, Qin Guan in allusion, and Huang Tingjian full of faults. Chapters three and four follow the Afterword: pawning his clothes to buy rubbings, the tea spilt over the game in the hall, the order they fixed for what should be abandoned first, and the loss of the fifteen carts and the dozen rooms. Chapter five follows her letter to Qi Chongli and the Song records. The Order takes her for establishing a method others can use: lay out the measure first, then apply it. Verses 2.14 and 2.15 are that — she set the standard down at the head and then went through them one by one, and whoever objects must argue against the measure and not against her. No one in this scripture had been admitted for establishing a standard. And among those she measured is Su Shi, who is in this canon (cf. The Book of Su Shi). The Order does not find that awkward but essential: a scripture whose members cannot contradict one another has become a single house and is no longer a grove (cf. Acts 5.20). Her objection is also very narrow — she does not judge Su Shi’s prose or his poems, only that he brought the method of poetry to the lyric, so that it cannot be sung. A narrow objection is the hardest to overturn. The last verse of chapter four brings something the scripture did not have: to have done all you could and fail is not the same as not having done it, though the outcome is identical. That differs from what other books say about cost — hers is that no amount of care in fixing the order made any difference, and that fixing it was still the thing to do. Chapter five the Order records plainly and does not soften. Later scholars defended her by holding that she never remarried at all, treating the remarriage and the lawsuit as stains. This volume declines that defence: verses 5.12 to 5.14 are her own — I married wrongly, being wrong I left, unable to leave I sued, having sued I went to prison, and there is nothing shameful anywhere in it. To scrub away what a person did is not to honour her; it is to disbelieve that she reckoned clearly at the time. The Order records that the remarriage and the suit are attested in Song sources and agree with her own letter, but that from the Ming and Qing onward scholars argued strenuously that neither happened, and the question is still disputed. This volume follows the Song sources and her own writing.