(Women and Gender in China Studies) Lara Blanchard - Song Dynasty Figures of Longing and Desire - Gender and Interiority in Chinese Painting and Poetry-Brill (2018)

i
Song Dynasty Figures of Longing and Desire
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004369399_001 Lara C.W. Blanchard - 978-90-04-36939-9
Downloaded from Brill.com05/05/2020 10:59:28AM
via free access
ii
Women and Gender

in China Studies
Edited by
Grace S. Fong (McGill University)
Editorial Board
Louise Edwards (University of New South Wales)

Nicola Spakowski (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg)
Robin D. S. Yates (McGill University)
Harriet T. Zurndorfer (Leiden University)
VOLUME 10
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/wgcs
Lara C.W. Blanchard - 978-90-04-36939-9

via free access
iii
Song Dynasty Figures of Longing

and Desire
Gender and Interiority in Chinese Painting and Poetry
By
Lara C.W. Blanchard
LEIDEN | BOSTON

via free access
iv
Cover illustration: A Lady at Her Dressing Table. Su Hanchen (fl. ca. 1120s–60s), Southern Song dynasty,
mid-12th century; fan, ink, color, and gold on silk, 25.2 × 26.7 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Denman
Waldo Ross Collection (29.960). Photograph © 2017 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2018015655
Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface.
issn 1877-5772
isbn 978-90-04-36278-9 (hardback)
isbn 978-90-04-36939-9 (e-book)
Copyright 2018 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands.

Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi,
Brill Sense and Hotei Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without prior written permission from the publisher.
Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided
that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive,
Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change.
This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

via free access
v
For Audrey, Steve, Shirley, and Daria

via free access
vi

via free access
Contents
Contents vii
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
List of Figures xii
Abbreviations xiii
Introduction 1
1 Gendered Subjectivity and Representing Interiority 12

Subjectivity and Authorship 13
Women Poets, Erotic Personae, and Female Subjectivity 14
Women Painters and Images of Women 19
Cross-Dressing and Authenticity 28
Pictorial Representations of Inner Feelings 54
Modes of Representing Emotion in Figure Painting 58
Melding of Feeling and Scene 63
Interiority and the Inner Quarters 66
Courtly and Literati Audiences: Evidence from Commentaries 71
2 Political Interpretations of Desire 77

Handscrolls of Goddess of the Luo River 80
Compositions of the Song Dynasty Paintings 94
Reading Desire and Rejection 113
The Beijing Handscroll Night Revels of Han Xizai 116
Singing Girls in Tang and Song Texts 119
Content of the Beijing Scroll 126
Early Assessments of Han Xizai’s Character 137
Political Interpretations of Night Revels 141
Night Revels and Pictorial Cross-Dressing 151
3 Male Audience and Authorship: Projecting Desire and Longing onto the
Female Figure 157
Huizong’s Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk 161
Pounding Silk and Women’s Work 165
Zhang Xuan’s Painting and Huizong’s Copy 172
Mou Yi’s Pounding Cloth 183
Visualizing a Palace-Style Poem 185
Text and Interpretation 203

via free access
viii Contents
4 The Female Audience: Modeling Idealized Femininity 208

Women and Fan Paintings 210
Acquiring Fans Painted with Lonely Women 216
The Enclosed Garden 222
Mirrors, Makeup, Interiority, and Performing Femininity 227
Ladies Adorning Their Hair with Flowers: A Bed-Screen? 246
Conclusion: Interiority and the Value of Connection 252
Works Cited 273
Index 296

via free access
Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments ix
Acknowledgments
This book has been more than a decade in the making, and I am deeply grate-
ful to the Women and Gender in China Studies editor Grace S. Fong and
members of the series editorial board—Louise Edwards, Nicola Spakowski,
Robin D.S. Yates, and Harriet T. Zurndorfer—for their willingness to bring it to
publication. I thank Patricia Radder and other members of the Brill staff for
their hard work to that end. My colleagues in the Art and Architecture
Department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges have been extremely sup-
portive of this work, particularly the art historians: Michael Tinkler, Elena
Ciletti, Stanley Mathews, Patricia Mathews, Liliana Leopardi, and Kathryn
Vaughn. My thinking on this topic began while I was a graduate student at the
University of Michigan, where I especially benefited from the wisdom and
guidance of Martin J. Powers (who gave me a foundation in critical thinking
and Chinese art history), Shuen-fu Lin (who introduced me to Chinese litera-
ture—especially poetry—and philosophy), Jonathan Reynolds (for whose
class I did my earliest research on pictorial representations of emotion),
Celeste Brusati (who got me thinking about the nature of representation in
painting), and Patricia Simons (whose approach to gender studies and femi-
nist art history changed the entire direction of my research).
Over the years various entities offered material support for this work. These
include the Provost’s Office, the Warren Huntington Smith Library, the Asian
Studies Department, and the Art and Architecture Department at Hobart and
William Smith Colleges; the East Asia Program at Cornell University; the Freer
Gallery of Art at the Smithsonian Institution; the Ministry of Education,
Republic of China; and the Rackham Graduate School, the Department of the
History of Art, the Center for Chinese Studies, the Women’s Studies Program,
and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, all at the University of
Michigan. Without their assistance, this study would not have been possible.
Some of the material in this book has appeared already in print, and I am
grateful to have permission to use it again here. My discussion of Emperor
Huizong, desire, and patronage appeared in slightly different form in “Huizong’s
New Clothes: Desire and Allegory in Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk,”
Ars Orientalis 36 (2006): 111–35. I included a more abbreviated analysis of a
painting by Mou Yi than that presented here (and no discussion of gender) in
an article on the artist’s comments about the purpose of painting; see “Mou Yi’s
Pounding Cloth: Painting, Play, Reference, and Discourse in Song China,”
Artibus Asiae 73, no. 2 (2013): 295–341. I briefly presented some of my ideas

via free access
x Acknowledgments
about scholars, courtesans, and reclusion in “A Scholar in the Company of

Female Entertainers: Changing Notions of Integrity in Song to Ming Dynasty
Painting,” NAN NÜ: Men, Women and Gender in China 9, no. 2 (2007): 189–246.
Finally, some of my preliminary ideas about paintings-within-paintings and
gender appeared in “Lonely Women and the Absent Man: The Masculine
Landscape as Metaphor in the Song Dynasty Painting of Women,” in Gendered
Landscapes: An Interdisciplinary Exploration of Past Place and Space, ed. Bonj
Szczygiel, Josephine Carubia, and Lorraine Dowler (University Park, Pa.: The
Center for Studies in Landscape History, The Pennsylvania State University,
2000): 33–47.
Numerous individuals beyond those named above have provided commen-
tary, advice, or support on various aspects of this project, at different stages of
development, and I am grateful for their input. They include Jasmine Alinder,
Laura Bassett, Betty Bayer, Tamara Bentley, Kimberly Besio, Lisa Bessette, Peter
Bol, Beverly Bossler, Katharine Burnett, Katherine Carlitz, Wen-chien Cheng,
Elizabeth Clement, Claudette Columbus, Anna Creadick, Bahar Davary, Jodi
Dean, Kevin Dunn, Maureen Flynn, Roslyn Lee Hammers, Susan Henking,
Carmenita Higginbotham, Wendy Holden, Martin Huang, Kyle Johnson, Ellen
Johnston Laing, Lisa Langlois, Irene Leung, Allison MacDuffee, Heather Lee
Miller, Susan Pliner, Marcelle Pour, Jennifer Purtle, Lee Quinby, Benjamin
Ridgway, Sandra Seekins, Tatiana Senkevitch, Maureen Shanahan, Mary-Louise
Totton, Christina Waugh, Margaret Weitekamp, Leela Wood, Marshall P.S. Wu,
Yao-Fen You, Patrick Young, and many others. Anna Wager (William Smith
College ’09), Julia O’Halloran (William Smith College ’10), and Christopher
J. Slaby (Hobart College ’09) provided research assistance at a critical stage.
I could not have completed my research without the assistance of multiple
librarians, particularly Deirdre Spencer at the Fine Arts Library, University of
Michigan; Lily Kecskes at the Freer and Sackler Library, Smithsonian Institution;
Michelle Hubbell at Cornell University Library; and Dan Mulvey and Joseph
Chmura at the Warren Huntington Smith Library, Hobart and William Smith
Colleges. I wish to thank Sewall Oertling, Ellen Johnston Laing, Samantha Fogg,
and Kathryn Cowles, who provided me with useful sources on Chinese art,
literature, and philosophy. As the project enters its final stages, I am deeply
appreciative of the assistance of Roslyn Lee Hammers, Kristen L. Chiem, and
Adam Joel Ensign, who provided crucial contacts with Chinese museums, and
Charles King, who did a superlative job of copy-editing the entire manuscript.
Last but not least, the manuscript has benefited from the suggestions of mul-
tiple anonymous reviewers; any errors that remain are my own.
In addition, I need to express my gratitude to my friends and family. Since
arriving in Geneva, New York, I have been sustained by friendships with

via free access
Acknowledgments xi
Anna Creadick and Kevin Dunn, May Farnsworth and Jim Norwalk, Ingrid
Keenan and Rob Carson, Meghan and Dave Brown, and Nan Crystal Arens
and David Kendrick. Since I began my education, my parents and members
of my extended family (too many to mention by name, but including a great-
grandfather, grandparents, great-aunts and great-uncles, aunts and uncles,
first cousins, second cousins, and everyone in between) have cheered me on.
But most particularly: my sister, Audrey, has been my dearest friend since we
were young and also a patient and interested listener with a good ear for titles.
(And she and her family always provide me with food and lodging whenever
I need to visit the Freer Gallery.) My husband, Steve, has moved with me to
Ann Arbor, Taipei, and Geneva, has sat with me through many setbacks, has
taught me more about writing than he realizes, and has been good company
on research trips to Boston, Washington, New York, and Toronto. My mother-
in-law, Shirley, welcomed me wholeheartedly into a new family and provided a
haven more times than I can count. My daughter, Daria, who has never known
a time when I have not been working on this book, has been a constant source
of joy. I dedicate this book to these four.

via free access
xii List of Figures List Of Figures
List of Figures
1.1–1.3 Section 1 of In the Palace, after Zhou Wenju, before 1140 36, 38, 39
2.1–2.4 Section 2 of In the Palace, after Zhou Wenju, before 1140 42–45
3.1–3.4 Section 3 of In the Palace (Palace Ladies at Leisure), after Zhou Wenju,
before 1140 46–49
4.1–4.2 Section 4 of In the Palace, after Zhou Wenju, before 1140 50, 52
5 Detail of Lady Wenji’s Return to China: Parting from Nomad Husband and
Children, ca. 1125–50 62
6.1–6.12 Goddess of the Luo River (Liaoning Provincial Museum) 82–93
7.1–7.10 Goddess of the Luo River (Palace Museum, Beijing) 96–105
8.1–8.5 Goddess of the Luo River, 12th–13th century (Freer Gallery of Art) 108–
112
9.1–9.5 Night Revels of Han Xizai, after Gu Hongzhong, ca. 1127–1200 127, 131, 133,
134, 136
10.1–10.5 Palace Banquet, late 10th–early 11th century 149–153
11.1–11.2 Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk, attributed to Emperor Huizong,
early 12th century 162, 163
12.1–12.8 Mou Yi, Pounding Cloth, 1240 186–193
13 Su Hanchen, A Lady at Her Dressing Table, mid-12th century 212
14 Embroidered Cage, Morning Mirror, attributed to Wang Shen 213
15 A Lady Watching a Maid with a Parrot, early 13th century 215
16 Self-adornment scene from Admonitions of the Court Instructress to the
Palace Ladies, after Gu Kaizhi, possibly 5th–7th century 235
17 Ladies Adorning Their Hair with Flowers, after Zhou Fang, late 9th–10th
century 248
18 Palace Ladies Tuning the Lute, after Zhou Fang 256
19 Liu Yuan, Sima Caizhong’s Dream of the Courtesan Su Xiaoxiao, early 13th
century 258
20 Ma Lin, Layers of Icy Silk, 1216 260
21.1–21.4 Zhao Lingrang, Whiling Away the Summer by a Lakeside Retreat,
1100 263–266

via free access
Abbreviations
Abbreviations xiii
Abbreviations
DHGC Dunhuang geci zongbian 敦煌歌詞總編, edited by Ren Bantang 任半塘

HJJ Xinyi “Huajian ji” 新譯花閒集, compiled by Zhao Chongzuo 趙崇祚
QSC Quan Song ci 全宋詞, edited by Tang Guizhang 唐圭章
QTS Quan Tang shi 全唐詩, edited by Peng Dingqiu 彭定求 (1645–1719) et al.
YFSJ Yuefu shiji 樂府詩集, edited by Guo Maoqian 郭茂倩
YTXY Jianzhu “Yutai xinyong” 箋注玉臺新詠, compiled by Xu Ling 徐陵

via free access
xiv Abbreviations

via free access
Introduction
Introduction 1
Introduction
Who says that heartbreak cannot be painted?

The painter’s heart corresponds to the feelings of real people.
誰謂傷心畫不成。畫人心逐世人情。
Wei Zhuang 韋莊 (836–910), “Picture of Jinling” (Jinling tu 金陵圖)
Emotional attachment between men and women is a prominent theme in

Chinese culture, significant in both literature and painting. Since the early im-
perial period, Chinese theorists have sought to understand the nature of inner
feelings, particularly how they manifest outwardly as emotion. One way that
premodern poets and painters explored these manifestations was in imagining
select women as preoccupied with romance. I use the term “romance” here to
refer to situations, well-established in poetry and fiction, of love affairs and
sexual relations between men and women (this more colloquial than literary
sense of “romance” is how the term is used throughout this book). The Song
dynasty (960–1279; known as the Northern Song before 1127 and the Southern
Song afterward) marks an important moment in the representation of this
idea, a period when images of women experiencing longing or desire became
increasingly nuanced, both in song lyrics (ci 詞) written by scholars and cour-
tesans and in paintings made by court artists and members of the literati. The
paintings in particular provide a rich body of material for investigating Chinese
conceptions of feeling and emotion, and also Chinese conceptions of the con-
struction of gender, the nature of representation, and text-image relationships.
Paintings that allude to romance or eroticism occupy a problematic place in
Chinese art historical accounts. Some of these paintings depict interactions
between men and women and might simply be classified as figure painting
(renwu hua 人物畫),1 but the majority focus on isolated female figures and thus
1 A ninth-century text on painting indicates that there were four major genres of painting: in
rank order, figure painting, paintings of birds and animals, landscapes, and architectural
subjects; Zhu Jingxuan 朱景玄 (fl. ca. 806–40), Tangchao minghua lu 唐朝名畫錄 [Record of
Famous Painters of the Tang Dynasty], ed. Wen Zhaotong 溫肇桐 (reprint, Chengdu: Sichuan
meishu chubanshe, 1985), 1; cf. Alexander C. Soper, trans., “T’ang Ch’ao Ming Hua Lu: Celebrated
Painters of the T’ang Dynasty by Chu Ching-hsüan of T’ang,” Artibus Asiae 21, no. 3/4 (1958):
206. In an early twelfth-century imperial painting catalogue, figure painting was one genre of
ten, ranked second only to Daoist and Buddhist subjects; “Xu mu 敘目 [Introduction to
Contents],” in Xuanhe huapu 宣和畫譜 [Xuanhe Painting Catalogue], ed. Yang Jialuo 楊家駱
(1120; reprint, Taipei: Shijie shuju, 1967), 5–8; cf. translation in Susan Bush and Hsio-yen Shih,
via free access
2 Introduction
form a subset of the genre called shinü hua (written 士女畫 or 仕女畫). While
figure painting was once considered one of the highest forms of art, the critical
discourse reveals a declining regard for paintings of women as the Tang and
Song dynasties progressed, especially for those that overtly reference longing
and desire.2 The term shinü appears to refer to a woman from an aristocratic,
official, or scholarly family, generally someone of relatively high standing in
Chinese society; the meaning of the word appears to change over time along
with the definition of the word shi 士, which referred to someone prepared to
“serve” (shi 仕) in government office—an aristocrat in the Tang dynasty (618–
907), a bureaucrat in the Northern Song, or a “local elite” in the Southern Song.3
I translate shinü as “lady” in an attempt to capture as many shadings of the
Chinese term as possible, but the paintings include representations of not only
the above-mentioned women but also courtesans, who were highly educated
but considered less respectable in the middle imperial period.4 Zhu Jingxuan
朱景玄 (fl. ca. 806–40), the author of Record of Famous Painters of the Tang
Dynasty (Tangchao minghua lu 唐朝名畫錄), seems to be the first connoisseur
to use the term shinü hua 士女畫 to denote a group of paintings, and his text
indicates that the Tang court artists who specialized in it were considered
among the best painters of their time: he classifies Zhou Fang 周昉 (ca. 730–ca.
800) in the “inspired class, middle grade” (shenpin zhong 神品中).5 In the Song
dynasty, however, the notion of what constituted meaningful art dramatically
shifted with the rise of the literati,6 and critics such as Mi Fu米芾 (1051–1107)
began to dismiss examples of shinü hua as insignificant.7
comp. and ed., Early Chinese Texts on Painting (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard-Yenching Institute,
Harvard University Press, 1985), 103–105.
2 James Cahill alludes to critical distaste for Chinese paintings that represent either the feelings
of figures or relationships that do not emphasize moral behavior in Pictures for Use and
Pleasure: Vernacular Painting in High Qing China (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2010), 4.
3 Peter K. Bol discusses the identity of the shi 士 in “This Culture of Ours”: Intellectual Transitions
in T’ang and Sung China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 4, 32–75. See also Ciyuan
辭源 [The Source of Words] (Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1988), s.v. shi 士, shinü 士女, shi
仕, shinü 仕女; and Paul W. Kroll, A Student’s Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese
(Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015), s.v. shi 士, shi 仕.
4 Beverly Bossler, Courtesans, Concubines, and the Cult of Female Fidelity (Cambridge, Mass., and
London: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013), 20–21.
5 Zhu, Tangchao minghua lu, 5–7; cf. Soper, “T’ang Ch’ao Ming Hua Lu,” 210–12.
6 On scholarly culture in the Tang–Song transition, see Bol, “This Culture of Ours,” 108–211.
7 Mi Fu, Huashi 畫史 [Painting History], in Meishu congshu 美術叢書 [Fine Arts Series], ed.
Huang Binhong and Deng Shi 黃賓虹、鄧實 ([Taipei]: Yiwen yinshuguan, [1947]), 10:52.

via free access
Introduction 3
Reasons for the particular marginalization of the small set of paintings that
depict eroticized women are twofold. First, by the eleventh century, they stood
in opposition to pictorial images of virtuous figures.8 This represents a devel-
opment of the middle imperial period: before the Tang dynasty, “exemplary
women” (lienü 列女) were not particularly differentiated from “beautiful
women” (meiren 美人); indeed, the category of “worthy beauties” (xianyuan
賢媛) seems to blend the two.9 Images of virtuous women served as didactic
models of behavior, with surviving examples that date back to the Han dynasty
(206 bce–221 ce). Such images continued to be relevant in the Song dynasty:
the Southern Song court propagated pictorial guides to female behavior, in the
form of illustrated versions of the Classic of Filial Piety for Girls, for example.10
Paintings of women obsessed with their love relationships, depicting elabo-
rately dressed female figures engaging in leisure activities, did not fit into this
mold; indeed, literary scholars were already criticizing poems on similar
themes as “decadent” (tuifei 頹廢) in the Tang dynasty.11
Second, the literati valued works that clearly reflected their own discourse
on painting as a mode of expression equal to poetry, with many of the same
rhetorical aims. The position of a given work of art within the canon has to a
great extent depended upon critical perceptions of its rhetorical functions.12
Some Chinese critics viewed images of women as frivolous, merely depicting
women’s daily lives and created solely for men’s enjoyment.13 This study exam-
ines in depth what these intertextual works reveal about the nature of repre-
sentation through their visualization of interior states and their correspondence
to prominent genres of poetry, not only song lyric but also palace-style poetry
8 Guo Ruoxu 郭若虛, Tuhua jianwen zhi 圖畫見聞誌 [Experiences in Painting], in Alexan-
der C. Soper, trans., Kuo Jo-hsü’s Experiences in Painting (Tu-hua chien-wên chih): An Elev-
enth Century History of Chinese Painting Together with the Chinese Text in Facsimile
(Washington, D.C.: American Council of Learned Societies, 1951), 1.15a–b; cf. Soper’s trans-
lation in ibid., 18.
9 Audrey Spiro, “Creating Ancestors,” in Gu Kaizhi and the Admonitions Scroll, ed. Shane
McCausland (London: The British Museum Press, 2003), 57.
10 Julia K. Murray, “Didactic Art for Women: The Ladies’ Classic of Filial Piety,” in Flowering in
the Shadows: Women in the History of Chinese and Japanese Painting, ed. Marsha Weidner
(Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1990), 33, 42–46.
11 Fusheng Wu, The Poetics of Decadence: Chinese Poetry of the Southern Dynasties and Late
Tang Periods (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 33, 38–39, 73, 189–90.
12 Audrey Spiro discusses the functions mentioned in early texts on painting in “Creating
Ancestors,” 54.
13 Guo, Tuhua jianwen zhi, 1.15a–b; cf. Alexander Soper’s translation in Experiences in Paint-
ing, 18. See also Murray, “Didactic Art for Women,” 28.

via free access
4 Introduction
(gongti shi 宮體詩) of the Southern Dynasties (420–589) as well as Music

Bureau poetry (yuefu shi 樂府詩) of the Tang dynasty in particular. As the com-
plexity of the paintings begins to be acknowledged, they are deservedly attain-
ing a more prominent place in the history of Chinese art.14
Somewhere between the eighth and eleventh centuries, the themes ad-
dressed in Chinese paintings of women change, as reflected in Experiences in
Painting (Tuhua jianwen zhi 圖畫見聞誌). Author Guo Ruoxu 郭若虛 (fl. 1071–
80) asserts that Northern Song paintings of women compare unfavorably to
those of earlier periods:
In the past, I have looked at masterpieces of ancient painting from the

genres of “golden boys and jade girls” and deities and constellations. The
female figures within them have extremely stern faces and spirits of pure
antiquity. They naturally possess a stately and regal beauty, causing view-
ers to feel respect and continual admiration. Contemporary painters,
however, value pretty faces, so selected to gratify popular taste. Their
vision does not encompass the proper ways of making painting compel-
ling. This is a matter for viewers’ consideration.
歷觀古名士畫金童玉女及神仙星官，中有婦人形相者，貌雖端嚴神必
清古，自有威重儼然之色，使人見則肅恭有歸仰心。今之畫者，但貴
其姱麗之容，是取悅於眾。目不達畫之理趣也。觀者察之。
He adds:
If one asks how contemporary artists compare to those of ancient times,

I respond that contemporary artists working in ancient styles are defi-
cient in many ways, though they have some surpassing aspects. But if one
speaks of Buddhist and Daoist subjects, figures, ladies, or oxen and horses,
then contemporary artists are not as accomplished as the ancient.
14 Ellen Johnston Laing, “Chinese Palace-Style Poetry and the Depiction of A Palace Beauty,”
The Art Bulletin 72, no. 1 (March 1990): 284–95; John Hay, “The Body Invisible in Chinese
Art?” in Body, Subject and Power in China, ed. Angela Zito and Tani E. Barlow (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 45–63; and Jan Stuart, “Revealing the Romance
in Chinese Art,” in Love in Asian Art & Culture, ed. Karen Sagstetter (Washington, D.C.:
Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 1998), 11–29.

via free access
Introduction 5
或問近代至藝與古人何如。荅曰，近代方古多不及，而過亦有之。若
論佛道，人物，士女，牛馬，則近不及古。15
Guo means to demonstrate his superior appreciation of paintings in compar-

ing the admirable female figures of earlier periods with the pretty faces of his
own. When he speaks of “pure antiquity,” perhaps he thinks of paintings such
as Admonitions of the Court Instructress to the Palace Ladies (Nüshi zhen tu 女使
箴圖; a detail is represented in fig. 16) and Exemplary Women (Lienü tujuan 列
女圖卷), which both presented virtuous women; one version of the former, at
least, was attributed to Gu Kaizhi 顧愷之 (ca. 345–406) by the early twelfth
century.16 Not all female figures in early Chinese pictorial art were intended as
colorless models of correct feminine conduct—indeed, scholars debate
whether the surviving version of the Admonitions scroll, in the British Museum,
functions as a didactic painting or is intended as satire17—but such represen-
tations were prominent.
Northern Song connoisseurs consistently emphasize the pleasing appear-
ance of shinü, which may explain why this term is defined as an alternative for
meiren.18 In a section where Guo considers “suitability of characterization” (qi
ru zhong 其如種) in painting, he proclaims: “It is fitting for ladies to be abun-
15 Guo, “Lun furen xingxiang 論婦人形相 [On Women’s Appearances]” and “Lun gujin you-
lie 論古今優劣 [On the Superiority and Inferiority of Ancient and Contemporary],”
Tuhua jianwen zhi, 1.15a–b, 19b; cf. Alexander Soper’s translations in Experiences in Paint-
ing, 18, 21.
16 Admonitions of the Court Instructress to the Palace Ladies, in the British Museum, is thor-
oughly discussed and fully reproduced in Shane McCausland, First Masterpiece of Chinese
Painting: The Admonitions Scroll (New York: George Braziller, 2003), as well as idem., Gu
Kaizhi and the Admonitions Scroll. Mi Fu is the first to attribute a painting of this title to
Gu Kaizhi, in Huashi, 4; Alfreda Murck, “The Convergence of Gu Kaizhi and Admonitions
in the Literary Record,” in McCausland, Gu Kaizhi and the Admonitions Scroll, 143–44; cf.
Nicole Vandier-Nicolas, trans., Le Houa-che de Mi Fou (1051–1107), ou Le Carnet d’un con-
naisseur à l’époque des Song du Nord (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1964), 1.
Audrey Spiro notes that an Admonitions scroll is also mentioned in the early twelfth-cen-
tury Xuanhe Painting Catalogue in “Creating Ancestors,” 53; cf. Xuanhe huapu, 1.45. Exem-
plary Women, also attributed to Gu Kaizhi but probably a Song painting, belongs to the
Palace Museum, Beijing; reproduced in Gugong Bowuyuan, Gugong Bowuyuan canghua ji
故宮博物院藏畫集 [The Painting Collection of the Palace Museum], 8 vols. (Beijing: Ren-
min meishu chubanshe, 1978–91), 1:20–32.
17 Julia Murray suggests that the Admonitions scroll is intended to be properly admonitory
in “Who Was Zhang Hua’s ‘Instructress’?” in McCausland, Gu Kaizhi and the Admonitions
Scroll, 104. Audrey Spiro argues for it as parody in “Creating Ancestors,” 59.
18 Ciyuan, s.v. shinü 仕女, shinü 士女.

via free access
6 Introduction
dantly elegant, beautiful, and delicate in form.” (士女宜富秀色婑媠之態。)19

This statement, coupled with his charge that contemporary painters appealed
to popular taste, insinuates that this art was produced solely for the titillation
of male viewers. The scholar-official Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037–1101), citing the
Confucian Analects (Lunyu 論語),20 similarly evaluates Zhou Fang’s paintings:
Formerly, Zhou Fang’s figure paintings all entered the inspired class, yet
ordinary people only knew of his ladies. Isn’t this referred to as “not yet
seeing someone who loves virtue as much as sex?”
昔周昉畫人物，皆入神品，而世俗但知有周昉士女，皆所謂未見好德
如好色者歟？21
Still, suggesting that paintings of shinü only appealed to male voyeurs ignores
their use by court and literati painters and viewers as vehicles for expression
and commentary, the contributions of female artists and poets to the creation
of female figures of desire, and the responses of a female audience.
In the early Yuan dynasty (1260/79–1368), perhaps as early as the 1280s or
1290s, another critic, Tang Hou 湯垕 (d. before 1317),22 offers a different assess-
ment of shinü hua. He suggests that painters from the Tang to Song dynasties
who excelled at representing women portrayed them with sensitivity to their
interior lives:
19 Guo, “Lun zhizuo jiemo 論製作楷模 [On Models for Creating],” Tuhua jianwen zhi, 1.7b;
cf. Alexander Soper’s translation in Experiences in Painting, 11.
20 Sometimes ascribed to the disciples of Confucius, this text, one of the Confucian classics,
appears to have existed by the Han dynasty (206 bce–220 ce); for a summary of the schol-
arship on its authorship and date, see Michael Loewe, ed., Early Chinese Texts: A Biblio-
graphical Guide (Berkeley: The Society for the Study of Early China and the Institute of
East Asian Studies, University of California, 1993), 314–15.
21 Su Shi, “Ti Zhang Ziye shiji hou 題張子野詩集後 [Afterword to Zhang Ziye’s Poetry Col-
lection],” Su Shi wenji 蘇軾文集 [Collected Writings of Su Shi], ed. Kong Fanli 孔凡禮
(Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1986), 5:2146; “Zi han 子罕 [What the Master Seldom Speaks
Of],” Lunyu zhushu 論語注疏 [Annotated “Analects”], ed. Ruan Yuan 阮元 (1815), 80,
<http://hanchi.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/ihp/hanji.htm> (accessed 30 May 2016). See Ronald
Egan’s discussion in The Problem of Beauty: Aesthetic Thought and Pursuits in Northern
Song Dynasty China (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Asia Center,
2006), 245–46; he translates se 色, which I have translated as “sex” but literally means
“color,” as “sensual beauty.”
22 Regarding Tang Hou’s biography and the date of his text Huajian, see Diana Yeongchau
Chou, A Study and Translation from the Chinese of Tang Hou’s “Huajian (Examination of
Painting)” (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2005), 21–32.

via free access
Introduction 7
The art of representing ladies lies in catching their attitudes in the inner
apartments. Various artists have achieved this subtlety, including Zhou
Fang and Zhang Xuan [fl. 713–42] of the Tang dynasty, Du Xiao [n.d.] and
Zhou Wenju [fl. 961–75] of the Five Dynasties [907–60], and, more
recently, Su Hanchen [fl. ca. 1120s–60s] and his generation. They all
understood that the art was not in the application of makeup or in the
gold filigree and jade pendants, or, in other words, taking ornament as the
basis for representation. I once came into possession of a scroll titled
Palace Ladies, a work by Wenju. He suspended a jade flute from the belt
at a woman’s waist, directed her gaze toward her fingertips, and conveyed
her feelings through her still position. The viewer knows that she is long-
ing for someone.
仕女之工，在于得其閨閣之態。唐周昉、張萱、五代杜霄、周文矩、
下及蘇漢臣輩，皆得其妙，不在施朱傅粉，鏤金佩玉，以飾為工。余
嘗收宮女圖，文矩筆也。置玉笛于腰間帶中，目視指爪，情意凝佇，
知其有所思也。23
This passage suggests that the most appealing paintings of women from these
periods provide insight into their emotional states24—a more satisfactory ex-
planation of the shift in content. The character si 思 in the last line of the pas-
sage could be more conservatively translated as “thinking,” but it has strong
connotations of longing in love poetry,25 and the rhetorical connection be-
tween poetry and painting suggests that it should be translated similarly in a
discussion of paintings of women. Such pictures derive their abiding appeal
from their attempts to render the figures’ feelings.
This revolution in the representation of women, which can be dated to the
Tang–Song transition, coincides with a similar development in literature.26
23 Given discrepancies among the published editions of Tang Hou’s text, I rely on the Chi-
nese transcription that appears in Chou, Tang Hou’s “Huajian,” 163–64.
24 James Cahill, writing about meiren hua of a later period, reaches the same conclusion in
“Paintings Done for Women in Ming–Qing China?” NAN NÜ: Men, Women and Gender in
China 8, no. 1 (2006): 33.
25 Connotations of the character si are discussed in Hans H. Frankel, The Flowering Plum and
the Palace Lady: Interpretations of Chinese Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976),
58; the poetic theme of “longing for someone” (the same phrase used in this passage, you
suo si 有所思) is discussed in Stephen Owen, The Great Age of Chinese Poetry: The High
T’ang (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), 127.
26 Scholar Zhang Xuecheng 章學誠 (1738–1801) assesses this phenomenon as the result of
the “aestheticizing and sexualizing of women’s writing” and the “commodification of

via free access
8 Introduction
Early poetry about women’s feelings of love or longing tends to rely on the “la-
ment” tradition, with poems written in the voice of an abandoned woman ex-
pressing her sorrow.27 The first anthology to focus on themes of women’s
interiority is the sixth-century collection of palace-style poetry, New Songs
from a Jade Terrace (Yutai xinyong 玉臺新詠). Xu Ling 徐陵 compiled the po-
ems at the Liang court of the Southern Dynasties, in the salon of Xiao Gang
蕭剛 (503–51), who reigned as the Jianwen 簡文 emperor from 549 to 551. While
many poems in the anthology date to this time, the earliest were several centu-
ries old when Xu selected them. The poets were predominantly male—emper-
ors, princes, literati—but included educated women.28 Their vision of the
abandoned woman persona included codified attributes: the appearance of
noble birth; luxurious surroundings; beauty enhanced with elegant clothing
and cosmetics; and, above all, an air of melancholy and vulnerability resulting
from ceaseless pining for an absent lover.29 The process of creating this per-
sona follows a pattern consistent with Judith Butler’s theory of gender perfor-
mativity: poets working in the courtly mode used a prescribed formula to
create a literary discourse on a woman’s emotional landscape, presenting the
lovelorn female persona as an object of desire.30
Writers continued to cite this lamenting female persona. In the mid-Tang
dynasty, the literary community’s new regard for love stories reflects the rise
of a “culture of romance,” redefining the private sphere as one of intimate
experiences and feelings. That era witnessed a new context for such stories
and for numerous poems on themes of love and longing: the demimonde, a
realm in which men mixed freely with female entertainers and daughters of
women’s talent as entertainment”; Susan Mann, “Presidential Address: Myths of Asian

Womanhood,” Journal of Asian Studies 59, no. 4 (November 2000): 846.
27 Paul F. Rouzer, Articulated Ladies: Gender and the Male Community in Early Chinese Texts
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 129–30, 139, 145–46.
28 Xu Ling 徐陵, comp., Jianzhu “Yutai xinyong” 箋注玉臺新詠 [The Annotated “New Songs
from a Jade Terrace,” hereafter abbreviated as YTXY] (Taipei: Guangwen shuju, 1967); cf.
Anne M. Birrell, trans., New Songs from a Jade Terrace: An Anthology of Early Chinese Love
Poetry, Translated with Annotations and an Introduction (London, Boston and Sydney:
George Allen & Unwin, 1982).
29 Anne M. Birrell, “The Dusty Mirror: Courtly Portraits of Woman in Southern Dynasties
Love Poetry,” in Expressions of Self in Chinese Literature, ed. Robert E. Hegel and Richard
C. Hessney (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 35.
30 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York and London:
Routledge, 1993), 2, 94–95.

via free access
Introduction 9
merchants.31 Subsequently, the Song literati expanded upon the persona of

the lovelorn courtesan, chiefly in song lyrics, although by this period even the
intimate marital relationships of scholars had become a topic of greater in-
terest. Indeed, song lyrics showcase the emotions of the speaker, no matter
what topic the poet addresses; the association of ci with the expression of ro-
mantic feelings reaches a peak in the late eleventh and early twelfth century.32
Perhaps because of the new interest in sentiment, the lovelorn woman became
a more nuanced persona.33
The reevaluation of the significance of private feelings ultimately permitted
pictorial representations of the emotional attachments of women.34 Despite
their concern with intimate relationships, most Song paintings that present
romantic themes focus on women in isolation, with no male figures pictured.
The reasons for this become apparent when investigating constructions of
femininity in regard to heteroerotic relationships.
A number of important Song paintings, including but not limited to examples
of shinü hua, portray women’s romantic interactions with men largely through
poetic context. In order to depict women’s feelings about their relationships
with men, Song court artists and members of the literati availed themselves
of the preexisting construction of the romantic female persona in poetry. At
first, some of their paintings simply appear to represent aristocratic women
and courtesans enjoying the limited activities deemed appropriate for them,
yet the unifying theme of these works is a woman’s emotional reaction to the
presence or absence of her lover. Song painters generally depicted eroticized
female figures engaged in four types of feminine pastimes: spending reflective
moments in gardens or the women’s quarters, playing musical instruments,
dressing and adorning themselves, and working with cloth. Significantly, each
of these pictorial themes takes advantage of tropes developed in love poetry
31 Stephen Owen, The End of the Chinese ‘Middle Ages’: Essays in Mid-Tang Literary Culture
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 6, 87, 130 n. 2. Paul Rouzer sees the new inter-
est in romance as reflecting the greater complexity of the societal roles of literati; Rouzer,
Articulated Ladies, 201–202, 226–27. For more on representations of love in Tang dynasty
stories, see Daniel Hsieh, Love and Women in Early Chinese Fiction (Hong Kong: Chinese
University Press, 2008).
32 Shuen-fu Lin, “The Formation of a Distinct Generic Identity for Tz’u,” in Voices of the Song
Lyric in China, ed. Pauline Yu (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1994), 3–29.
33 Egan notes that the lovelorn woman remained a conventional figure in early song lyrics in
The Problem of Beauty, 239, 283, 303.
34 Martin J. Powers, “Love and Marriage in Song China: Tao Yuanming Comes Home,” Ars
Orientalis 28 (1998): 54, 57.

via free access
10 Introduction
that convey the figures’ feelings or moods. Extant Song paintings include works
that encompass these four themes.
But what kinds of functions could paintings of women in love serve? Why
were themes of interiority so resonant? Which groups constituted their in-
tended audience? (Or, as Judith Butler asks in Gender Trouble, “From what stra-
tegic position in public discourse and for what reasons has the trope of
interiority and the disjunctive binary of inner/outer taken hold?”35) These are
the questions that this book addresses. I have chosen to focus primarily on
works of art that not only are representative of the various ways that paintings
can express interiority, but also can be linked to specific individuals who were
artists, patrons, collectors, or viewers, as this permits greater understanding of
their historical context.
Chapter 1 begins with questions of perspective, both of author and audi-
ence, and how perspective relates to subjectivity and interiority. I first examine
song lyrics of female authorship and critical accounts of paintings by court la-
dies, women of scholarly families, and courtesans, considering them against a
painting that is likely of male authorship: In the Palace (Gongzhong tu 宮中圖,
figs. 1.1–4.2), a Song copy of a painting by court artist Zhou Wenju of the
Southern Tang kingdom (937–75). I then turn to textual sources that discuss
strategies for representing feelings in painting and poetry, and finally consider
male viewers’ responses to paintings of women.
Chapter 2 analyzes allegorical and political interpretations of sexual desire
in painting, focusing on Song representations of Goddess of the Luo River
(Luoshen fu tujuan 洛神賦圖卷, figs. 6.1–8.5) and Night Revels of Han Xizai (Han
Xizai yeyan tu 韓煕載夜宴圖, figs. 9.1–9.5). Goddess of the Luo River depicts the
unrequited love between a deity and a prince; Night Revels of Han Xizai repre-
sents the interaction of scholars and courtesans in ways that hint at the possi-
bility of attachment on the part of the courtesans. In both cases, critical
interpretations of love poetry as political commentary invite similar interpre-
tations of these paintings, though it is necessary to consider whether allegori-
cal readings exclude other potential meanings.
Chapter 3 examines two paintings of male authorship—which circulated at
court and among the literati—as potential sites of projected feeling: oblique
expressions of emotion through the figures of women. The works I consider
are Emperor Huizong’s 徽宗 (1082–1135, r. 1101–25) Court Ladies Preparing
Newly Woven Silk (Dao lian tu 擣練圖, figs. 11.1–11.2) and Mou Yi’s 牟益 (ca. 1178–
ca. 1242) Pounding Cloth (Dao yi tu 擣衣圖, figs. 12.1–12.8), which coincidentally
35 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Rout-
ledge, 1990), 134.

via free access
Introduction 11
have similar themes. This chapter questions whether the notion of the “deter-
mining male gaze” and the potential identification of the viewer with the (un-
pictured) object of the female figures’ longing or desire (a framework originally
posited in Laura Mulvey’s feminist analysis of narrative cinema)36 illuminate
the functions of these paintings.
Chapter 4 considers paintings that might have targeted a female audience
and that employ the desirable female figure as a model for idealized attitudes
and behavior. I focus on three fans that could have been kept by women—
A Lady at Her Dressing Table (Zhuang jing shinü tu 妝靚仕女圖, fig. 13), attrib-
uted to Su Hanchen; Embroidered Cage, Morning Mirror (Xiulong xiaojing tu
繡攏曉鏡圖, fig. 14); and A Lady Watching a Maid with a Parrot (Xuan gui tiao
ying 璇閨調鸚, fig. 15)—and use these to consider a fourth painting once
mounted as a three-panel screen: Ladies Adorning Their Hair with Flowers (Zan
hua shinü tu 簪花仕女圖, fig. 17), attributed to Zhou Fang. While the content of
all these paintings could be interpreted using the rubrics outlined in Chapters
2 and 3, their formats suggest a different rhetorical function.
The paintings featured in this book have often been misunderstood as
straightforward representations of women’s lives. Yet they demonstrate the
multiple ways that Song painters visualized feelings such as desire or longing,
experienced by both women and men, and used these to convey ideas that
were not solely confined to the vicissitudes of romantic relationships.
36 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 11, 13.

via free access
12 Chapter 1
Chapter 1
Gendered Subjectivity and Representing Interiority
Examining the authorship of and audience for Song paintings that focus on
women’s emotional attachments reveals that gender is an important category
of analysis for these works. Though these paintings are concerned with wom-
en’s interiority and thus might be interpreted as representing or constructing
female subjectivity, virtually all of the surviving examples are attributed to
male artists of the court or of the literati: none by a woman is known to sur-
vive. The pattern of male authorship of images of lonely or desiring women
that these paintings suggest is not attested throughout Chinese culture, how-
ever. Before painters took up the theme, writers of palace-style poetry, Music
Bureau poetry, and song lyric created an indelible image of the lovelorn woman,
and though most poets working in these genres were men, courtesans origi-
nated song lyric, performing and sometimes writing the earliest examples.1
Furthermore, while women’s genuine feelings were understood as the basis of
some poems in these genres, which readers perceived as feminine,2 a sense of
superficiality and artifice was certainly an aspect of palace-style poetry.3 As
my analysis reveals, both poems and paintings on themes of longing and de-
sire necessarily involve complex negotiations of interiority and subjectivity, on
the part of not only the creators but also the audience, who perceived female
1 Kang-i Sun Chang, The Evolution of Chinese Tz’u Poetry: From Late T’ang to Northern Sung
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 8–10, 12; and Marsha L. Wagner, The Lotus Boat:
The Origins of Chinese “Tz’u” Poetry in T’ang Popular Culture (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1984), 86–87.
2 Grace S. Fong addresses the representation of femininity in all three genres in her “Engendering
the Lyric: Her Image and Voice in Song,” in Yu, Voices of the Song Lyric in China, 107–44; she
discusses the gendering of song lyric on pp. 108, 114–18, and of Southern Dynasties Music
Bureau poetry on pp. 110–12, and she considers the use of the female image in palace-style
poetry on pp. 112–14. On the femininity of song lyric, see also Lin, “The Formation of a Distinct
Generic Identity for Tz’u,” 18–19; and Ronald Egan, The Burden of Female Talent: The Poet Li
Qingzhao and Her History in China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013),
82–83. Note Judith Butler’s discussion of the work of Luce Irigaray on phallogocentric lan-
guage’s exclusion of the feminine and the subsequent inability to represent women, in Gender
Trouble, 18–19; cf. Luce Irigaray, “Any Theory of the ‘Subject’ Has Always Been Appropriated
by the ‘Masculine,’” in Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1985), 133–46. This may be applicable to Chinese poetry; Rouzer, Articulated
Ladies, 8.
3 Wu, The Poetics of Decadence, 29, 66.
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004369399_003

via free access
Gendered Subjectivity and Representing Interiority 13
figures as sites of projection. In this chapter, I explore gendered authorship of

paintings of women and its implications for subjectivity, pictorial strategies for
representing a figure’s interiority, and textual evidence of the male audience
for paintings that considered women’s interiority.
Subjectivity and Authorship
The question of whose subjectivity is represented in romantic images of

women has the potential to illuminate the paintings and poetry discussed in
this book. Although images of women’s longings and desires seem to focus on
women’s feelings, they also refer obliquely to men’s feelings: their desire for
women who desire them, their longing for distant women, their expectation of
their lovers’ loyalty,4 or their thoughts on other topics altogether. Men who
wrote about women were often considering not only women’s roles in society
but also their own;5 men’s paintings of women may have operated in the same
way. Although most surviving examples of romantic paintings are assumed to
be the work of male artists and produced for male viewers, some among this
group lack secure attributions and may represent female perspectives: roman-
tic poetry by women does survive, as do textual accounts of paintings by
women, and examining these texts can reveal gendered responses to themes of
longing and desire. Because these works often represent idealized visions, they
disclose more about how the culture regarded both men and women than
about typical heteroerotic relationships.
The subjective position in palace-style poetry, Music Bureau poetry, and
song lyrics about women is variable, as revealed by modes of representation
that range from the “objective,” voyeuristic descriptions of a detached ob-
server6 to the deployment of first-person male or female voice. Song paintings
of women, which depend on those poetic constructions, similarly play upon
the different potential alignments of subjectivity between authors, viewers,
and depicted figures. Internal cues in poetry—the judicious use of a pronoun,
for example—sometimes indicate a writer’s perspective, but the subjective
4 See Julia Ching, “Sung Philosophers on Women,” Monumenta Serica: Journal of Oriental Studies
42 (1994): 259–74, for increased concern about women’s loyalty in the Song following the rela-
tive freedom of Tang women; cited in Mann, “Myths of Asian Womanhood,” 850.
5 Bossler, Courtesans, Concubines, and the Cult of Female Fidelity, 9–10.
6 For a discussion of different interpretations of this phenomenon, see Anna M. Shields, Crafting
a Collection: The Cultural Contexts and Poetic Practice of the Huajian Ji (Collection from Among
the Flowers) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006), 17, 181, 193–94.

via free access
14 Chapter 1
position in painting is inherently unstable and open to interpretation. While

paintings of women can be understood as reflecting a voyeur’s vantage point
and the object of his or her gaze, a painter’s deployment of female figures can
correspond to the adoption of female voice in song lyric: the clearly performa-
tive nature of the latter unmasks the performative potential of the former. In
certain circumstances, both artists and viewers (whether male or female)
might identify with some aspect of a depicted female figure and adopt her
subjectivity.
Women Poets, Erotic Personae, and Female Subjectivity

Though the poets who created the romantic female persona were predomi-
nantly male, women’s writing contributed to its construction. New Songs from
a Jade Terrace included compositions by female poets, among them Xu Shu 徐
淑 (fl. mid-second century), Bao Linghui 鮑令暉 (fl. ca. 464), and Liu Lingxian
劉令嫻 (fl. late fifth–early sixth century).7 By the late Tang, courtesans were
writing and performing the desiring female persona in the emerging genre of
song lyric. Some female entertainers of the period wrote poems for exchange
with scholars that were suitable for performance; they also may have com-
posed popular lyrics presenting a courtesan’s perspective on her relationships.8
Women’s participation in creating images of female personae consumed with
love relationships makes for interesting problems of subjectivity: what hap-
pens when a female poet adopts a female persona?
Scholarship on Tang poetry provides insight into this question. Three
women poets of the period, Li Ye 李冶 (d. 784), Xue Tao 薛濤 (768–831), and Yu
Xuanji 魚玄機 (842–72), all courtesans, addressed their poems on love to men
they knew, indeed writing almost exclusively for a male audience,9 and these
examples suggest a correlation between female author and persona. Moreover,
7 For poems by these women, see YTXY, 1.18a, 4.11b–13a, 6.18a, 10.4a, 10.14a–b; cf. translations
by Birrell in New Songs from a Jade Terrace, 47, 122–24, 178, 268, 280.
8 Chang, The Evolution of Chinese Tz’u Poetry, 8–10, 12; and Wagner, The Lotus Boat, 10–11,
86–87. The earliest examples of popular lyrics survive in the cache of manuscripts found
at Dunhuang, on the Silk Routes; the authors’ names are generally not recorded.
9 Maureen Robertson, “Voicing the Feminine: Constructions of the Gendered Subject in
Lyric Poetry by Women of Medieval and Late Imperial China,” Late Imperial China 13, no.
1 (June 1992): 74. Their poems are included in Peng Dingqiu 彭定求 (1645–1719) et al., ed.,
Quan Tang shi 全唐詩 [Complete Tang Poems, hereafter abbreviated as QTS], 12 vols.
(reprint, Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1960), 11.803.9035–46, 11.804.9047–56, 11.805.9057–61,
and many appear in translation in Kang-i Sun Chang and Haun Saussy, eds., Women Writ-
ers of Traditional China: An Anthology of Poetry and Criticism (Stanford: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 1999), 56–75, as well as Wilt Idema and Beata Grant, The Red Brush: Writing

via free access
women sometimes wrote in autobiographical voices in the genre of shi 詩 po-

etry, which is often perceived as reflecting an author’s subjective position.10
A fourth courtesan, the renowned Zhao Luanluan 趙鸞鸞 (fl. eighth century)
of the Pingkang 平康 entertainment district in the capital, Chang’an, wrote a
series of five shi poems that gives a tantalizing impression of erotic pleasure.
Her poems focus on ever-more-intimate parts of a female body, progressing
from “Cloud Curls” (Yunhuan 雲鬟) and “Willow Brows” (Liumei 柳眉) to
“Sandalwood Mouth” (Tankou 檀口), “Silken Fingers” (Xianzhi 纖指), and
“Creamy Breasts” (Suru 酥乳). The last reads:
Powder-fragrant, sweat-slick, a lute’s jade pegs—

aroused in spring, glowing like cream, sleek as threads of rain.
After a bath, a handsome gentleman caresses and plays with them:
potent blossoms, cool and firm as purple grapes.
粉香汗溼瑶琴軫，春逗酥融綿雨膏。浴罷檀郎捫弄處，靈華凉沁紫葡
萄。11
The implied comparison in the first line, between a woman’s nipples and a
lute’s tuning pegs, underscores the erotic connotations of certain musical in-
struments. As an example of shi poetry, this verse could be perceived as an ex-
pression of Zhao Luanluan’s genuine sexual pleasure.
Recognizably female voices inform the treatment of the female persona in
song lyric, resulting in something approaching an authentic female subjectiv-
ity. Anonymous song lyrics in the popular tradition (as opposed to those from
the literati tradition) sometimes characterize male voices as unreliable, a
stance that suggests a female perspective.12 Nevertheless, women who wrote
erotic song lyric did not necessarily express their own feelings: instead, they
more typically evoked feelings of longing and desire conventional to this
Women of Imperial China (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Asia Cen-
ter, 2004), 178–95.
10 Maureen Robertson gives a cogent summary of the complexity of subjectivity in shi
poetry in “Changing the Subject: Gender and Self-inscription in Authors’ Prefaces and Shi
Poetry,” in Writing Women in Late Imperial China, ed. Ellen Widmer and Kang-i Sun Chang
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 176–78.
11 QTS, 11:802.9033; cf. translations of all five poems by Jeanne Larsen in Chang and Saussy,
Women Writers of Traditional China, 76–78.
12 Maija Bell Samei, Gendered Persona and Poetic Voice: The Abandoned Woman in Early Chi-
nese Song Lyrics (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2004), 17, 150.

via free access
16 Chapter 1
essentially performative genre.13 Though it was possible to inscribe the femi-

nine image with their own perceptions, women who composed song lyrics
could also adopt an established erotic persona.14 Some readers and critics did
not recognize this, expecting seamless continuity between female authors and
personae,15 especially in song lyric. They assumed that such a “feminine” genre
was a natural medium for a woman’s voice and that erotic song lyric featuring
a female persona genuinely reflected a female poet’s feelings and experiences.16
These are highly problematic assumptions. Female authors using female voice
in song lyric might simply avail themselves of a constructed persona, and
women’s expressions of erotic feelings in other genres, such as shi poetry, were
not necessarily accurate representations of their own interiority. Certainly, ex-
amples of female-authored erotic poetry that break with convention may pres-
ent an indisputably female subjectivity, resulting in something different from
what a man might have written.17 Prior to the late Ming dynasty (1368–1644),
however, no discourse suggested that women’s poetic writing might be under-
stood as distinct from men’s;18 instead, the ability to create a fresh view of fem-
inine personae was valued in poets of both sexes.19
Examples of ostensibly female-authored song lyric that demand to be un-
derstood as genuine laments sometimes prove to be male-authored fictions.
One lyric reputedly by a Tiantai barracks courtesan named Yan Rui 嚴蕊 (fl. ca.
13 Fong, “Engendering the Lyric,” 114–15; Idema and Grant, The Red Brush, 199–200. See also
Stephen Owen, “Meaning the Words: The Genuine as a Value in the Tradition of the Song
Lyric,” in Yu, Voices of the Song Lyric in China, 30–69, for an exploration of the discontinu-
ity between author and persona.
14 Samei questions whether “literati conventions of femininity” should actually be under-
stood as less genuinely feminine in Gendered Persona and Poetic Voice, 18.
15 Ronald Egan summarizes some of the reasons behind this assumption in The Burden of
Female Talent, 109–12.
16 For discussions of these critical perceptions, see Samei, Gendered Persona and Poetic
Voice, 18, 67–68; and Idema and Grant, The Red Brush, 199–200. Ronald Egan links the
failure of male readers and critics to recognize a woman poet’s ability to construct an
artificial persona to the patriarchal society of imperial China in The Burden of Female Tal-
ent, 112.
17 For example, Ronald Egan, in comparing the palace poems of Lady Huarui 花蕊夫人
(fl. ca. 935) and Huizong, suggests that her poems reflect a “more consistent effort to cap-
ture plausibly lived female experience”; Ronald Egan, “Huizong’s Palace Poems,” in
Emperor Huizong and Late Northern Song China: The Politics of Culture and the Culture of
Politics, ed. Patricia Buckley Ebrey and Maggie Bickford (Cambridge, Mass., and London:
Harvard University Asia Center, 2006), 392.
18 Rouzer, Articulated Ladies, 7.
19 Samei, Gendered Persona and Poetic Voice, 73.

via free access
1160) addresses her profession in a manner unusual for the period. The opening
lines read:
It is not that I love the courtesan’s life;

It’s the karma of a past life that has wronged me.
不是愛風塵，似被前身誤。20
Because they reject the desiring persona more typical of poems attributed to
courtesans, they read as a candid expression of the writer’s pain. This lyric,
however, was actually composed by one of Yan’s male associates.21 While the
song lyric tradition permits authenticity, it is imprudent to assume that a lyric
recorded under the name of a female poet presents an authentic female voice.
The body of work attributed to Li Qingzhao 李清照 (literary name Yi’an
Jushi 易安居士, 1084–ca. 1155), China’s preeminent female poet, clearly illus-
trates the willingness of critics to assign female authorship to song lyrics even
when doing so is unwarranted. A recent study of her writing reveals how the
number of lyrics attributed to her steadily grew from the Southern Song
through the twentieth century, even after the earliest collections of her work
were lost. Those lyrics that scholars can confidently link to her authorship tend
to feature a distinctive voice: that of a persona of the same social class as Li
Qingzhao herself and given to expressing ideas or sentiments that are uncon-
ventional in song lyric. Nevertheless, one must keep in mind that the poet
most likely presented deliberately cultivated personae rather than comment-
ing on her own life.22
Examining the range of Li Qingzhao’s lyrics—just one type of writing in
which she engaged—demonstrates that she did not limit herself to stereotypi-
cal romantic themes. For example, one of her lyrics mentions problems of po-
etic composition, and a few others feature a female persona enjoying an outing
in nature rather than remaining cloistered indoors.23 Yet Li Qingzhao did avail
herself of the romantic themes common to song lyric, often bringing a fresh
20 Attributed to Yan Rui, Tune: “Bu suanzi 卜算子 [The Fortune-Teller],” trans. Sophie Volpp,
in Chang and Saussy, Women Writers of Traditional China, 106–107; Volpp acknowledges
scholarly questions about whether Yan Rui ever existed. The Chinese text appears in Tang
Guizhang 唐圭章, ed., Quan Song ci 全宋詞 [Complete Song Lyrics of the Song Dynasty,
hereafter abbreviated as QSC] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1965), 3:1677.
21 Egan, The Burden of Female Talent, 18–20.
22 Ibid., 91–105, 324–25, 388.
23 Ibid., 49–51, 335–39.

via free access
18 Chapter 1
perspective.24 One song lyric with a relatively reliable attribution to Li Qing

zhao combines the lamenting female persona with the trope of self-adornment
(discussed further in Chapter 4). Written to the tune “On the Phoenix Terrace,
Thinking of Playing the Flute” (Fenghuang taishang yi chuixiao 鳳凰臺上憶吹
簫), it reads:
Incense cold in the golden lion,

the disheveled quilt lies in red waves.
Rising, but too lazy to comb her own hair—
she’s allowed the jeweled cases to fill with dust.
The sun’s rays reach the curtain hook,
and with them rises fear of the bitterness of parting.
So many small events
she wants to speak of, but still she waits.
Newly become thin,
not from the onset of wine-sickness
nor this autumnal grief.
“Waiting, waiting!
At this parting,
a thousand, ten thousand repeats of ‘Yang Pass’
but still it was too hard to stay.
I remember that Wuling man, so far away,
mist enveloping the Qin tower,
yet only the flowing water before the tower
will remember me.
Until day’s end, my gaze frozen,
frozen, staring, in this place,
and now, add once again
a portion of new sorrow.”
香冷金猊，被翻紅浪，起來慵自梳頭。任寶奩塵滿，日上簾鉤。生怕
離懷別苦，多少事，欲說還休。新來瘦，非干病酒，不是悲秋。
休休！這回去也，千萬遍陽關，也則難留。念武陵人遠，煙鎖秦樓。
唯有樓前流水，應念我，終日凝眸。凝眸處，從今又添，一段新
愁。25
24 Ibid., 343.
25 The Chinese text and an English translation appear in Egan, The Burden of Female Talent,
127. A version of the lyric with significantly different wording also appears in QSC, 2:928,

via free access
This lyric may demonstrate the degree to which women embraced the lament-
ing persona in poetic composition. It is tempting to consider some autobio-
graphical motive behind its composition, and in fact critics have tended to
attribute this work to a period when Li Qingzhao and her first husband, Zhao
Mingcheng 趙明誠 (1081–1129), might have been separated. Still, one should
not assume that the words represent Li’s own lived experience.26 It is possible
to translate this lyric, as I have done here, as encompassing two distinct voices:
that of a relatively detached observer in the first stanza, and that of the imag-
ined female persona herself in the second—an arrangement which follows a
pattern found in earlier song lyrics.27 This alone could indicate the different
subjectivities of author and persona. Yet while Li Qingzhao takes advantage of
the already established romantic feminine persona, she also includes unusual
tropes: the imagery of flowing water that remembers the woman when no one
else seems to and the artful suggestion of an already vast well of feeling.
When a female poet adopts a feminine persona, her subjective position be-
comes more complicated. Again, this circles back to the issue of performance.
Female-authored poetry in female voice enjoys an aura of authenticity pre-
cisely because of the reader’s or listener’s willingness to collapse author and
persona into a single entity. While some compositions may represent the au-
thor’s feelings or circumstances, even the most heartfelt lyric relies upon a con-
structed persona. Especially in examples of poetry written by women, one
cannot assume that female subjectivity is always distinct or recognizable.
Women Painters and Images of Women

While quite a few female-authored poems from the middle imperial period
survive (though in smaller quantities than male-authored poems),28 this is not
true of compositions by female painters. The catalogue Views from Jade Terrace:
Chinese Women Artists, 1300–1912 includes an index of the known extant paint-
ings by Chinese women: the earliest artist represented is Guan Daosheng 管
道昇 (1262–1319) of the Yuan dynasty.29 This does not mean that women did
not paint in earlier periods, only that their work was not preserved. Snippets
of information about female artists, extracted from published painting histo-
ries, were collected in an early nineteenth-century text. Titled History of Jade
under the tune title “Fenghuang taishang yi chuixiao.”

26 Egan, The Burden of Female Talent, 127–29, 324–25.
27 Shields, Crafting a Collection, 270.
28 Egan, The Burden of Female Talent, 389.
29 Marsha Weidner et al., Views from Jade Terrace: Chinese Women Artists, 1300–1912 (India-
napolis: Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1988), 176–87.

via free access
20 Chapter 1
Terrace Painting (Yutai huashi 玉臺畫史) and compiled by Tang Shuyu 唐漱

玉 (a.k.a. Tang Souyu), it details women’s artistic accomplishments from the
third century through the Qing dynasty (1644–1911). They include court ladies
(empresses, concubines, princesses, and wives of members of the imperial
family); women associated with literati and artistic families (including wives,
daughters, concubines, and maids); courtesans; and nuns.30 Still, the women
mentioned were only those whom connoisseurs noticed. Though this source
hints that female artists from the Tang through Song periods did paint roman-
ticized female figures, none is explicitly described as a painter of the genre that
such works tended to belong to, shinü hua: one must read between the lines of
the few entries that do suggest romantic themes embodied in female figures.
Two entries on Tang women suggest that female artists’ depictions of female
figures may have begun with self-portraits. For example, one finds an entry on
eighth-century courtesan Cui Hui 崔徽 that greatly embellishes an anecdote
earlier recounted in Zhang Junfang’s 張君房 (fl. 1005) Record of the Feelings of
Beauties (Liqing ji 麗情集). The earlier account reads:
In the Tang dynasty, Pei Jingzhong served as a surveillance official,31 and

he was sent to Puzhou. He had a relationship with Cui Hui. When
Jingzhong was recalled, Hui became resentful of his inability to stay with
her, and after some time she fell ill. She painted her self-portrait to send
to Pei with a note saying, “Cui Hui quite soon will not resemble the figure
in this scroll.”
唐裴敬中為察官，奉使蒲中。與崔徽相從，敬中回，徽以不得從為
恨，久之成疾。自寫其真以寄裴曰，崔徽一旦不如卷中人矣。32
Though brief, this anecdote suggests that Cui Hui painted an idealized self-
portrait, rendering herself at her most beautiful, which undoubtedly coincided
with her period of happiness with Pei Jingzhong. Clearly, however, she foresees
a physical decline that corresponds to her deteriorating emotional state. The
version in History of Jade Terrace Painting adds a number of details. It identi-
fies Cui Hui as a government courtesan (fuchang 府倡) from Hezhong 河中
30 Tang Shuyu, comp., Yutai huashi, in Huang and Deng, Meishu congshu, 17: 113–244.
31 Charles O. Hucker, A Dictionary of Official Titles in Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 1985), s.v. 47, ch’a-kuan.
32 Zhang Junfang, Liqing ji, in Songdai biji xiaoshuo 宋代筆記小説 [Song Dynasty Anec-
dotes and Stories], ed. Zhang Guangpei 張光培, 24 vols. (Shijiazhuang: Hebei jiaoyu chu-
banshe, 1995), 15:91.

via free access
prefecture, dates this episode to the Xingyuan 興元 era (784–85), and names
the person who conveys the portrait to Pei Jingzhong. It also describes Cui Hui
as using a mirror to paint her portrait (a trope that may allude to romantic
exchanges as well as idealized behavior; I discuss mirrors in more depth in
Chapter 4) and indicates that Cui Hui thereafter went mad and died. Tang
Shuyu’s longer anecdote stresses that the courtesan acts upon real attachment.33
A second anecdote included in Tang Shuyu’s text indicates that a Tang wife
used a revealing self-portrait to shame her straying husband. This entry, on Xue
Yuan 薛媛, appeared earlier in a ninth-century or Song text, Fan Shu’s 范攄
Discussions of Friends of Clouds and Streams (Yunxi youyi 雲溪友議). Fan Shu’s
more detailed version of the story reads:
Nan Chucai from Haoliang traveled to the regions of Chen and Ying. After
he had spent years there, the governor admired his virtuous demeanor
and wanted his daughter to be Chucai’s wife. Chucai had a wife at home,
but because he cared deeply about receiving an official post and sud-
denly forgot what was right, he assented at once and then sent his servant
back home to collect his zither, books, and other things; it seemed that
he would not return to his old love. He also spoke of seeking the Dao
in Qingcheng and visiting a monk on Hengshan; this was incompatible
with an official’s reputation, only an affair of deceit. His wife, Xue Yuan,
excelled at painting and calligraphy, and her writing was exquisite. She
knew that Chucai did not remember the feelings built upon shared hard
times, and rather than relying on the strength of their bond, she faced a
mirror and painted her portrait, writing a poem in four rhymes to send
with it. When Chucai received his wife’s portrait and exemplary poem,
he was very ashamed. All at once he became a model husband and per-
fectly trustworthy, and this resulted in husband and wife growing old
together. A village saying goes, “At one time a wife abandoned her hus-
band; today the husband left his wife. If she did not indulge herself in
painting, she would have been all alone in an empty house.” Xue Yuan’s
poem, “A Portrait to Send to My Husband,”34 reads: “I want to put down
33 Tang, Yutai huashi, 5.215; for a translation, see Lara C.W. Blanchard, “Imagining Du Lin-
iang in The Peony Pavilion: Female Painters, Self-portraiture, and Paintings of Beautiful
Women in Late Ming China,” in Women, Gender and Art in Asia, c. 1500–1900, ed. Melia
Belli Bose (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 129.
34 Her poem is recorded in QTS, 11:799.8991. This source gives an alternative character in the
second line, changing the “treasured mirror” to a “cold mirror” (hanjing 寒鏡). Cf. transla-
tion by Lily Xiao Hong Lee in Lily Xiao Hong Lee and Sue Wiles, eds., Biographical

via free access
22 Chapter 1
my paintbrush / but first pick up my treasured mirror. / Already surprised

at the loneliness on my face, / I slowly perceive the fading at my temples.
/ It will be easy to sketch my tears, / but harder to write of the grief at my
core. / I am afraid you will become muddled and forget me, / so from time
to time open up this picture and look at it.”
濠梁人南楚材者，旅游陳潁。歲久，頴守慕其儀範，將欲以子妻之。
楚材家有妻，以受頴牧之眷深，忽不思義，而輒已諾之。遂遣家僕歸
取琴書等，似無返舊之心也。或謂求道青城，訪僧衡岳，不親名宦，
唯務玄虛。其妻薛媛，善書畫，妙屬文；知楚材不念糟糠之情，別倚
絲蘿之勢，對鏡自圖其形，幷詩四韻以寄之。楚材得妻真及詩範，遽
有雋不疑之讓，夫婦遂偕老焉。里語曰：「當時婦棄夫，今日夫離
婦。若不逞丹青，空房應獨自。」薛媛寫真寄夫詩曰：「欲下丹青
筆，先拈寳鏡端。已驚顏索寞，漸覺鬢凋殘。淚眼描將易，愁腸寫出
難。恐君渾忘却，時展畫圖看。」35
In this case, the sorrow and longing presumably conveyed by the portrait are
reiterated in the moving poem that accompanied it. This anecdote indicates
that wives might avail themselves of tropes indicating attachment, as a means
of competing with other women. Significantly, Xue Yuan’s poem intimates that
painting might serve as a more natural reflection of feelings than poetry, per-
haps revealing an effort to grant painting a more authentic value than its arti-
ficial nature usually inspires.
History of Jade Terrace Painting lists only two Song-era women as painting
female figures with literary or historical associations. The first is a concubine of
Southern Song emperor Gaozong 高宗 (r. 1127–62), named Liu Xi 劉希 (d. 1187)
but known as Liu Guifei 劉貴妃, Liu Wanrong 劉婉容, Lady Liu 劉夫人, or
Lady Shangyi 尚衣夫人. Xia Wenyan’s 夏文彥 (b. ca. 1315) Treasured Mirror of
Painting (Tuhui baojian 圖繪寶鑑) relates the scope of her talent:
Lady Liu was named Xi; her literary name was Furen. In the Jianyan era
[1127–30] she was in charge of the inner palace writing of imperial text.
Dictionary of Chinese Women, Volume II: Tang through Ming, 618–1644 (London and New
York: Routledge, 2015), 529.
35 Fan Shu, “Zhen shi jie 真詩解 [Explaining Truth in a Poem],” in Yunxi youyi 雲溪友議
[Discussions of Friends of Clouds and Streams] (Shanghai: Gudian wenxue chubanshe,
1957), 1.4; cf. Tang, Yutai huashi, 2.127–28. Similar information is provided in the entry on
Xue Yuan in Lee and Wiles, Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women, Volume II, 529. For
a translation of the excerpt in Tang Shuyu’s text that derives from this anecdote, see
Blanchard, “Imagining Du Liniang in The Peony Pavilion,” 129–30.

via free access
She excelled at painting figures and took the old masters as her teachers
for both brushwork and writing imperial characters. Emperor Gaozong
loved her deeply, and her paintings bore a Fenghuatang seal.
劉夫人希字號夫人。建炎年掌内翰文字，善畫人物，師古人筆法及寫
宸翰字，高宗甚愛之，畫上用奉華堂印。36
Chapter 2 will discuss how one of Gaozong’s concubines could have inscribed
the calligraphy on the Liaoning Provincial Museum painting Goddess of the
Luo River (figs. 6.1–6.12):37 perhaps the writer was Liu Guifei. If her study of art
included copying masterpieces of figure painting, she could have been the
painter of that particular handscroll, meaning that one could interpret it as a
document asserting her loyalty to Gaozong. No evidence links her to the cal-
ligraphy, however, much less to the painting, which bears neither a signature
nor any Fenghuatang seal. The Fenghuatang was Liu Guifei’s residence, and
the seal appeared on works of art in her collection, including landscape paint-
ings, flower-and-bird paintings, works of calligraphy, and even ceramics.38
According to Wang Yuxian’s王毓賢 Notes on Painting Matters (Huishi beikao
繪事備考), the Fenghuatang seal was also impressed upon works that Liu
Guifei painted herself. While none seems to survive, Wang’s text does list titles
of a selection of her paintings; it too mentions that she excelled at figure paint-
ing. Three of the titles appear to allude to palace women’s work with cloth and
suggest an emphasis on virtuous aspects of that work. They include Replenishing
the Threads of the Palace Clothing (Gongyi tianxian tu 宮衣添綫圖), Mending
the Ceremonial Robes (Bugun tu 補袞圖), and Palace Embroidery (Gongxiu tu 宮
鏽圖).39
36 Xia Wenyan 夏文彥, Tuhui baojian 圖繪寶鑑 [Treasured Mirror of Painting] ([Shanghai]:
Shenzhou guoguangshe, 1929), 4.15b; this edition refers to a “Chunhuatang 春華堂” seal
rather than a Fenghuatang seal, which I believe to be a printing error. The error is cor-
rected in Tang, Yutai huashi, 1.119–20, which otherwise repeats the earlier text verbatim.
37 Chen Pao-chen, “The Goddess of the Lo River: A Study of Early Chinese Narrative Hand-
scrolls,” 2 vols. (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1987), 1: 209–10, 242.
38 Hui-shu Lee, Empresses, Art, and Agency in Song Dynasty China (Seattle and London: Uni-
versity of Washington Press, 2010), 131–35. Two of these works are discussed in Ankeney
Weitz, Zhou Mi’s “Record of Clouds and Mist Passing Before One’s Eyes”: An Annotated
Translation (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 102, 118, 164; cf. Zhou Mi 周密, Yunyan guoyan lu 雲煙過
眼錄 [Record of Clouds and Mist that Have Passed Before My Eyes], 2 juan (reprint, Taipei:
Yiwen yinshuguan, 1969), 1.26a, 1.36a, 2.9a–15b.
39 Wang Yuxian, Huishi beikao, 8 juan (reprint, Taipei: Taiwan shangwu yinshuguan, 1971),
2:6.56a–b; cf. Tang, Yutai huashi, 1.121. An occasional poem treats embroidery as a natural

via free access
24 Chapter 1
Intriguingly, Liu Guifei is also credited with a painting of the most notorious
imperial concubine, in a passage from Wang Keyu’s 汪砢玉 Coral Net Record of
Painting (Shanhuwang hualu 珊瑚網畫錄). The painting’s subject is Yang
Yuhuan 楊玉環 (719–56), better known by the title Yang Guifei 楊貴妃. She had
married the Prince of Shou 壽王 (715–75), son of Emperor Xuanzong 玄宗
(a.k.a. Minghuang 明皇, r. 712–56), but left the marriage and briefly became a
Daoist nun, using the name Taizhen 太真. Thereafter she became the guifei, or
Honored Consort,40 of Xuanzong himself in 745. For a time, her status as be-
loved concubine translated into power for herself and members of her family,
including three sisters, who all received titles, and a cousin, Yang Guozhong
楊國忠 (d. 756), who became Chief Minister. Although legend has it that Yang
Guifei and the emperor pledged eternal love, their relationship was tumultu-
ous, and she was eventually accused of impropriety with the general An Lushan
安祿山 (ca. 703–57). When An fomented rebellion in the capital, emperor and
consort fled to Shu, and she died en route, either killed by the emperor’s men
or compelled to commit suicide. Xuanzong died later in the same year, and the
latter part of his reign is thus intertwined with tales of his tragic attachment to
this consort.41
Wang Keyu’s account of Liu Guifei’s painting suggests that it emphasized
the consort’s lack of virtue:
Taizhen Intoxicated and Pouring out Flower Nectar (Taizhen zui yi hualu
tu), by Lady Liu: On one occasion, Taizhen was drinking alone and intoxi-
cated, when she rose to suck the nectar from flowers on a branch beside
her. This scene was most worthy as a model for sketching. In this portrait,
she is abundantly plump yet delicate, with dainty features and flesh the
color of peach blossoms, [leading one to] think of Yuhuan as flushed and
slippery with sweat. She holds a heap of chrysanthemums to hide her red
pastime for a heartbroken woman; see, for example, Wei Zhuang 韋莊 (836–910), Tune:
“Qing ping yue 清平樂 [Pure, Serene Music, 1/2],” in Robin D.S. Yates, trans., Washing Silk:
The Life and Selected Poetry of Wei Chuang (834?–910) (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East
Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1988), 198.
40 Hucker, A Dictionary of Official Titles, s.v. 3366, kuei-fei.
41 A brief sketch of Yang Guifei’s life and embellishments on her story are given in Mann,
“Myths of Asian Womanhood,” 848–50; a fuller account, with translations of relevant his-
torical passages, appears in Howard S. Levy, “The Career of Yang Kuei-fei 楊貴妃,” T’oung
Pao 45, no. 4/5 (1957): 451–89. She is the subject of a famous poem by Bai Juyi, “Chang hen
ge 長恨歌 [Song of Everlasting Sorrow],” QTS, 7:435.4816–20; cf. translation by Dore
J. Levy in Chinese Narrative Poetry: The Late Han through T’ang Dynasties (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 1988), 129–33.

via free access
lips—perhaps using them to become sober? It is credible that this came

from a famous brush. Formerly it bore a Fenghuatang seal, so we know it
was a painting of the Jianyan era by inner-palace scribe Lady Liu. Regret
tably, during remounting, the seal was cut off by an inferior hand. Thus
I tentatively propose that it must have been originally by a Song painter.
Written by Wang Keyu, drunk on the Double Ninth of the dingwei year
[1607] of the Wanli era [1572–1620].
劉夫人作太真醉挹花露圖。太真在當時，惟宿酒未醒，曉起傍花枝吸
露，此景最堪摹寫，是像豐致灧灧，眉目楚楚，肌色如桃花，想玉環
紅汗浥也。把菊盈盈掩絳唇，固藉以解醒乎。信出名筆哉。第舊有奉
華堂印，知為建炎掌內翰劉夫人所繪。惜裝演時，為庸手剪去。然暗
中模索，要自宋人揮染，萬厯丁未重九日，醉裡汪砢玉題。42
Wang’s description suggests that Liu depicted Yang Guifei as lovely but dishev-
eled and debauched. Sucking the nectar from flowers, moreover, would have
been a highly suggestive image. Representations of Yang Guifei drunk may re-
fer to tales of her rivalry with Jiang Caipin 江采蘋—known as Meifei 梅妃, the
Flowering-Plum Consort—in which the former would drink while the em-
peror spent time with the latter. (Meifei nonetheless appears to be a wholly
invented figure, featured in a “tale of strange events” or chuanqi 傳奇 that dates
to the Tang or Song dynasties.)43 Liu Guifei may have meant to suggest that she
herself was neglected in favor of a competitor. In choosing to illustrate a story
about a concubine with whom she shared a title, however, perhaps Liu Guifei
sought to force a direct comparison between herself and her subject, one that
may have proved flattering to the artist.
Li Qingzhao, who is better known for her writing, is also linked to paintings
based on poetry, works that represent bamboo and rocks, and small land-
scapes, though all accounts that discuss her as an artist significantly postdate
the Song and may represent later attempts to make her over in the image of a
42 Wang Keyu, Shanhuwang 珊瑚網 [Coral Net], 48 juan (1643; reprint, Kyoto: Kanseki
Repository, 2016), 29.21b–22a, <http://www.kanripo.org/text/KR3h0060/> (accessed 28
July 2016); cf. Tang, Yutai huashi, 1.120, which provides Wang’s text nearly verbatim.
43 Maggie Bickford translates excerpts from the tale and argues for a twelfth-century date in
Bones of Jade, Soul of Ice: The Flowering Plum in Chinese Art (New Haven: Yale University
Art Gallery, 1985), 176–79. See also Mann, “Myths of Asian Womanhood,” 849–50; Chang
and Saussy, Women Writers of Traditional China, 268n. For an overview of Tang dynasty
chuanqi, see William H. Nienhauser Jr., “T’ang Tales,” in The Columbia History of Chinese
Literature, ed. Victor H. Mair (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 579–94.

via free access
26 Chapter 1
multitalented woman.44 History of Jade Terrace Painting cites a text by Song

Lian (1310–81), Collection of Song Scholars (Song xueshi ji 宋學士集), which
claims that she created a painting that takes up themes of attachment. Song
Lian’s account begins:
Letian was living in exile in Jiangzhou when he heard a merchant’s wife

playing the pipa and wiped away tears of sorrow and joy; it could be said
that he was not good at handling suffering and difficulty. However, his
poem about it has been passed down and makes readers sad even now—
what of those who hear of this affair? Li Yi’an made a picture [of the
poem] and wrote it out; her thoughts covertly dwelled within.
樂天謫居江州，聞商婦琵琶，抆淚悲歡，可謂不善處患難矣。然其詞
之傳，讀者猶愴然，況聞其事者乎。李易安圖而書之，其意蓋有所
寓。45
Letian is the courtesy name of poet Bai Juyi 白居易 (772–846), and Song Lian
claims that Li Qingzhao made a painting on the theme of one of Bai’s best-
known poems, “Song of the Pipa” (recorded under the alternate Chinese titles
Pipa xing 琵琶行 and Pipa yin 琵琶引). The poem describes the longings of a
former singing girl, sold as wife to a merchant and then frequently left alone
when he traveled.46 Song Lian’s text dates some two hundred years after Li
Qingzhao lived, and the attribution may not be credible. Still, he believed that
Li Qingzhao was the artist, and he wrote a poetic colophon for the painting in
which he unfavorably compares her to Bai Juyi’s protagonist, possibly as a
means of registering a critique of Li Qingzhao’s second marriage to Zhang
Ruzhou 張汝舟—a stance reflective of Ming views on chastity.47 A painting
44 Ronald Egan calls into question the notion of Li Qingzhao as a multitalented woman
accomplished in calligraphy, painting, and music in The Burden of Female Talent, 247–49.
45 The title of this text gives the impression that Li Qingzhao only copied out Bai Juyi’s poem
and did not make the painting; Song Lian, “Ti Li Yi’an suoshu ‘Pipa xing’ hou 題李易安所
書琵琶行後 [On Li Qingzhao’s Calligraphy of ‘Song of the Pipa’],” Song xueshi quanji
宋學士全集 [Complete Collection of Song Scholars], 40 vols. (Taipei: Yiwen yinshuguan,
1970), 30:32.6b–7a. Tang Shuyu also claims that Li Qingzhao was responsible for both
painting and calligraphy in Yutai huashi, 2.138.
46 Bai Juyi, “Pipa yin,” QTS, 7:435.4821–22; cf. Burton Watson, ed. and trans., The Columbia
Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1984), 249–52.
47 Ronald Egan discusses Song Lian’s colophon in depth in The Burden of Female Talent, 248,
258–60.

via free access
based on this poem would undoubtedly address its lonely female persona, but
no such painting by Li Qingzhao survives, and thus one cannot know whether
she might have presented a fresh view of the woman’s side of a romantic
relationship.
In Tang Shuyu’s compilation, these four—Cui Hui, Xue Yuan, Liu Guifei, and
Li Qingzhao—are the only women of the Tang and Song eras described as us-
ing figure painting to consider interiority: most entries for women of these pe-
riods laud their talent in painting landscapes, ink bamboo, and other lofty
subjects. Still, I argue that woman-authored paintings on emotional attach-
ment must have been more numerous than this source indicates, particularly
given the existence of female writers of erotic poetry. One entry in the Northern
Song Xuanhe Painting Catalogue (Xuanhe huapu 宣和畫譜) suggests that cer-
tain subjects were simply not regarded as sufficiently serious:
An imperial wife born to the Cao family [in the Song dynasty] was an
excellent painter. Everything that she painted avoided the type of pleas-
ant and feebly charming compositions that girls choose for enjoyment. It
was truly as though, through her travels, she obtained beautiful scenes of
rivers, lakes, and landscapes that she had viewed, and then collated them
as fine compositions.
宗婦曹氏，雅善丹青，所畫皆非優柔輭媚取悅兒女子者，真若得於
遊，覽見江湖山川間勝槩，以集於毫端耳。48
This comment not only reflects the prominence that landscape attained as a
genre, but also betrays an assessment of “feminine” painting as trivial in nature
(perhaps echoing Guo Ruoxu on the topic of shinü hua). Ms. Cao is explicitly
praised for making paintings that were not feminine. Perhaps critics refrained
from mentioning female artists whose works used female figures to express
longing or desire for two reasons: first, out of a sense that it was unremarkable
for a woman to do so—in the way that critics came to view women as naturally
drawn to and proficient at song lyric—and second, from an apprehension that
such subjects were less worthy. These anecdotes suggest that when female
painters did illustrate romantic themes, they used the same tropes found in
earlier examples of poetry and painting, responding to the preexisting concep-
tion of female figures as consumed with longing or desire. Thus, female artists
may have used paintings as vehicles for expression just as male artists did.
48 Xuanhe huapu, 16.457; cf. Tang, Yutai huashi, 1.117–18.

via free access
28 Chapter 1
Cross-Dressing and Authenticity

In China, female poets and painters who addressed romantic or erotic themes
worked within genres with a long history of male authors adopting a female
persona for expressive purposes. This phenomenon in poetry is called literary
cross-dressing or transvestism, referring to the way that a male poet might
speak through a feminine persona or, in some cases, contrast the persona’s
voice with his own (which suggests ventriloquism as well). Chinese poets used
this device extensively in palace-style poetry, Music Bureau poetry, and song
lyric.49 I suggest that such poems represent a subjectivity that is neither female
nor male but transvestite.50 Even when female poets wrote in female voice,
one cannot understand the resulting compositions as reflecting a purely fe-
male subjectivity. Scholars of Chinese poetry have argued that this circum-
stance too amounts to an act of cross-dressing: a woman writing as a man
writing as a woman. Marjorie Garber has discussed a comparable situation in
English drama, the filling of female roles with woman actors—replacing the
boy actors that had played those roles through the Restoration era—as the op-
posite of a return to naturalism: instead, “a double substitution—a re-recogni-
tion of artifice.”51
In those Chinese poetic traditions that rely upon transvestism, concerns
about authenticity are ubiquitous. One source of this concern is an idea ad-
vanced in the Great Preface (Da xu 大序, dating no later than the Former Han
dynasty, 202 bce–9 ce) to the Book of Songs (Shijing 詩經, thought to date be-
tween the tenth and seventh centuries bce):
Poetry is where the intent of the heart/mind goes. What in the heart is
intent is poetry when emitted in words.
詩者。志之所之也。在心為志。發言為詩。52
49 Samei, Gendered Persona and Poetic Voice, 16–17, 28–35. Some male poets did not presume
to render a woman’s feelings: Paul Rouzer discusses Tang quatrains that suggest that the
female subject’s emotions are unreadable in Articulated Ladies, 293.
50 Garber suggests that the transvestite “define[s] and problematize[s] the entire concept of
‘male subjectivity,’” in Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York:
HarperCollins/Routledge, 1992), 98. Samei refers to it as a “male-defined feminine” in Gen-
dered Persona and Poetic Voice, 17.
51 Garber, Vested Interests, 126. On cross-dressing in Chinese poetry, see Robertson, “Voicing
the Feminine,” 68; Rouzer, Articulated Ladies, 8, 155–56; Samei, Gendered Persona and
Poetic Voice, 18–19.
52 Translated by Pauline Yu, The Reading of Imagery in the Chinese Poetic Tradition (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 31–32; cf. Ruan Yuan, ed., Maoshi zhengyi 毛詩正義

via free access
This concept is summed up in three words, shi yan zhi 詩言志, which can be
translated “poetry speaks to intent.” It acknowledges poetry as a genuine ex-
pression of feeling, an unconscious outpouring comparable to the manifes-
tation of emotion. Literary scholars observe that genres in which poets do
not avoid artifice unsettle this assumption.53 Poetry that made use of literary
cross-dressing thus could be marginalized as inauthentic. This is perhaps why
Xu Ling’s preface to New Songs from a Jade Terrace intimates that it presents
the work of female authors for female readers; such a claim avoids the issue
of literary cross-dressing in the (predominantly male-authored) poems.54 In
the Music Bureau and song lyric genres, the use of female voice might be ex-
plained through manifold associations with performance by female entertain-
ers.55 But this does not explain why critics hailed Su Shi’s adoption of the song
lyric genre to address “strongly individuated”56 and autobiographical topics as
an important achievement: that suggests unease with transvestite subjectivity
or a perception that men should not voice romantic feelings, even through an
appropriate female persona.57
The close correspondence between poetry and painting suggests that there
might be a visual counterpart to literary cross-dressing: pictorial cross-dressing.
A painting does not have a voice in the same way a poem does, but a subject
position is sometimes implied, and connoisseurs have discussed some paint-
ings as expressive or as providing commentary. If painters or patrons could
use female figures as a means of expressing their own concerns, the concept
of transvestism may be relevant to examinations of male-authored paintings
of women’s interiority. One painting that raises the question of subjectivity is
In the Palace (figs. 1.1–4.2), which depicts the pleasures of imperial concubines
[Commentary on Mao’s “Songs”] (1815), 1.13, <http://hanchi.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/ihp/hanji.

htm> (accessed 30 May 2016). The Book of Songs is also translated under the titles Book of
Odes, Book of Poetry, Classic of Odes, and Classic of Poetry. For a summary of the origins of
this text and scholarship on it, see Loewe, Early Chinese Texts, 415–23; for an English trans-
lation, see Arthur Waley, trans., The Book of Songs: The Ancient Chinese Classic of Poetry
(New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1987).
53 Samei, Gendered Persona and Poetic Voice, 13; citing Wu, The Poetics of Decadence, 4–5.
54 For an analysis of the preface, see Rouzer, Articulated Ladies, 132–37.
55 Joseph R. Allen, In the Voice of Others: Chinese Music Bureau Poetry (Ann Arbor: Center for
Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1992), 228.
56 Egan, The Problem of Beauty, 283.
57 Samei discusses the use of female personae as a means of expressing genuine feeling in
Gendered Persona and Poetic Voice, 12–13. The tenth-century Among the Flowers (Huajian
ji 花閒集) collection includes some lyrics expressing longing written in first-person male
voice; Shields, Crafting a Collection, 227–30, 274–77.

via free access
30 Chapter 1
with attributes that function as metonyms of their emotional attachments.

Analyzing the manipulation of the figures is essential to any interpretation of
the painting, whether it be understood as political or allegorical, an expression
of the painter’s or patron’s thoughts or feelings, a model of idealized feminin-
ity, or an artifact of heteroerotic desire.
In the Palace was once a long handscroll that depicted dozens of palace
women diverting themselves. The painting, now divided into four sections, is a
copy of a scroll (not extant) by Southern Tang court painter Zhou Wenju.
Scholars concur that the four paintings are sequential sections of a single
scroll: horizontal streaks in the silk extend through all four segments; the frag-
ments are approximately consistent in height, ranging between 25.7 and 28.3
centimeters; and seals on the first section and on the colophon attached to the
second section appear to match seals on the final section.58 Still, the different
parts of the scroll may not be the work of a single artist: it is possible that the
first two segments were by one artist and the latter two by another.59 All four
sections credibly date to the Song era, based on the style of the painting, the
58 Laurance P. Roberts, The Bernard Berenson Collection of Oriental Art at Villa I Tatti (New
York: Hudson Hills Press, 1991), 30. One of the seals impressed after the colophon, reading
“Junsima yin 軍司馬印,” appears again as a half-seal at the beginning of the first section
and at the end of the fourth section, suggesting that the sections do belong together; this
seal, however, is not consistent with an early twelfth-century date, as discussed by Wai-
kam Ho in “Danyan Jushi Zhang Cheng kaolüe, bing lun Mo Zhou Wenju Gongzhong
tujuan ba hou zhi ‘Junsima yin’ ji qita weiyin 澹巖居士張澂考略並論《摹周文矩宮中
圖卷》跋後之‘軍司馬印’及其他偽印 [A Brief Investigation of Danyan Jushi
Zhang Cheng, along with a Discussion of the ‘Junsima yin’ and Other Spurious Seals
Stamped after the Colophon to the Handscroll In the Palace, a Copy after Zhou Wenju],”
Shanghai Bowuguan jikan 上海博物館季刊 4 (1987): 43.
59 Discussions of the order of sections and the possibility of multiple artists appear in Yas-
hiro Yukio 矢代幸雄, “So bo Shū-Bunku Kyūchū zu 宋摹周文矩宮中圖 [A Sung Copy of
the Scroll ‘Ladies of the Court’ by Chou Wen-chü (Chinese, Five Dynasties)],” Bijutsu Ken-
kyu 美術研究, no. 25 (January 1934): 1–12; idem., “So bo Shū-Bunku Kyūchū zu no shin
danpen 宋摹周文矩宮中圖の新斷片 [A New Fragment of the Sung Copy of the Scroll-
Painting ‘Ladies of the Court’ by Chou Wen-chü],” Bijutsu Kenkyu 美術研究, no. 56
(August 1936): 316; idem., “Saisetsu So bo Shū-Bunku Kyūchū zu 再說宋摹周文矩宮中
圖 [Again on the Sung Copy of the Scroll ‘Ladies of the Court’ by Chou Wên-chü],” Bijutsu
Kenkyu 美術研究, no. 169 (1952): 159; Roberts, The Bernard Berenson Collection, 30; Wen
C. Fong, Beyond Representation: Chinese Painting and Calligraphy 8th–14th Century (New
York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 67 n. 31; and
Eight Dynasties of Chinese Painting: The Collections of the Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum,
Kansas City, and The Cleveland Museum of Art (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art,
1980), 28.

via free access
seals, and the quality of the silk.60 Though it is not clear why they were sepa-
rated, the division of at least the first two sections possibly occurred in the
early twentieth century at the hands of an art dealer.61 The sections are pre-
served in the Bernard Berenson Collection at Villa I Tatti, Florence (figs. 1.1–1.3),
the Cleveland Museum of Art (figs. 2.1–2.4), the Harvard Art Museums (figs.
3.1–3.4), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (figs. 4.1–4.2). They are known
by multiple titles, and it is not clear how these were assigned. Although the
English title of the Berenson section is now given as In the Palace or Ladies of
the Court, it has been recorded under the title Spring Morning in the Tang
Palace (Tang gong chunxiao tu 唐宮春曉圖); this version of the Chinese title
seems to date back to the time of the painter and critic Dong Qichang 董其昌
(1555–1636).62 The Harvard section is known as Court Ladies, but its Chinese
title is Palace Ladies Reveling (Gongnü yanle tujuan 宮女宴樂圖卷); I have not
found any reference to this title in early painting catalogues. The Cleveland
section is known as Ladies of the Court, and the Metropolitan section is known
by the title In the Palace. For simplicity, I refer to the painting by the title in use
in the early twelfth century, mentioned in the colophon: In the Palace
(Gongzhong tu 宮中圖).
This painting combines courtly and scholarly elements, suggesting the
broad appeal of romantic themes. Its setting is the inner rooms and courtyards
of the women’s quarters of the palace. Many of the women depicted therein
enact poetic scenarios of longing and desire, suggesting that Zhou Wenju
painted the original composition for the Southern Tang ruler Li Yu 李煜
(r. 961–75). Yet the copyist does not render the women in a courtly painting
60 The scrolls may represent extant examples of dingben 定本 (preliminary drawings) from
the Northern Song that preserve Zhou Wenju’s composition; Howard Rogers, “Second
Thoughts on Multiple Recensions,” Kaikodo Journal, no. 5 (Autumn 1997): 53. Wai-kam Ho
assesses the first two sections of the scroll as dating to the Song era and notes the pres-
ence of a genuine seal of Zhang Cheng, who wrote the colophon in 1140, in “Danyan Jushi
Zhang Cheng kaolüe,” 42–43. Roberts assesses the silk as of the Song era in The Bernard
Berenson Collection, 30.
61 Roberts, The Bernard Berenson Collection, 29.
62 Ibid., 27. The painting is listed under this title in Bian Yongyu 卞永譽 (1645–1712), comp.,
Shigutang hua kao 式古堂畫攷 [A Study of Paintings of the Shigu Hall], in Shigutang
shuhua kao 式古堂書畫攷 [A Study of Calligraphy and Paintings of the Shigu Hall],
comp. Bian Yongyu (1682, reprint; Wuxing: Jiangu shushe, 1921), 11.15b-16a, <http://catalog.
hathitrust.org/Record/002334902> (accessed 30 May 2016). A variant title, Spring Evening
in the Tang Palace (Tang gong chunwan tu 唐宮春晚圖), appears in Sun Yuepan 孫岳頒,
comp., Peiwenzhai shuhuapu 佩文齋書畫普 [Peiwen Hall Calligraphy and Painting Cata-
logue], 100 juan (Beijing: Neifu, Kangxi reign period of the Qing dynasty [1708–22]), 82.7a.

via free access
32 Chapter 1
style, instead choosing the “plain outline” (baimiao 白描) style associated with
Northern Song scholar Li Gonglin 李公麟 (ca. 1049–1106), who used it for his
Classic of Filial Piety (Xiaojing tu 孝經圖).63 The austere quality of baimiao may
thus have undertones of propriety, but the figures of In the Palace are enhanced
with light color—either a faint pink wash or a bolder application of red—in
lips, cheeks, hair ornaments, and the occasional pot of makeup. The correla-
tion of the word “color” (se 色) with adornment appears in the Confucian
Analects, and the word was strongly associated with sex, as affirmed in Song
dynasty lyrics about women in which “color” has a double meaning, under-
scoring the association between wearing makeup and sexual desirability.64
This aspect of In the Palace, then, helps to construct these figures as desirable
and perhaps desirous. The spare style may indicate that the copy was intended
for a scholarly audience, suggesting that not only a ruler would have enjoyed
picturing himself as the object of the figures’ desire. In fact, a colophon to the
painting suggests that this handscroll was created for a nephew of Li Gonglin,
the scholar-official Zhang Cheng 張澂 (literary name Danyan Jushi 澹巖居士,
fl. ca. 1138–43),65 and this paired with the use of baimiao provides evidence
that Song literati sought to reinterpret eroticized poetic themes.
Much of the information about the scroll derives from its colophon (fig. 2.4),
which reveals some of the painting’s history. The colophon is dated 1140 and is
signed Danyan Jushi. It reads:
Zhou Wenju’s In the Palace depicts eighty women and children, as well as
one man painting a portrait. In addition, there are powder boxes, musical
instruments, basins and tubs, fans, chairs and mats, parrots, dogs, and
63 Li Gonglin, Classic of Filial Piety, Metropolitan Museum of Art (1996.479a–c), New York;
the painting is thoroughly discussed and reproduced in Richard M. Barnhart, Li Kung-lin’s
“Classic of Filial Piety” (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1993), and repro-
duced online at Center for the Art of East Asia, Digital Scrolling Paintings Project (Chicago:
The University of Chicago, 2013–), <http://scrolls.uchicago.edu/scroll/classic-filial-piety>
(accessed 30 May 2016).
64 “Confucius said: ‘Clever words and a beguiling appearance [literally, “good color”] rarely
make up for kindness towards others.’” (子曰：『巧言令色，鮮矣仁。』) “Xue’er 學
而 [Learning],” in Ruan, Lunyu zhushu, 1.5–6 (accessed 30 May 2016). For Song dynasty
lyrics that clarify the double meaning of se, see Liu Yong 柳永 (987–1053), Tune: “Gu qing
bei 古傾杯 [Drinking a Toast, as of Old]”; and Chao Duanli 晁端禮 (1046–1113), Tune: “Yu
jie xing 御街行 [Driving a Chariot through the Lanes],” QSC, 1:27, 429.
65 More information about Zhang Cheng is provided in Ho, “Danyan Jushi Zhang Cheng
kaolüe,” 35–38; and Alfreda Murck, Poetry and Painting in Song China: The Subtle Art of
Dissent (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2000), 200–202.

via free access
butterflies. Wenju was from Jurong and served as painter-in-attendance

at the Jiangnan Hanlin Academy. When he painted ladies, his style was
similar to Zhou Fang’s but more delicate and beautiful. Once he painted
a work titled Southern Village for the Last Ruler [Li Yu]. It is said that after
one hour he put down his brush, and on that very day he presented it to
the court, where by imperial order it was registered in the Palace Library.
It is said that In the Palace is an authentic work. Previously it belonged to
the family of the Chief Minister of the Court of the Imperial Treasury,66
Zhu Zai[shang, d. 1126]. It was copied for presentation as a gift [to me].
The wives all have tall hairdos, fashionable since the Tang dynasty. In this
scroll, they are abundantly fleshy, with long skirts of fine silk; this is the
style of Zhou Fang. When I was in Jiaonan, with one of the descendants
of the original line of Emperor Gaozu [r. 618–26], I saw portraits of vari-
ous emperors from the family collection. The palace women on either
side of the emperors combed their hair roughly the same way as in this
scroll. The maids arrange their hair in two large coils that hang to their
shoulders, allowing the nape of the neck to show; this is ugly but it cap-
tures the style as it truly was. The Li family called themselves the Southern
Tang dynasty, and therefore their attire was entirely based on the Tang
system. But the romantic style actually derives from the Six Dynasties.
Painters say that to distinguish old paintings one should first inquire
about the clothing, carts, and furniture. This fully lives up to that saying.
Written by Danyan Jushi, yiyou day of the fifth lunar month of the geng-
shen year [1140] of the Shaoxing era [1131–62].
周文矩《宮中圖》，婦人小兒其數八十。一男子寫神。而壯具、樂
器、盆盂、扇、椅、席、鸚鵡、犬、蝶不與。文矩句容人，為江南翰
林待詔。作仕女，體近周昉，而加纖麗。嘗為後主畫《南莊圖》，號
一時絕筆。它日上之朝廷，詔籍之秘閣。《宮中圖》，云是真蹟。藏
前太府卿朱載家。或摹以見餽。婦人高髻，自唐以來如此。此卷豐肌
長襦裙，周昉法也。予在嶠南，於端溪陳高祖之裔見其世藏諸帝像，
左右宮人梳髻，與此略同。而丫鬟乃作兩大鬟垂肩項間，雖醜而有真
態。李氏自謂南唐，故衣冠多用唐制。然風流寔承六朝之餘。畫家者
言辨古畫，當先問衣冠車服，蓋謂是也。紹興庚申五月乙酉澹喦居士
題。67
66 Hucker, A Dictionary of Official Titles, s.v. 6162, t’ai-fu ch’ing, and 6165, t’ai-fu ssu.
67 The Chinese text of the colophon is published in Yashiro, “So bo Shū-Bunku Kyūchū zu,”
4–5, and Ho, “Danyan Jushi Zhang Cheng kaolüe,” 42. I am grateful to Grace S. Fong for
suggestions on the translation.

via free access
34 Chapter 1
Zhang Cheng and the Northern Song official Zhu Zaishang 朱載上 were both
from Shucheng 舒城.68 The colophon’s wording suggests that Zhu Zaishang’s
painting might already have been lost in 1140 (which seems especially likely if
one takes into account the chaotic fall of the Northern Song in 1127).
The painting that survives today may be Zhang Cheng’s copy, and it must
date before 1140 if one can believe the colophon. The colophon, however, has
certain problems. Some of its passages are close in wording to another colo-
phon with a Zhang Cheng signature, written for a different painting—which
may mean that one or the other is a forgery.69 Moreover, the colophon for In
the Palace is attached to the Cleveland scroll rather than the final section of the
painting, and it has apparently been trimmed at the bottom; the characters of
the colophon are cut along the bottom edge. This might indicate that the colo-
phon was once attached to a different composition altogether, one of larger
dimensions. (Like all the sections of the painting, the colophon also appears to
have been trimmed at the left and right edges, possibly when the scroll was cut
into pieces.) The seals stamped after the colophon also present an enigma: one
may be Zhang Cheng’s authentic seal, but at least seven of the others appear to
have been added with the intent of making the work seem older.70 This does
not necessarily invalidate the colophon as Zhang Cheng’s genuine writing, but
it does mean that one cannot assign a date to the painting on the basis of the
colophon alone.
Despite these concerns about Zhang Cheng’s colophon, it clearly describes
the full painting, and it has a distinct subtext: that all elements depicted are
based in reality. Zhang Cheng discusses women’s fashions of earlier periods in
order to give the painting the status of a historically accurate portrayal; in this
way, he asserts that Zhu Zaishang’s painting was an original painting by Zhou
Wenju. Perhaps this reflects Zhang Cheng’s recognition that his own painting
is only a copy of that earlier work, or perhaps he feels some anxiety about his
memory of Zhu Zaishang’s painting. On a deeper level, though, it may demon-
strate his awareness of the artifice involved in a male court painter’s imagining
of a female perspective. His efforts to ground the painting in a past reality show
his concern with discerning between genuine and artificial. At the same time,
this rhetorical move is essential to making the ladies it depicts into the stuff of
fantasy. If the viewers who enjoyed this painting could not believe that desir-
able court women such as these had existed in some place or time, even (or
68 Ho, “Danyan Jushi Zhang Cheng kaolüe,” 42–43.

69 The second painting is a fragmentary version of Night Revels of Han Xizai; I discuss the
passages that are identical in greater detail in the Conclusion.
70 Ho, “Danyan Jushi Zhang Cheng kaolüe,” 44.

via free access
perhaps especially) one far removed from their own, then the beauties would
lose some of their appeal. An indispensable element of fantasy is that it must,
in some rarefied instance, contain the potential of realization.
The colophon identifies most of the depicted figures as ladies or maids.
Many of the ladies wear love-knots, or pendants attached to ribbons hanging
from the belt to the floor, tied in a knot below the hips. This ornament, as a
token of a man’s affection, suggests the wearer’s attachment to a particular
man.71 Many of those wearing elaborate headdresses are probably supposed
to be imperial concubines, but those that play musical instruments might be
(former or present) palace courtesans.72 The younger figures are either maids
or daughters of the concubines; the maids wear their hair in loops bound at the
ears, while the daughters often wear bows as well. Additionally, one little boy,
no bigger than a toddler, appears in the Cleveland section (fig. 2.2). The colo-
phon mentions a single man painting a lady’s portrait; he appears at the open-
ing of the Berenson section (fig. 1.1). A second man, however, appears at the
end of the Metropolitan Museum section (fig. 4.2). Zhang Cheng must have
counted him as a boy (including him among the children) because he has no
beard; I contend that he is a eunuch.73 These two male figures, appearing in the
first and last scene, raise the question of whose subjectivity is represented.
Beginning with a portrait painter (fig. 1.1) clarifies the content of In the
Palace. The woman sitting for her portrait is a concubine wearing a volumi-
nous pink floral headdress; a lady-in-waiting and two girls—one a daughter
wearing a large pink bow—observe the process. Some emperors allegedly re-
lied upon portraits of court ladies when choosing a sexual partner for the eve-
ning. A well-known story concerning this practice, focusing on the Former Han
imperial concubine Wang Qiang 王嬙, known as Zhaojun 昭君, apparently
originates in the fifth-century text A New Account of Tales of the World (Shishuo
xinyu 世說新語). This text, written centuries after Wang Zhaojun lived, relates
that a portrait painter did not fairly represent her beauty, and consequently
Emperor Yuandi 漢元帝 (r. 48–32 bce) offered her as consort to a Xiongnu
chieftain in 33 bce. Several other (mostly earlier) historical or literary accounts
of Wang Zhaojun do not mention the existence of a portrait at all, describing
71 An early poem listing the connotations of the love-knot and other ornaments is Fan Qin’s
繁欽 (d. 218) “Ding qing shi, yi shou 定情詩一首 [We Pledged Our Love, One Poem],”
YTXY, 1.22a–23b; cf. translation in Birrell, New Songs from a Jade Terrace, 51–52.
72 Wen Fong suggests that some of the women are ladies-in-waiting in Beyond Representa-
tion, 67 n. 31.
73 Wen Fong proposes that the portrait painter is Zhou Wenju himself and that the young
man near the end represents ruler Li Yu in Beyond Representation, 35, 67 n. 31.

via free access
36
Figure 1.1 In the Palace. After Zhou Wenju ( fl. 961–75), before 1140; section of a handscroll, ink and color on silk, 28.0 cm h. Berenson Collection, Villa I Tatti,
Florence, reproduced by permission of the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Photo: Paolo De Rocco, Centrica SRL, Florence.
Chapter 1
via free access

different reasons for her presentation to the chieftain. However, this elabora-
tion proved so compelling that it continued to circulate even into the Tang
dynasty, with allusions by prominent poets Li Bai 李白 (701–62), Bai Juyi, and
Li Shangyin 李商隱 (813?–58), among others.74 The scene in the Berenson
scroll undoubtedly alludes to this manner of documenting the concubines’
beauty for the emperor’s benefit and suggests that this handscroll was intended
as a representation of women eager to attract the emperor’s attention.
This interpretation is supported by the next grouping of figures: a concu-
bine and two maids using translucent scarves to capture butterflies (fig. 1.2).
The activity suggests the theme of Flower Morning or the Birthday of the
Flowers, occurring in the second lunar month. On this day women tradition-
ally wore flowers in their hair and attempted to catch butterflies, in hopes of
being summoned to the emperor’s bed.75 The painter depicts the concubines
as joyfully seeking union with the emperor, while minimizing the sense of
competition among them. Starting the painting with these two scenes estab-
lishes a mood of sexual anticipation and excitement.
Immediately following is a scene that presents a prelude to bathing, a topic
that relates to self-adornment and possesses significant erotic potential (fig.
1.3). Two concubines carry a basin filled with water to a third concubine sitting
in a chair. A fourth concubine, wearing an elaborate bow in her hair, holds the
hands of an imperial daughter (also wearing a bow) as a fifth concubine looks
74 Eugene Eoyang discusses the various accounts of Wang Zhaojun in Hanshu 漢書 [Han
History, 1st cent. ce], Cai Yong’s蔡邕 (133–92) Qin cao 琴操 [Principles of the Lute, 2nd
cent. ce], Fan Ye’s 范曄 (d. 445) Hou Hanshu 後漢書 [History of the Latter Han, 5th cent.
ce], Shishuo xinyu, and Xijing zaji 西京雜記 [Miscellaneous Records of the Western Capi-
tal, early 6th cent. ce], and he provides translations of poems by Li Bai, Bai Juyi, and Li
Shangyin that explicitly mention her portrait; see Eoyang, “The Wang Chao-chün Legend:
Configurations of the Classic,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 4, no. 1
(January 1982): 6–13, 19–22; cf. Li Bai, “Tongqian er shou 同前二首 [Wang Zhaojun, two
poems, 1/2]”; Bai Juyi, “Tongqian er shou [Wang Zhaojun, two poems, 1/2]”; and Li Shang-
yin, “Tongqian 同前 [Wang Zhaojun],” in Guo Maoqian 郭茂倩, ed., Yuefu shiji 樂府詩
集 [A Collection of Music Bureau Poetry, hereafter abbreviated as YFSJ] (Beijing: Zhonghua
shuju, 1979), 2:29.430, 2:29.431. Additional Music Bureau poems on Wang Zhaojun appear
in YFSJ, 2:29.426–35. See also Liu Yiqing 劉義慶, Shishuo xinyu 世說新語 [A New Account
of Tales of the World], 2 vols. (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1982), 1:7.14b–15a; cf. Liu
I-ch’ing, Shih-shuo Hsin-yü: A New Account of Tales of the World, trans. Richard B. Mather
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976), 340–41. See also Idema and Grant,
The Red Brush, 91–95, for a discussion of Wang Zhaojun and for translations of the Hou
Hanshu and Xijing zaji texts.
75 Ellen Johnston Laing, “Notes on Ladies Wearing Flowers in Their Hair,” Orientations 21, no.
2 (February 1990): 35–39; idem, “Chinese Palace-Style Poetry,” 284–86.

via free access
38
Figure 1.2 In the Palace. After Zhou Wenju ( fl. 961–75), before 1140; section of a handscroll, ink and color on silk, 28.0 cm h. Berenson
Chapter 1
Collection, Villa I Tatti, Florence, reproduced by permission of the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Photo: Paolo
De Rocco, Centrica SRL, Florence.
via free access

Figure 1.3 In the Palace. After Zhou Wenju ( fl. 961–75), before 1140; section of a handscroll, ink and color on silk, 28.0 cm h. Berenson
Collection, Villa I Tatti, Florence, reproduced by permission of the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Photo: Paolo
39
De Rocco, Centrica SRL, Florence.
via free access

40 Chapter 1
on. A sixth concubine and a maid bring another chair. This scene concludes
the Berenson scroll.
Next, opening the Cleveland section, is a scene of two musicians fingering
their stringed instruments, a ruan 阮 and a zither (fig. 2.1). Because of the as-
sociation between stringed instruments and courtesans, these women may be
palace courtesans entertaining the concubines or former courtesans elevated
to the status of concubines. Three more ladies sit by the musicians. Models for
the scene depicted here appear in two classical narratives, both featuring the
sympathetic listener (zhiyin 知音). The first, from the Liezi 列子, tells of two
male friends, Bo Ya 伯牙 and Zhong Ziqi 鍾子期. Bo Ya was an exceptional lute
player who improvised upon his instrument as he imagined mountains or wa-
ters, while Zhong Ziqi was so attuned to his friend’s music that he could always
discern Bo Ya’s thoughts.76 This story presents their like-mindedness as the ba-
sis for a strong homosocial bond, a concept that this scene from In the Palace
may allude to. The second narrative is Bai Juyi’s “Song of the Pipa.” The narrator
tells of detecting a former courtesan’s marital frustration through her expres-
sive (and, once again, improvised) music, a deeply affecting experience for
him.77 This poem suggests that the musicians depicted in In the Palace might
convey their feelings to their audience: this would suggest the other women as
supportive rather than adversarial.
Though interrupted by the incongruously placed colophon (fig. 2.4), In the
Palace continues with a long scene (extending from the Cleveland scroll, figs.
2.2 and 2.3, to the beginning of the Harvard scroll, fig. 3.1) showing women and
children interacting. This has implications for the women’s fertility and sug-
gests that one responsibility of palace women was to model femininity for
their younger female counterparts. In this scene, two maids carry a palanquin
in which a young girl sits holding a parrot. The usually caged bird evokes the
practice of gender segregation,78 and the girl is likely meant to internalize this
76 Frankel, The Flowering Plum and the Palace Lady, 222. He cites Liezi 5.7a, a Daoist text
already in existence in the fourth century (the date of the earliest commentary on it);
Loewe, Early Chinese Texts, 298–301.
77 Bai Juyi, “Pipa yin,” QTS, 7:435.4821–22; cf. translation in Watson, The Columbia Book of
Chinese Poetry, 249–52.
78 An early poem, Mi Heng’s 禰衡 (ca. 173–98) “Yingwu fu 鸚鵡賦 [Rhapsody on a Parrot],”
alludes to a caged parrot separated from its mate; Xiao Tong蕭統 (501–31) and Hu Kejia
胡克家(1757–1816), comp., Fangsong Hu Ke Wen xuan 仿宋胡刻文選 [Selections of
Refined Literature], ed. Li Shan 李善 (Poyang, Jiangxi Province: 1809), 13.13a–15a; cf. Xiao
Tong, comp., Wen xuan, or Selections of Refined Literature, trans. David R. Knechtges,
3 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 3:49–57. Mi’s rhapsody, written at
request about a powerful friend’s parrot, was personal in nature and departed from

via free access
lesson. Three concubines gather around them. One observes the procession
while holding a pair of birds—a metaphor for enduring love. Another, wearing
a large bow and carrying a fan, looks down at the girl, while a third helps to
steady her in the palanquin. Nearby, three concubines hover over a clapping
toddler, apparently male (judging from his hair); a maid waits nearby with a
bowl. Finally, two more seated concubines watch seven girls—three of whom
are imperial daughters with beautifully dressed hair—and five small dogs.
This scene is followed in the Harvard scroll by another scene of musical
performance (fig. 3.2). Here, three courtesans or concubines play the harp,
the panpipes, and the transverse flute, accompanied by a maid on a clapper.
Images of women playing pipes and flutes are sexually suggestive, clarifying
that what is being expressed is stymied heteroerotic desire. The audience con-
sists of two seated concubines, a maid, and a girl, and the latter two appear to
be holding covered instruments of their own. The viewer might also under-
stand this scene as a demonstration of the performance of desire for a genera-
tion of courtesans-in-training.
What comes next is a long scene (extending from the Harvard scroll to the
Metropolitan scroll, figs. 3.3, 3.4, and 4.1), involving sixteen concubines (mostly
devoted to their toilette), five maids, and two small girls. First, the viewer finds
two concubines with tall floral headdresses, again recalling the theme of
Flower Morning; a small girl tugs at the love-knot suspended from the belt of
the first. Another concubine stretches her arms languorously, as if just awak-
ened. A maid holds a mirror for a concubine arranging her topknot; its re
flection shows her happy face. Two concubines, one seated on a stool, one
arranging her coiffure, turn toward each other companionably. A maid holds a
tray of cosmetic boxes for a concubine gazing at her face in a mirror (which the
viewer only sees from the back); she strokes her plump cheek, perhaps smooth-
ing powder onto it. The Harvard scroll closes with a concubine pinning up her
hair. Then, at the beginning of the Metropolitan scroll, a group of five concu-
bines and two maids gather around a concubine sitting on a couch, with a large
basin next to her on the floor. The maid closest to her holds a tray of cosmetic
boxes, and the other maid waits with a towel. Two of the ladies hold a mirror
and stacked cosmetic boxes. In the background, a young concubine uses her
conventions for such works; the circumstances are discussed in William T. Graham Jr., “Mi
Heng’s Rhapsody on a Parrot,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 39, no. 1 (June 1979):
40–44, 51–53. A poem by Bai Juyi, “Yingwu 鸚鵡 [Parrot],” QTS 7.447.5035, suggests this
interpretation and explicitly compares a caged parrot to courtesans in confinement; cf.
translation by Rewi Alley, Bai Juyi: 200 Selected Poems (Beijing: New World Press, 1983),
199.

via free access
42
Figure 2.1 In the Palace. After Zhou Wenju, before 1140; section of a handscroll, ink and slight color on silk, 28.3 × 168.5 cm. The Cleveland Museum of Art,
John L. Severance Fund, 1976.1. Photograph © The Cleveland Museum of Art.
Chapter 1
via free access

Figure 2.2 In the Palace. After Zhou Wenju, before 1140; section of a handscroll, ink and slight color on silk, 28.3 × 168.5 cm. The Cleveland
Museum of Art, John L. Severance Fund, 1976.1. Photograph © The Cleveland Museum of Art.
43
via free access

44
Chapter 1
via free access

45
via free access

46
Figure 3.1 In the Palace (Palace Ladies at Leisure). After Zhou Wenju, before 1140; section of a handscroll, ink and traces of pigment on silk, 25.7 × 177.0 cm.
Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Francis H. Burr Memorial Fund, 1945.28. Photo: Imaging Department © President
and Fellows of Harvard College.
Chapter 1
via free access

Figure 3.2 In the Palace (Palace Ladies at Leisure). After Zhou Wenju, before 1140; section of a handscroll, ink and traces of pigment on silk, 25.7 × 177.0 cm.
Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Francis H. Burr Memorial Fund, 1945.28. Photo: Imaging Department © President
and Fellows of Harvard College.
47
via free access

48
Figure 3.3 In the Palace (Palace Ladies at Leisure). After Zhou Wenju, before 1140; section of a handscroll, ink and traces of
pigment on silk, 25.7 × 177.0 cm. Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Francis H. Burr Memorial Fund,
Chapter 1
1945.28. Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College.
via free access

Figure 3.4 In the Palace (Palace Ladies at Leisure). After Zhou Wenju, before 1140; section of a handscroll, ink and traces of
pigment on silk, 25.7 × 177.0 cm. Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Francis H. Burr Memorial Fund,
1945.28. Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College.
49
via free access

50
Figure 4.1 In the Palace. After Zhou Wenju, before 1140; section of a handscroll, ink and color on silk, 26.5 × 146.0 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, Purchase, Douglas Dillon Gift, 1978 (www.metmuseum.org).
Chapter 1
via free access

fingers to apply red gloss to her lips; her laughing eyes show her good humor.
Nearby, another concubine, wearing an elaborate pink ribbon on her head,
stands with a pot of powder in her hands. Here, the application of makeup sug-
gests preparation for an approaching romantic encounter, although these
women may also beautify themselves as a way to pass time. Next, a concubine
combs the hair of a young girl, as a second concubine and a maid with a tray
look on, emphasizing that attention to one’s appearance is crucial in the con-
struction of femininity. The girl furrows her brow in discomfort, as the woman
tugs at her hair and offers a sympathetic smile. Although the girl is only having
her hair looped over her ears to create chignons, in the style common to young
girls and maids, she is essentially learning what it is to be feminine.79
In the final scene of the painting as a whole (and of the Metropolitan scroll,
fig. 4.2), a concubine looks at a painting held by a second concubine, as two
maids, two more concubines and a eunuch observe. Because the painting is
shown from the back, we cannot know what it represents. However, it is tempt-
ing to imagine it as a concubine’s portrait being presented for her approval:
this would neatly echo the scene of portrait painting found at the beginning,
creating an elegant frame for this intimate glimpse of the usually inaccessible
women of the inner palace and their diversions.
Though the presence of both a male painter and a eunuch within the wom-
en’s quarters is significant, what is especially unusual is the emphasis upon the
gaze of each. The painter depicted at the beginning of the scroll holds a com-
plex dual role. First, he is a male viewer with rare access to this feminine space.
Viewers of In the Palace should understand him as the emperor’s agent: his
eyes are the emperor’s. Nevertheless, any male viewer is probably meant to
identify with him. The concubine having her portrait painted is shown from
behind: no viewer of the scroll would be able to see her face if not for its clear
depiction in the portrait. Second, the painter alludes to the perspective of both
Zhou Wenju and the unknown painter of the Song copy of In the Palace. The
portrait-within-the-scroll serves as a synecdoche for the scroll itself, and it in-
dicates that In the Palace presents a distinctly male point of view. While the
depiction of this concubine is not unlike that of another concubine in the
Harvard section, who is also seen from behind and whose face is only visible in
mirror reflection, the portrait-within-painting has a different rhetorical func-
tion than the mirror-within-painting: a mirror reflects physical likeness as well
as aspects of interiority, but the operation of the mirror is understood as
79 A poem that describes girls learning about femininity and adornment is Zuo Si 左思
(250?–306?), “Jiaonü shi 嬌女詩 [Spoiled Little Girls],” YTXY, 2.19b–21b; cf. translation in
Birrell, New Songs from a Jade Terrace, 85–86.

via free access
52
Figure 4.2 In the Palace. After Zhou Wenju, before 1140; section of a handscroll, ink and color on silk, 26.5 × 146.0 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, Purchase, Douglas Dillon Gift, 1978 (www.metmuseum.org).
Chapter 1
via free access

reflexive. In the Tang and Northern Song periods, however, members of the li-
terati wrote about paintings—even portraits—in ways that reveal an under-
standing of painting as a construction: a painting was by nature an artifact, one
that incorporated the painter’s interpretation of his subject.80 The eunuch also
stands out among so many figures of women, and he and a concubine gaze
together at another concubine appraising a painting, possibly her own por-
trait. It is significant that viewers of In the Palace cannot see precisely what
image this female viewer, the other concubines, and the eunuch are all looking
at. This may be a complicated trope for the unknowable female perspective.
A female gaze (which might be interpreted as female subjectivity) is evident
throughout: here, in the images of women regarding themselves in mirrors,
and in the images of women watching musical performances, but this group in
particular suggests that the figures represented in this scroll are an entirely ar-
tificial construction on the part of a male painter, highlighting the problem of
authenticity that arises when men create figures that serve as models of
femininity.
Could the Song version of In the Palace have been painted by a woman?
Painting histories do describe women artists who specialize in figures: for ex-
ample, Liu Guifei in the Southern Song (as mentioned above) or a Ms. Tong 童
氏 of the Southern Tang period.81 Even if the unidentified copyist were female,
however, what is depicted here does not reflect a consistently female subjectiv-
ity: the point of view in places is indistinguishable from that of a male painter.
For one thing, because the scroll has been recorded as a copy of a Zhou Wenju
original, one must assume that to a great extent this scroll reflects his perspec-
tive on the theme. Secondly, the content of the scroll does not substantially
depart from the depictions of women in erotic poetry or in other examples of
80 Ronald C. Egan, “Poems on Paintings: Su Shih and Huang T’ing-chien,” Harvard Journal of
Asiatic Studies 43, no. 2 (1983): 413–19, 421, 425–26, 434–40, 444. On artfulness, naturalness,
and the genuine in paintings of the Northern Song court and literati, see Martin J. Powers,
“Discourses of Representation in Tenth and Eleventh Century China,” in The Art of Inter-
preting, ed. Susan C. Scott (University Park, Pa.: Department of Art History, Pennsylvania
State University, 1995), 102–108. For a literati comment on portraiture, see Su Shi, “Zeng
xiezhen He Chong xiucai 贈寫真何充秀才 [For the Portraitist and Cultivated Talent He
Chong],” in Su Shi shiji hezhu 蘇軾詩集合注 [Annotated Selections of Su Shi’s Poetry], ed.
Feng Yingliu 馮應榴 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 2001), 2:560–61; a translation appears in
Peter C. Sturman, “In the Realm of Naturalness: Problems of Self-Imaging by the Northern
Sung Literati,” in Arts of the Sung and Yüan, ed. Maxwell K. Hearn and Judith G. Smith
(New York: Department of Asian Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1996), 166–67.
81 On Ms. Tong, see Tang, Yutai huashi, 2.130–31; cf. Xuanhe huapu, 6.183–84, and Du Mu
都穆 (1458–1525), Tiewang shanhu 鐵網珊瑚 [Iron Net for Coral] (1758; reprint, Taipei:
Guoli Zhongyang Tushuguan, 1970), 13.3b.

via free access
54 Chapter 1
shinü hua from the Tang and Song eras, suggesting that if the copyist did not
rely on Zhou Wenju’s vision, he or she perhaps drew upon established images
of palace women, which were largely constructed with the assumption of a
male perspective. As literary scholars have suggested, though, a woman herself
could adopt such a perspective in her own act of cross-dressing. In the case
of the Song copy of In the Palace, both male and female gazes are perceptible,
and we might conclude that the painting is thus an example of transvestite
subjectivity.
Pictorial Representations of Inner Feelings
Gu Kaizhi, a figure painter and portraitist working predominantly in the latter

half of the fourth century, wrote that artists must convey a figure’s inner quali-
ties, which he described using the comprehensive term “spirit” (shen 神).82 His
biography in the Jin History (Jinshu 晉書) records that he once addressed the
issue of pictorial interpretation of poetic themes by citing a poetic couplet:
“My hand sweeps over the five strings” is easy to paint,

but “My eye bids farewell to homing geese” is difficult.
手揮五絃易，目送歸鴻難。
One interpretation of this couplet is that the depiction of feelings (qing 情)

or moods (yi 意) presents different representational challenges than do con-
crete images.83 The first line refers to the representation of a musician’s per-
formance, a straightforward task for a painter. The second, however, presents a
more complex image: not merely the spectacle of migrating geese, but in addi-
tion the mood that such a spectacle would arouse. In his simple statement, this
82 For discussions of this term, see Ronald Egan, “Conceptual and Qualitative Terms in
Historical Perspective,” in A Companion to Chinese Art, ed. Martin J. Powers and Katherine
R. Tsiang (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2016), 278; and Bush and Shih, Early Chinese
Texts on Painting, 14, 33–34.
83 Translated by Hsio-yen Shih in “Poetry Illustration and the Works of Ku K’ai-chih,” in The
Translation of Art: Essays on Chinese Painting and Poetry, ed. James C.Y. Watt (Hong Kong:
Centre for Translation Projects, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1976), 8 n. 8. She identi-
fies the poetic lines as from Xi Kang 嵇康 (223–62), “Zeng xiucai ru jun wu shou 贈秀才
入軍五首 [For the First Degree Graduate upon Entering the Army, Five Poems, 4/5],”
dedicated to Xi Xi 嵇熹, in Xiao and Hu, Wen xuan, 24.6a. For a discussion of poetic
moods in painting, see Egan, “Conceptual and Qualitative Terms in Historical Perspec-
tive,” 289–90.

via free access
painter identifies one of the central problems of his art. The anecdote not only
suggests the difficulties inherent in making a visual interpretation of poetry,
but also reveals that even the earliest accounts of Chinese artistic practice ex-
press a concern with the problem of the representation of emotion in painting:
a task that is complicated by issues of subjectivity.
This interest in the pictorial rendering of emotions, especially those associ-
ated with poetry, increased in the Song dynasty. The scholar Ouyang Xiu 歐陽
修 (1007–72) discussed the ability to convey a state of mind as separating artists
from artisans, a matter of some consequence to connoisseurs:
Loneliness and calmness are moods difficult to paint. Though a painter

may capture them, a viewer won’t necessarily recognize them. For this
reason, though it is easy to perceive the flowing swiftness of [creatures]
flying or running, or beings with superficial mindsets, it is hard to shape
relaxed contentment or austere stillness, or a heart set on what is distant.
As for [depicting] high and low, facing forward and turning back, far and
near, and layering and overlapping, these are the arts of the artisan
painter, not a matter for refined connoisseurs.
蕭條澹泊，此難畫之意，畫者得之，覽者未必識也。故飛走漽速，意
淺之物易見，而閒和嚴靜，趣遠之心難形。若乃高下向背，遠近重
複，此畫工之藝耳，非精鑒之事也。84
The entire passage concerns perception in painting, on the part of both viewer
and artist. Ouyang Xiu distinguishes between rendering appearances and con-
veying feelings—the latter a rarefied skill that imparts a subtle sense of natu-
ralism to a painting. Perhaps some of the scholarly disdain for shinü hua comes
from a sense that the feelings embodied in the eroticized figures common to
the genre were altogether too evident.
This concern for the rendering of feelings in painting reflects the idea that
they are an intrinsic part of human nature. This is set out in early texts, includ-
ing the Book of Rites (Liji 禮記):
The seven universal feelings are fondness, anger, sorrow, fear, love, hate,
and desire. These seven one is capable of without study.
84 My translation is a modified version of that by Susan Bush in The Chinese Literati on Paint-
ing: Su Shih (1037–1101) to Tung Ch’i-ch’ang (1555–1636) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1971), 69, 194.

via free access
56 Chapter 1
何謂人情、喜、怒、哀、懼、愛、惡、欲。七者弗學而能。85
It has been suggested that in this passage the concept of qing overlaps with
that of “nature” (xing 性) and that qing is better translated as “the genuine,”
and indeed the meaning of the term appears to undergo an evolution in sev-
eral philosophical texts.86 Philosophers propose that emotions are responses
to reality, a position reiterated in literary texts.87 This connection demonstrates
why questions of subjectivity are so crucial in works that represent emotion.
Part of what made the pictorial representation of emotion challenging was
the conceptualization of it as the outward counterpart to an interior state—
feeling—as developed in early theoretical texts on poetry. A classic articula-
tion of this idea occurs in the Great Preface’s passage on poetry speaking to
intent:
What in the heart is intent is poetry when emitted in words. An emotion

moves within and takes form in words. If words do not suffice, then one
sighs; if sighing does not suffice, then one prolongs it [the emotion] in
song; if prolonging through song does not suffice, then one unconsciously
dances it with hands and feet.
在心為志。發言為詩。情動於中而形於言。言之不足。故嗟歎之。嗟
歎之不足。故永歌之。永歌之不足。不知手之舞之。足之蹈之也。88
These lines locate feeling within the xin 心, which refers to both heart and
mind, and explain the different outward forms feelings may take, all of which
might be characterized as ways of expressing emotion.89 The Great Preface is
85 Li yun 禮運 [The Conveyance of Rites],” Liji zhushu 禮記注疏 [Annotated “Book of Rites”],
ed. Ruan Yuan (1815), 22.431, <http://hanchi.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/ihp/hanji.htm> (accessed 3
June 2016). For a summary of the origins of this text and scholarship on it, see Loewe,
Early Chinese Texts, 293–97.
86 A.C. Graham, Studies in Chinese Philosophy & Philosophical Literature (Singapore: Insti-
tute of East Asian Philosophies, 1986), 59–66.
87 Chad Hansen, “Qing (Emotions) 情 in Pre-Buddhist Chinese Thought,” in Emotions in
Asian Thought: A Dialogue in Comparative Philosophy, ed. Joel Marks and Roger T. Ames
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 181–211.
88 Translated by Pauline Yu in The Reading of Imagery, 31–32; brackets in original. Cf. Ruan,
Maoshi zhengyi, 1.13 (accessed 30 May 2016).
89 This is similar to the Foucauldian concept of the interior soul inscribed upon the body,
insofar as one might consider the soul as the seat of intent; for an analysis of Michel Fou-
cault’s formulation, see Butler, Gender Trouble, 135. Even closer to the concept articulated

via free access
part of the Mao 毛 commentary on the first poem in the Book of Songs. The
Mao school introduced allegorical readings for the poems (further discussed in
Chapter 2), and one of the important aspects of the Great Preface is the con-
nection between emotion and morality.90
Other literary texts further clarify the origins and manifestations of emo-
tion. As early as the Qin (221–207 bce) and Han dynasties, it was believed that
the heart/mind could be stirred by external circumstances or phenomena.91 In
the sixth century, Liu Xie 劉勰 (ca. 465–522) reiterates that the seven emotions
respond to things and could be expressed in song (or poetry), and, referencing
the Great Preface, expands upon this point:
Feelings are moved and words form; reason arises and patterns are per-
ceived; one follows what is hidden to arrive at what is manifest, and
therefore the inner can stand for what is outer.
夫情動而言形，理發而文見，蓋沿隱以至顯，因内而符外者也。92
Song dynasty poets continue to address this perceived connection between

inner feelings and outward expressions of emotion. For example, Li Qingzhao
wrote a song lyric to the tune “A Cut Plum Branch (Yi jian mei 一剪梅)” that
ends with these lines:
One cannot arrange for this feeling to disappear.

Even as it drops from the brow
It still rises in the heart.
此情無計可消除。纔下眉頭，却上心頭。
in the Great Preface is a discussion of emotion, the body, music, and movement in Leslie
Gotfrit, “Women Dancing Back: Disruption and the Politics of Pleasure,” in Postmodern-
ism, Feminism, and Cultural Politics, ed. Henry A. Giroux (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1991), 177–78.
91 Stephen Owen, Readings in Chinese Literary Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East
Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1992), 205–206.
92 Liu Xie, “Ming shi 明詩 [Explaining Poetry]” and “Tixing 體性 [Style and Nature],” Xinyi
“Wenxin diaolong” 新譯文心雕龍 [New Interpretation of “The Literary Mind and the Carv-
ing of Dragons”], ed. Luo Ligan 羅立乾 (Taipei: Sanmin shuju, 1996), 2.82, 6.446; cf. Liu
Xie, The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons: A Study of Thought and Pattern in Chi-
nese Literature (Wenxin diaolong 文心雕龍), trans. Vincent Yu-chung Shih (Hong Kong:
The Chinese University Press, 1983), 60–61, 306–307.

via free access
58 Chapter 1
Li Qingzhao is discussing the feelings of “mutual longing” (xiangsi 相思) and

“melancholy” (chou 愁) in this lyric; what is new here is her suggestion that
facial expressions can be governed but feelings in the heart cannot.93
This idea that inner feelings could be manifested outwardly proves crucial
for the visualization of emotion in painting. Painters, like poets, sought to rep-
resent women’s feelings and sensibilities naturalistically. Lyricists, for exam-
ple, wrote in first-person female voice for dramatic purposes, expecting that
women would sing their compositions; when performed by female entertain-
ers, the lyrics seemed to convey women’s genuine feelings.94 Painting required
an enactment that paid attention to visible cues, as indicated by Tang Hou: he
suggested that the convincing pictorial representation of longing depended
upon the rendering of a figure’s expression, gesture, and actions, as well as the
depiction of meaningful objects in her environment (such as a flute).95 Thus,
as in other cultures, painters principally articulated figures’ emotions using
the body,96 but they also deployed culturally specific cues with received asso-
ciations. In some cases, a painting’s style might suggest the prevailing mood.97
Through various visual strategies, painters sought to arouse viewers’ feelings.
Modes of Representing Emotion in Figure Painting

In figure painting, what primarily identified a pictorial subject as “emotional”
was attention to how feeling manifested in the body. Both poets and painters
recognized that facial expression was especially important in conveying mood.
The “Rhyme-Prose on Literature” (Wen fu 文賦) by Lu Ji 陸機 (261–303) in-
cludes the couplet:
93 Ronald Egan translates the full lyric and discusses its implications in The Burden of Female
Talent, 114–15, 331–32; cf. Li Qingzhao, “Yi jian mei,” QSC, 2:928 (with one changed charac-
ter).
94 Chang, The Evolution of Chinese Tz’u Poetry, 66.
95 See my translation in the Introduction.
96 Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the
Social History of Pictorial Style, 2nd ed. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
1988), 61.
97 For connections between style and melancholy, see Arthur Mu-sen Kao [Gao Musen]
高木森, “Shiren hua de qingchou yu yaxing—Jinchao yu Nan Song shiren hua de shiqing
士人畫的清愁與雅興–金朝與南宋士人畫的詩情 [Pure Melancholy and Refined
Enthusiasm of Literati Paintings: Poetic Sentiment of Literati Paintings of the Jin and
Southern Song Dynasties],” Gugong wenwu yuekan 故宮文物月刊 [The National Palace
Museum Monthly of Chinese Art], no. 59 (February 1988): 79.

via free access
Truly there is no difference between feeling and appearance,

and thus every alteration appears on the face.
信情貌之不差。故每變而在顏。98
Accordingly, facial expression was given prominence in figure paintings, and

Song critical texts acknowledge its importance. For example, Su Shi com-
mented on a portrait of himself made by Chen Huaili (n.d.):
The difficult point in catching a likeness is the eyes. As Gu Hutou [Kaizhi]

said, “Expression in portraiture is all in the eyes […]”
傳神之難在於目。顧虎頭云，傳神寫照，都在阿堵中。99
Whereas Gu Kaizhi believed that the eyes held the key to conveying a figure’s
interiority, Su Shi’s own comment on eyes reflects (or perhaps anticipates)
what may be a development of his own era: the importance of the directed
gaze as a component of visual expression in figure painting,100 certainly a phe-
nomenon significant in images of women.
Other anecdotes focus on different aspects of facial expression. One re-
counted in Record of Famous Painters of the Tang Dynasty describes how two
court painters, Han Gan 韓幹 (ca. 715–after 781) and Zhou Fang, both received
commissions for an official’s portrait. The official’s wife judged that Zhou
Fang’s was more successful:
The first has only captured Mr. Zhao’s appearance, but the second also
transmits his character, and his attitude and emotion when he is speak-
ing with a smile.
98 Lu Shiheng 陸士衡 [Lu Ji], “Wen fu 文賦 [Rhyme-Prose on Literature],” in Xiao and Hu,
Wen xuan, 17.2b; cf. Stephen Owen, ed. and trans., An Anthology of Chinese Literature:
Beginnings to 1911 (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996), 336–43; and
translation by David Knechtges in Xiao, Selections of Refined Literature, 3:211–32.
99 Su Shi, “Shu Chen Huaili chuanshen 書陳懷立傳神 [Written for Chen Huaili’s Portrait],”
Su Shi wenji, 5:2214–15. Most of the text is translated in Ronald C. Egan, Word, Image, and
Deed in the Life of Su Shi (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard Uni-
versity, and the Harvard-Yenching Institute, 1994), 282; and Osvald Sirén, “Su Tung-p’o as
an Art Critic,” Geografiska Annaler 17 (1935): 442–43.
100 On Gu Kaizhi, see Egan, “Conceptual and Qualitative Terms,” 281–82; on Su Shi, see Spiro,
“Creating Ancestors,” 62.

via free access
60 Chapter 1
前畫者空得趙朗狀貌。後畫者兼移其神氣，得趙朗情性笑言之姿。101
This story continued to circulate in the Song dynasty, appearing in Guo Ruoxu’s
Experiences in Painting. Guo’s text also contains an account of the lesser-known
figure painter Tian Jing 田景 of the Northern Song:
He painted two boys playing chess in front of a monk: the winner was
triumphant, the loser dejected, and the monk watched them and
smiled—just as in real life.
作二童奕碁於僧前。一則乘勝而矜誇。一則敗北而悔沮。僧臨視而
笑。聸顧如生。102
These anecdotes indicate that character and feeling were considered aspects
of interiority and that a painter’s ability to convey a figure’s interiority through
facial expression was prized.
Gesture, too, was important, although critics mention it less often. A differ-
ent passage from Su Shi’s colophon on the art of portrait painting refers to the
role of gesture in capturing one’s essence:
Jester Meng [fl. ca. 591 bce] imitated Sunshu Ao, clapping his hands, talk-
ing and laughing, so well that people cried out: “The dead live again!” Did
he get his entire body to take on the resemblance? No, he did it by grasp-
ing where his feelings and thoughts lay, that’s all.
優孟學孫叔敖，抵掌談笑，至使人謂死者複生。此豈能舉體皆似耶。
亦得其意思所在而已。103
Gesture can also play a role in conveying emotion. Consider the story of Cai
Yan 蔡琰 (courtesy name Wenji 文姬, b. 178) as told in Lady Wenji’s Return to
China (Wenji gui Han tu canjuan 文姬歸漢圖殘卷). Fragments of a Song
101 Zhu, Tangchao minghua lu, 6; Guo, Tuhua jianwen zhi, 5.11a; cf. Alexander Soper’s transla-
tion in Experiences in Painting, 80–81. Dora C.Y. Ching discusses this passage in terms of
conveying a figure’s spirit in “The Language of Portraiture in China,” in Powers and Tsiang,
A Companion to Chinese Art, 143.
102 Guo, Tuhua jianwen zhi, 3.19a; cf. Alexander Soper’s translation in Experiences in Painting,
54.
103 Su, “Shu Chen Huaili chuanshen,” Su Shi wenji, 5: 2214–15. Audrey Spiro discusses this pas-
sage in terms of the importance of posture and gesture in “Seeing through Words: Shishuo
Xinyu and the Visual Arts, a Case Study,” Early Medieval China 13–14, no. 1 (2007): 181.

via free access
painting by this title survive in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.104 The poetic
tradition includes many recensions of her story, beginning with accounts of
her tragic life, long thought to be authored by Wenji herself.105 The Boston
painting is based on a Tang cycle of poems by Liu Shang 劉商 (fl. ca. 766–80),
“Eighteen Songs of a Nomad Flute” (Hujia shiba pai 胡笳十八拍). His verses
relate how the Xiongnu, a nomadic people of Central Asia, invaded China and
kidnapped Wenji, the daughter of an official, in 196. After removing her to the
Central Asian steppe,106 a nomad chieftain marries her, and she bears his two
children. (In another accounting, Wenji’s children have different fathers: a
chieftain and his son.107 Liu Shang’s rendering of the slowly developing attach-
ment between Wenji and her nomad husband may reflect the importance of
romance in Tang literary circles.)
The Boston painting agrees with Liu Shang’s poems in many details, al-
though the unknown painter does make changes: for example, the nomads are
represented as Khitans of the Liao dynasty (947–1125), a substitution that
makes sense in the Song context.108 As long as Wenji lives among nomads she
wishes to return home, and after twelve years her ransom at last arrives. But
then, in the most heartrending scene of the painting, Wenji must bid goodbye
to her nomad husband and children, who cannot accompany her back to
China (fig. 5). Unmistakable gestures of sorrow reveal how deeply this event
affects her and those who care for her. The scene shows twelve figures crying
into their sleeves, including Wenji herself at the center of the group. Wenji’s
children reach out to her, clutching at her clothes. The viewer recognizes the
grief felt by Wenji’s husband, the largest figure, from the intensity of his ges-
104 The surviving four scenes are reproduced in Wu Tung, Masterpieces of Chinese Painting
from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: Tang through Yuan Dynasties (Boston: Museum of
Fine Arts, 1996), cat. nos. 12–15. A copy of the entire composition is preserved in Eighteen
Songs of a Nomad Flute (Hujia shiba pai tu 胡笳十八拍圖), Metropolitan Museum of Art
(1973.120.3), New York; published in Robert A. Rorex and Wen Fong, Eighteen Songs of a
Nomad Flute: The Story of Lady Wen-chi, a Fourteenth Century Handscroll in the Metropoli-
tan Museum of Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1974). Rorex and Fong trans-
late Liu Shang’s complete cycle of poems as well.
105 Hans H. Frankel argues that none could have been written by her in “Cai Yan and the
Poems Attributed to Her,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 5, no. 1/2
(July 1983): 133–56.
106 Irene S. Leung points out that this is one aspect of Wenji’s story where poets take some
liberties, in “The Frontier Imaginary in the Song Dynasty (960–1279): Revisiting Cai Yan’s
Barbarian Captivity and Return” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2001), 75–76.
108 Irene Leung discusses a similar substitution in Northern Song literati rhetoric in “The
Frontier Imaginary in the Song Dynasty (960–1279),” 52–55.

via free access
62 Chapter 1
Figure 5 Detail of Lady Wenji’s Return to China: Parting from Nomad Husband and
Children. Southern Song dynasty, ca. 1125–50; handscroll mounted as album leaf, ink,
color, and gold on silk, 24.8 × 67.2 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Denman Waldo
Ross Collection (28.64). Photograph © 2017 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
ture: he covers his face with both hands, as someone tries to comfort him. In
this painting, where the diminutive scale of the figures prevents the viewer
from focusing on their facial expressions, the painter depends upon gesture to
communicate the prevailing mood.
Context is a third way that emotion may be conveyed in figure painting. In
paintings of women with romantic themes, a woman’s preoccupation with her
love relationship is often revealed through pictorial tropes. Certain material
things in her vicinity—generally elements associated with her through me-
tonymy—serve as sites for the projection of her feelings.109 The object may
operate as a metaphor, such as an incense burner standing for desire; or its
109 This was true in poetry as well; for a discussion of the meaningful objects in a woman’s
environment, see Anne Margaret Birrell, “Erotic Decor: A Study of Love Imagery in the

via free access
material may be evocative, as in the use of spotted bamboo for blinds or cos-
metic boxes. Alternatively, the environment itself may be meaningful, filled
with natural elements that beg for interpretation.
Melding of Feeling and Scene

One might assume that conveying emotion was only a critical problem in fig-
ure painting, but natural scenes, too, were understood to be imbued with feel-
ing. Even a landscape painting might convey a certain mood.110 Strategies for
conveying feeling may have derived from notions of the capabilities of poetic
imagery. The Great Preface speaks of the rhetorical category of xing 興, a term
translated as either “stimulus” or “affective image,”111 used to designate images
that stir emotions rather than refer to feelings. In the third century, Lu Ji writes
of the concept of ganying 感應, “stirring and response,” as an important feature
of poetic composition.112 These concepts anticipate the idea of using scenes
made up of such images to arouse emotions.
Critics of Chinese poetry formulated several theories concerning the rela-
tionship of feeling to scene.113 Two are especially important for the rendering
of feeling in painting. I translate the first, you jing ru qing 由景入情, as “moving
from scenes to the realm of feelings.” The second, qing jing jiaorong 情景交融,
I translate as “the melding of feeling and scene.” Both speak to poets’ use of
natural scenes to arouse specific emotions in the reader. The basis for these
concepts seems to have been first articulated in a text attributed to Wang
Changling 王昌齡 (ca. 690–ca. 756). It says,
There are three worlds in poetry. The first is called the world of things; the
second is called the world of feelings; the third is called the world of
ideas.
詩有三境。一曰物境，二曰情境，三曰意境。114
Sixth Century a.d. Anthology: ‘Yu-t’ai hsin-yung’ 玉臺新詠 (New Poems from a Jade Ter-
race)” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1979).
110 Kao, “Shiren hua de qingchou yu yaxing,” 68; Egan, “Conceptual and Qualitative Terms,”
285–87.
111 Yu, The Reading of Imagery, 48–49; Owen, Readings in Chinese Literary Thought, 46.
112 Owen, Readings in Chinese Literary Thought, 173–74.
113 Samei, Gendered Persona and Poetic Voice, 97–98.
114 Attributed to Wang Changling, Shi ge 詩格 [Rules for Poetry], translated by Richard Wain-
wright Bodman in “Poetics and Prosody in Early Mediaeval China: A Study and Transla-
tion of Kūkai’s Bunkyō Hifuron” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1978), 375 n. 6.

via free access
64 Chapter 1
This definition provides a framework for developing ideas about the potential
for interaction between the natural world, emotion, and meaning.
In the Song dynasty, the complex connections between feeling and scene
were clarified by Fan Xiwen 范晞文 (n.d.), who recognized this rhetorical strat-
egy in the poetry of Du Fu 杜甫 (712–70). Citing excerpts of several poems, he
writes that the poet alternated lines describing a scene with lines expressing
feelings. Furthermore, Fan defines several terms that later critics would con-
tinue to examine. These include the nuances of “feelings-within-scene” (jing
zhong zhi qing 景中之情), “scene-within-feelings” (qing zhong zhi jing 情中之
景), and the “melding of feeling and scene.” Fan concludes that when one
comes upon a scene, one’s emotions must be stirred, and that in the absence of
a scene, one’s emotions cannot be stirred.115
Another way, then, to convey feeling in a figure painting was to make strate-
gic use of natural elements that were understood as metaphors. They might
stand for specific feelings or bring to mind a situation that would stimulate an
emotional response in the viewer. For example, in paintings of women longing
for absent lovers, natural images such as plum trees or bamboo often stand for
a missing man, whereas the appearance of ducks swimming together stands
for lifelong love.
The evocative natural scene could also appear in a figure painting as a
screen-within-painting, especially useful in paintings that interpreted poetic
themes.116 Indeed, several Song paintings of lovelorn women take advantage of
this strategy: they include Pounding Cloth (figs. 12.1–12.8), A Lady at Her Dressing
Table (fig. 13), and Embroidered Cage, Morning Mirror (fig. 14). The tactic of cre-
ating an obviously artificial landscape such as a painting-within-painting for
the purpose of evoking specific feelings might be regarded as a pictorial coun-
terpart to what critics such as Fan Xiwen would term “scene-within-feelings.”
Critic Wang Fuzhi 王夫之 (1619–92) regarded the scene-within-feelings as “a
metaphorical scene, generated from the poet’s authentic mood.”117 This makes
the painting-within-painting an ideal vehicle for the expression of feeling, and
115 Owen, Readings in Chinese Literary Thought, 630 n. 14. Fan phrases the relevant concept as
follows: “the interaction of feeling with scene so that the two become inseparable” (情景
相觸而莫分); he also writes, “Therefore, we know that a scene will not come forth with-
out the presence of feeling, and feelings will not arise apart from the presence of a scene.”
(固知景無情不發。情無景不生。) Fan Xiwen 范晞文, comp., Duichuang yeyu 對牀
夜語 [Night Chats Facing My Bed] (reprint, Changsha: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1937), 2.11.
116 Wu Hung, The Double Screen: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996), 21.
117 Owen, Readings in Chinese Literary Thought, 473. An alternative interpretation is that
images used to embody feeling in a poem constituted an “imaginary” scene rather than an

via free access
the Chinese term for it, huazhong hua 畫中畫, implies the perceived interiority
of such a pictorial element.
The use of scenes to evoke feelings is a strategy well suited to painting, not
only because it is inherently visual, but also because it permits restraint in rep-
resentations of emotion, an element valued in poetry from earliest times. The
first poem in the Book of Songs, “‘Guanguan’ Cry the Ospreys,” is praised in the
Confucian Analects for its understated treatment of joy and sadness, with nei-
ther going to extremes.118 By the Song dynasty, the best-regarded composers of
song lyrics tried to avoid speaking directly of feelings, even though this genre
of poetry almost exclusively focused on emotional situations, especially mel-
ancholy or lament. The ideal would later be articulated in the phrase “not a
single word voices complaint” (wu yi zi yan yuan 無一字言怨), first applied by
the critic Shen Deqian 沈德潛 (1673–1769) to Li Bai’s poem “Jade-Staircase
Grievance” (Yujie yuan 玉階怨).119 For these poets, hinting at feeling through
the use of appropriate scenes resulted in a subtlety that was highly esteemed.120
In figure painting, I argue, bodily expression serves as the pictorial equiva-
lent of verbalizing feelings and natural imagery as the equivalent of the evoca-
tive poetic scene. Thus, in paintings of lonely women, the subjects are rarely
shown with agitated facial expressions or histrionic gestures, as these would be
inappropriate to the interpretation of poetic themes and the representation of
refined figures. In Pounding Cloth, the women’s expressions and gestures, while
undoubtedly mournful, remain subdued. Although the figures gradually be-
come more expressive, the tenor of their mood is carried by the opening natu-
ral scene and, in the climactic scenes, screens with appropriate natural imagery.
These subtly underscore the nature and depth of their feelings.
Thus a Song figure painter concerned with the visualization of emotion has
a number of strategies at his or her disposal. Some are purely visual, such as
attention to a figure’s expression and gesture, which might be regarded as the
pictorial counterpart to the use of a protagonist’s voice in poetry. Others seem
“actual” one; James J.Y. Liu, The Art of Chinese Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1962), 95.
118 “The Master said, ‘In “‘Guanguan’ Cry the Ospreys” there is joy without lasciviousness,
sorrow without deep wounding.’” (子曰。關雎樂而不淫。哀而不傷。) “Ba yi 八佾
[Eight Pantomimes],” in Ruan, Lunyu zhushu, 30 (accessed 30 May 2016). For a translation
of the poem, see Watson, The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry, 18.
119 Samei, Gendered Persona and Poetic Voice, 150. I am grateful to Shuen-fu Lin and Grace
S. Fong for alerting me to the origin of the phrase. Li Bai’s poem appears in YFSJ, 2:43.632,
and is translated in David Hinton, trans. and ed., Classical Chinese Poetry: An Anthology
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 187.
120 Chang, The Evolution of Chinese Tz’u Poetry, 37.

via free access
66 Chapter 1
virtually identical to those used by the poet: the use of objects within the picto-
rial context as metaphors or the use of natural imagery to convey feelings. For
the depiction of desire or longing in paintings of women, however, perhaps the
best strategy of all is the visual adaptation of poetic themes that connote these
feelings.
Interiority and the Inner Quarters

Because feeling is considered essentially inner in Chinese thought, I argue that
the “inner quarters,” or the women’s area of a wealthy household,121 are an es-
pecially appropriate metaphorical space for the exploration of interiority, and
this may explain why poets and painters saw the female figure as ideal for the
projection of desire. This construction dates back to New Songs from a Jade
Terrace: Xu Ling’s preface suggests the importance of the inner quarters and
interiority.122 This is why Tang Hou wrote, “The art of representing ladies lies in
catching their attitudes in the inner apartments.”123 Song paintings and poems
set in inner rooms and gardens reveal that these locations are strongly identi-
fied with romantic relationships.
The concept of the inner quarters reflects the gendered dialectic between
nei 内 and wai 外, “inner” and “outer.” In early ritual texts, “inner” is conceived
as feminine and “outer” as masculine. The Neize 内則 chapter of the Book of
Rites includes the following recommendation: “Men do not speak of the inner,
and women do not speak of the outer.” (男不言内，女不言外。)124 Song con-
servatives Sima Guang 司馬光 (1019–86) and Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200) both fol-
lowed this source.125 While the terms nei and wai appear to originate in notions
of physical space, they come to represent ideals of feminine and masculine
121 Only the wealthy could afford to practice strict gender segregation; Patricia Buckley
Ebrey, The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 23–25. On the inner quar-
ters as a physical space, see Lisa Raphals, Sharing the Light: Representations of Women and
Virtue in Early China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 225–26.
122 Rouzer, Articulated Ladies, 132–36, 289, 305–309; however, he tends to see this rhetorical
move not as a means of signaling the rendering of intimate feelings but rather internal
politics among, for example, court poets. For a complete translation of Xu Ling’s preface,
see Birrell, New Songs from a Jade Terrace, 339–43.
123 Chou, Tang Hou’s “Huajian,” 163.
124 “Neize 內則 [Pattern of the Family],” in Ruan, Liji zhushu, 27.520 (accessed 3 June 2016).
Several of the pertinent passages are translated in Robert Hans van Gulik, Sexual Life in
Ancient China: A Preliminary Survey of Chinese Sex and Society from ca. 1500 b.c. till 1644
a.d. (reprint, Leiden: Brill, 2003), 58–59; and Raphals, Sharing the Light, 224, 232.
125 Ebrey discusses their writings in The Inner Quarters, 23–25.

via free access
conduct. In this sense, nei and wai complement the concepts of yin 陰 (femi-
nine, dark, passive) and yang 陽 (masculine, light, active).126
Spaces designated as the women’s quarters typically included inner suites
of rooms and attached gardens, all of which were (at least in theory) off-limits
to men, except when they joined their wives for sexual interaction.127 An early
Northern Song hanging scroll, Palace Banquet (Sui gong yanyou tu 隋宮讌遊
圖, fig. 10.1), illustrates a particularly grand example of such a space: the rooms
and gardens of the women’s quarters of the palace appear before a series of
locked gates (one of which seems to be guarded by female servants) and high
walls (fig. 10.2). In Song dynasty song lyrics, poets use special terms for this
area, including compounds that build upon the characters shen 深 (“inner” or
“deep”) and zhong 中 (“middle” or “inner”) to suggest places nested within the
heart of a residential complex;128 e.g. “inner rooms” (shen’ge 深閣 or shengui 深
閨);129 “inner place” (shenchu 深處);130 “inner palace” (shengong 深宮);131 and
“inner courtyard” (shen tingyuan 深庭院, shenyuan 深院, or zhongting 中庭).132
Alternatively, they used words that explicitly refer to women’s private spaces
(ge 閣 or gui 閨, as in shen’ge and shengui above), resulting in such terms as
126 Raphals, Sharing the Light, 139–68, 212–13. The concepts of yin-yang are first set out in the
Yijing 易經 [Book of Changes].
127 In practice this segregation was not necessarily strictly observed: Ebrey, The Inner Quar-
ters, 25, and Raphals, Sharing the Light, 225.
128 I included an abbreviated list of such terms in Lara C.W. Blanchard, “Lonely Women and
the Absent Man: The Masculine Landscape as Metaphor in the Song Dynasty Painting of
Women,” in Gendered Landscapes: An Interdisciplinary Exploration of Past Place and
Space, ed. Bonj Szczygiel, Josephine Carubia, and Lorraine Dowler (University Park,
Penn.: The Center for Studies in Landscape History, The Pennsylvania State University,
2000), 37.
129 Ouyang Xiu, Tune: “Xian zhong xin 獻衷心 [Revealing My Inner Heart],” and Du Anshi
杜安世 (n.d.), Tune: “He chong tian 鶴沖天 [Cranes Soaring in the Sky],” QSC, 1:165, 172.
130 Yan Jidao 晏幾道 (fl. ca. 1105), Tune: “Die lian hua 蝶戀花 [Butterflies Love Flowers,
8/14],” and Li Zhiyi 李之儀 (fl. ca. 1113–17), Tune: “Haoshi jin 好事近 [Happy Events
Approaching, 1/3],” QSC, 1:224, 349–50.
131 Yan Jidao, Tune: “Jie pei ling 解佩令 [Song of a Loosened Girdle],” QSC, 1:256.
132 The term shen tingyuan is used in Ouyang Xiu, Tune: “Yujia ao 漁家傲 [Fisherman’s Pride,
3/24],” QSC, 1:136. A play on shen tingyuan and the terms zhongting and shenyuan can be
found in Li Qingzhao, Tune: “Lin jiang xian 臨江仙 [Immortal by the River]”; Tune: “Tian
zi ‘Chou nu’er’ 添字醜奴兒 [‘The Ugly Slave,’ with Added Words]”; and “Chun mu 春暮
[Spring Evening],” Tune: “Yuan wangsun 怨王孫 [Lamenting the Prince],” in QSC, 2:929,
930, 931. The first two of Li Qingzhao’s lyrics are translated in Egan, The Burden of Female
Talent, 329, 340–41; the third is translated by Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung in Li
Ch’ing-chao: Complete Poems (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1979), 33.

via free access
68 Chapter 1
“perfumed rooms” (xianggui 香閨)133 and “boudoir” (guifang 閨房).134 All of

these terms are explicitly gendered as feminine, and the interior places to
which they refer are fitting metaphors for the heart/mind, the seat of feelings.
Occasionally, the inner chambers serve as a metaphor for a woman’s sexual
organs, making them apt sites for the location of desire. One example appears
in the second stanza of a song lyric by scholar Liu Yong 柳永 (987–1053), to the
tune “Spring in the Brocade Hall” (Jintang chun 錦堂春):
Before, I depended on past promises.

In the beginning, how he deceived me,
stealing a snippet of my cloud curls.
When will he return
to be locked deep inside my perfumed chamber?
Just wait until he wants
my bitter clouds and unsettling rain—
I’ll cover myself with the embroidered quilt
and not meet him with joy.
Then at the darkest hour,
I’ll ask him sincerely:
after this, would he dare behave so again?
依前過了舊約，甚當初賺我，偷翦雲鬟。幾時得歸來，香閣深關。待
伊要，尤雲殢雨，纏繡衾，不與同歡。儘更深，款款問伊，今後敢
更無端。135
This lyric presents the intense emotions of an abandoned and frustrated fe-
male persona. The word for “perfumed chamber” (xiangge 香閣) refers not
only to the inner quarters, but also to her body. This is clarified with the next
line’s reference to “bitter clouds and unsettling rain,” a more elaborate version
133 Yan Shu 晏殊 (991–1055), Tune: “Hongchuang ting 紅窗聽 [Listening at the Red Window,
2/2]”; Ouyang Xiu, Tune: “Dongxian geling 洞仙歌令 [Song of a Cave Transcendent, 1/2]”
and Tune: “Gui zi yao 歸自謠 [Song of Return, 2/3]”; Shen Tang 沈唐 (n.d.), Tune:
“Shuangye fei 霜葉飛 [Frosty Leaves Blowing]”; and Du Anshi, Tune: “Cai mingzhu 採明
珠 [Gathering Bright Pearls],” QSC, 1:92, 151, 161, 171, 182.
134 Li Zhiyi, Tune: “Queqiao xian 鵲橋仙 [Transcendent at the Magpie Bridge, 1/2],” QSC,
1:345.
135 Liu Yong, Tune: “Jintang chun,” QSC, 1:29. The complete lyric is translated in James R. High-
tower, “The Songwriter Liu Yung: Part I,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 41, no. 2 (1981):
353; and Lap Lam, “A Reconsideration of Liu Yong and His ‘Vulgar’ Lyrics,” Journal of Song-
Yuan Studies 33 (2003): 20.

via free access
of the well-known kenning for sexual intercourse (“clouds and rain”) that de-
rives from a description of the goddess of Wushan 巫山 in Song Yu’s 宋玉 (290–
223 bce) rhapsodies.136 Thus the inner quarters are uniquely suited for the
expression of feelings of sexual longing and desire.
In poems and paintings on the separation of lovers, the inner quarters gain
further significance from their identification with domestic space. For exam-
ple, Tang poetry set at the frontier deploys the faraway home, itself conceptual-
ized as “inner” in comparison to the outside world, as the focus of a male
persona’s nostalgic thoughts.137 Within that home, sometimes, is the woman
he left behind, installed in the women’s quarters.138 The boudoir then could
serve as the feminine counterpart of the masculine road, though a woman’s
garden may fill that role as well.139 Poetry that examines the woman’s view on
separation from her beloved retains the image of a woman in the inner quar-
ters longing for an absent man, and her environment becomes saturated with
her feelings: hence Su Shi’s poetic reference to a “lonely garden” (jimo yuanlin
寂寞園林).140
Although a text written by Neo-Confucian philosopher Cheng Yi 程頤
(1033–1107) explicitly treats women as more emotional than men,141 men were
not considered to be unemotional. Rather, feelings were conceptualized as “in-
ner” and may have been associated with a person’s “feminine” (yin) aspect,
making feminine space the most appropriate metaphorical setting for the rep-
resentation of emotional figures. Nuances of their feelings can be understood
with attention to the details of the “inner place”: the natural elements of the
136 Shields, Crafting a Collection, 300.

137 Ronald C. Miao, “T’ang Frontier Poetry; An Exercise in Archetypal Criticism,” Qinghua
xuebao 清華學報 [Tsing Hua Journal of Chinese Studies] 10, no. 2 (July 1974): 120.
138 One example is Wang Changling, “Congjun xing 從軍行 [Songs on Following the Army,
1/7],” QTS, 2:143.1443–44; cf. translation by Miao in “T’ang Frontier Poetry,” 118.
139 For the boudoir, see Birrell, trans., New Songs from a Jade Terrace, 19–20. For the garden,
see a pair of lines from a song lyric: “Within the walls, a swing; beyond the walls, the road,
/ beyond the walls, a traveler; within, a laughing beauty.” (牆裏鞦韆牆外道。牆外行
人，牆裏佳人笑。) Su Shi, “Chun jing 春景 [Spring Scene],” Tune: “Die lian hua” (1/8),
QSC, 1:300; cf. translation in James J.Y. Liu, Major Lyricists of the Northern Sung (a.d. 960–
1126) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 153–54; translation by Jiaosheng Wang
in Victor H. Mair, ed., The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994), 322–23; and Julie Landau, trans., Beyond Spring: Tz’u
Poems of the Sung Dynasty (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 124.
140 Su Shi, “Mu chun 暮春 [Evening in Spring],” Tune: “Die lian hua” (4/8), QSC, 1:300.
141 Ebrey, The Inner Quarters, 29.

via free access
70 Chapter 1
enclosed exterior of the garden, or the material elements of the enclosed inte-
rior of the bedroom or boudoir.142
Over the course of many centuries, the bedchamber and boudoir in poetry
become irrevocably associated with the sorrow of separation, from the Book of
Songs to a range of genres including Music Bureau poetry, palace-style poetry,
and song lyric.143 The implications of the setting were so well understood in
the Tang and Five Dynasties that the term “boudoir complaints” (guiyuan
閨怨) became shorthand for the abandoned woman theme in song lyric.144
I propose that this derives from both the binary opposition of home and the
outside world and the perception of the women’s quarters as a place for het-
eroerotic interludes. Interior settings had few temporal elements (except for
dust), but the luxurious objects found within the inner chambers were often
gendered, serving as metaphors for a female persona’s feelings as well as signi-
fying her status—and the higher her status, the more dependent she was on a
man for support, making her more vulnerable.145
Because the inner chamber or boudoir is emphatically interior—an indoor
space located in the innermost part of the household—voyeurism plays a sig-
nificant role in representations of it, at least from a male perspective. In poetry,
a male reader paradoxically finds a female persona that occupies a space for-
bidden to him to be nonetheless completely exposed through the author’s art.146
This location of the female persona in private space lends itself to the revela-
tion of her innermost feelings, made possible by spying on her in her most in-
timate moments. One literary scholar defines the “quintessential rhetorical
movement” of Tang erotic poetry as penetration, especially relevant in regard
to women’s private spaces and thoughts.147 The poetic interest in penetration
may be a strategy for representing increasingly internalized feelings.148
142 Birrell mentions the spatial tensions of the women’s quarters in “Erotic Decor,” 75.
143 Michael E. Workman, “The Bedchamber Topos in the Tz’u Songs of Three Medieval Chi-
nese Poets: Wen T’ing-yün, Wei Chuang, and Li Yü,” in Critical Essays on Chinese Literature,
ed. William H. Nienhauser Jr. (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1976), 168,
181.
144 Chang, The Evolution of Chinese Tz’u Poetry, 116–17.
145 Laing, “Chinese Palace-Style Poetry,” 288; Chang, The Evolution of Chinese Tz’u Poetry, 52.
146 Robertson, “Voicing the Feminine,” 69; Egan, The Burden of Female Talent, 111–12.
147 Paul F. Rouzer, Writing Another’s Dream: The Poetry of Wen Tingyun (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1993), 74.
148 Ronald Egan observes the opposite rhetorical movement, from inner to outer, in a lyric by
Li Qingzhao to the tune “Huanxi sha 浣溪沙 [Sand of Silk-Washing Stream]”: this lyric
begins with a female persona in the women’s quarters and ends with her looking outward
to the natural environment, and he notes that the lyric concerns a woman’s observations

via free access
Courtly and Literati Audiences: Evidence from Commentaries
Who constituted the audience for Song images of women experiencing desire
or longing? Theories of the male gaze have led both art historians and liter-
ary critics to presume a male viewer,149 and commentary that indicates who
owned or viewed certain paintings bears this out. Handscrolls in particular of-
ten included inscriptions appended as colophons by their owners and other
viewers. Many of the extant romantic paintings of women from the Song dy-
nasty belong to this format, which is often associated with particular viewing
contexts: circulated at court, presented to scholar-officials, or shared among
literati friends.150 Although paintings of women inspire less critical commen-
tary than landscapes do, and the circumstances of their creation are rarely re-
corded, the assumption of a predominantly male viewership for these works is
reinforced by colophons that mention who owned them, who ordered them,
or how they were circulated. For example, a colophon on Pounding Cloth (figs.
12.1-12.8), written by the artist Mou Yi, explains that he painted two versions
for his own amusement, although he shared the scrolls with close friends
and ultimately presented one to Lord Wu 吳公, the Commandery Governor
of Wenchang 文昌, and the other to his friend Dong Shi 董史 (fl. ca. 1240), a
connoisseur and collector of painting and calligraphy.151 Such textual accounts
rather than the expression of her emotional state. Egan, The Burden of Talent, 375–76; cf.
Li Qingzhao, “Huanxi sha [3/3],” QSC, 2:928 (a lyric with three variant characters in the last
line).
149 See, for example, I Lo-fen [Yi Ruofen], “Bei Song ti shinü huashi xilun 北宋題仕女畫詩
析論 [Analysis of Northern Song Paintings and Poems on Women],” in Chuancheng yu
chuangxin: Zhongyang Yanjiuyuan Zhongguo Wenzhe Yanjiusuo shi zhounian jinian lun-
wenji 傳承與創新：中央研究院中國文哲研究所十周年紀念論文集 [Tradition
and Innovation: Essays Commemorating the Tenth Anniversary of the Institute of Chinese
Literature and Philosophy at Academia Sinica] (Taipei: Institute of Chinese Literature and
Philosophy, Academia Sinica, 1999), 306; Robertson, “Voicing the Feminine,” 69; Fong,
“Engendering the Lyric,” 113–15; Mary H. Fong, “Images of Women in Traditional Chinese
Painting,” Woman’s Art Journal 17, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 1996): 25. Rouzer argues for a
deeper subtext in Articulated Ladies, 7.
150 For a discussion of literati paintings from the post-Song periods as “events,” see Richard
Vinograd, “Situation and Response in Traditional Chinese Scholar Painting,” The Journal
of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (1988): 365–74.
151 Guoli Gugong Bowuyuan 國立故宮博物院, Gugong shuhua lu 故宮書畫錄 [Record of
Calligraphy and Painting in the Palace Museum], rev. ed. (Taipei: Taiwan shangwu yinshu-
guan, 1965), 2: 4.64–65. In regard to the content of romantic paintings, it may be signifi-
cant that literati friendship in an earlier time “made possible the disclosure of personal
feelings or events that in the context of other, more distant social relationships would be

via free access
72 Chapter 1
exist for only a handful of other Song paintings of women, some of which are
no longer extant. The colophon attached to In the Palace, translated above,
mentions that the Chief Minister of the Court of the Imperial Treasury owned
the original painting in the eleventh century and that Zhang Cheng commis-
sioned a copy of it in the twelfth. The Xuanhe Painting Catalogue, dating to
about 1120, records that Zhang Xuan’s Pounding Silk then belonged to the im-
perial collection; sometime in the early thirteenth century, Jin dynasty (1115–
1234) scholar Yuan Haowen 元好問 (1190–1257) viewed this painting (a copy of
which appears in figs. 11.1–11.2).152 Another painting attributed to Zhang Xuan,
Court Ladies Playing the Qin (Guqin shinü tu 鼓琴士女圖), belonged to the im-
perial collection in 1120, later to the Jin emperor Zhangzong 章宗 (r. 1190–1208),
and some time afterward to the Southern Song prime minister Jia Sidao 賈似
道 (1213–75).153 This painting was probably similar to Palace Ladies Tuning the
Lute (Gongji tiaoqin tu 宮妓挑琴圖) in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (fig.
18).
These examples of shinü hua are associated with specific male viewers.
A study of similar images of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries sug-
gests that paintings with erotic subject matter, including sexually explicit
works, may have been principally intended to elicit a sexual response among
viewers who were predominantly male, whereas works that engaged more
deeply with women’s subjectivity may have had a different purpose and were
especially suitable for female viewers.154 The Song paintings under consider-
ation here, though not as uninhibited as paintings of later eras, still must be
understood as erotic insofar as they engage with ideas about romantic feelings
and relationships, but I argue that their primary design was not necessarily to
sexually arouse their viewers. Women might indeed have related to the figures
depicted within them: written records may have been circumspect about fe-
male viewers for various reasons. In fact, textual accounts attest to a variety of
patronage practices and hint at widespread consumption of paintings of
women experiencing longing or desire.
Although not typical examples of either shinü hua or representations of
love relationships, handscrolls bearing the title Night Revels of Han Xizai (see
figs. 9.1–9.5) have left an intriguing cumulative record of the audience for this
inappropriate”; Anna M. Shields, One Who Knows Me: Friendship and Literary Culture in
Mid-Tang China (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015), 5.
152 Xuanhe huapu, 5.157; Yuan Haowen, Yuan Haowen quanji 元好問全集 [The Complete
Works of Yuan Haowen], 2 vols. (Taiyuan: Shanxi renmin chubanshe, 1990), 1:34.772.
153 Xuanhe huapu, 5.158; Eight Dynasties of Chinese Painting, 9.
154 Cahill, Pictures for Use and Pleasure, 16, 21.

via free access
pictorial theme, which dates back to the Southern Tang. Depicting the mutual
desire of scholars and courtesans in the home of an imperial adviser, these
provocative pictures elicited an atypical quantity of commentary in the form
of published colophons, with much attention paid to the viewers of the scrolls
and the importance of the male gaze. Li Yu of the Southern Tang (known as Li
Houzhu 李後主, the Last Ruler) ordered the original version of the painting—
which does not survive—and several Song texts suggest that his motive was
voyeurism.155 A colophon by Zu Wupo 祖無頗 published in 1079, for example,
reads in part:
The Last Ruler wanted to appoint him as a minister, but from the time he
heard that Han Xizai [902–70] was indulging himself in reclusion unob-
served, he always wanted to spy on the parties in Han’s home. Thus he
ordered painter Gu Hongzhong to do a painting that would catch Han
Xizai.
後主欲用為相，而聞縱逸不檢，每伺其家宴，命畫工顧閎中丹青以
追。156
The colophon uses the term si 伺, “to spy,” to describe the ruler’s behavior.
Later, the role of spy would be assigned to the court painter, although the
ruler’s desire to witness the interaction of men and women at Han Xizai’s
house remains uncontested. As part of the imperial painting collection, Night
155 Wu Hung discusses this painting in terms of the “voyeuristic gaze” in The Double Screen,
68–71. The earliest account of the painting, however, suggests that the ruler wished to
make his minister desist from this behavior; Tao Yue 陶岳, “Han Xizai weibo bu xiu 韓熙
載帷箔不修 [Han Xizai’s Curtains Are Not Drawn]” (1012), Wudai shibu 五代史補 [Sup-
plement to the History of the Five Dynasties] 5 juan (reprint; [China]: Shanyin Song shi,
1887), 12a-b, <https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100367254> (accessed 22 March 2018).
Fuller translations of Song colophons for Night Revels of Han Xizai appear in Chapter 2.
156 Zu Wupo, “Ba Han Xizai yeyan tu 跋韓熙載夜宴圖 [Colophon to Night Revels of Han
Xizai],” in Zu Wuze 祖無擇, Longxue wenji 龍學文集 [Collected Writings of Longxue], ed.
Wang Yunwu 王雲五 (reprint, Taipei: Taiwan shangwu yinshuguan, 1974), 16.13b–14a. A
second, undated colophon that borrows substantially from Zu Wupo’s account includes
this line: “The Last Ruler always spied on the reveling at [Han Xizai’s] house, sending
painters like Gu Hongzhong to enter and make paintings.” (後主每伺其家宴，命畫工
顧閎中輩丹青以進。) This colophon is published (with some minor changes) in
Arthur Mu-sen Kao [Gao Musen] 高木森, “Lun Han Xizai yeyan tu 論『韓熙載夜宴
圖』 [A Study on the Han Hsi-tsai’s Night Banquet],” Dongwu Daxue Zhongguo yishushi
jikan 東吳大學中國藝術史集刊 [Soochow University Journal of Chinese Art History] 12
(October 1982): 2.

via free access
74 Chapter 1
Revels of Han Xizai was duly recorded in the Xuanhe Painting Catalogue, in an
entry that again referred to Li Yu’s insatiable curiosity:
[…] when talk began to spread and the ruler heard one-sided accounts of
Han’s wild indulgences, he thereafter wished to see his staging of noisy
drinking parties in a setting of wine vessels, lamps, and candles. Since the
ruler considered this impossible, he ordered Hongzhong to go to Han’s
house at night to spy on him, then to remember what he saw and paint it.
In this way Night Revels of Han Xizai has passed down to us.
聲傳中外，頗聞其荒縱，然欲見樽俎燈燭間觥籌交錯之態度不可得，
乃命閎中夜至其第竊窺之，目識心記，圖繪以上之，故世有『韓熙載
夜宴圖』。157
In this account, the term for “spying” (qiekui 竊窺), here applied to Gu
Hongzhong, becomes even stronger. The phrase may be broken down into its
component parts: qie, which suggests both stealing and stealth, and kui, which
on its own implies stealthy looking;158 the compound, then, intensifies both
the surreptitious and deceitful qualities of the artist’s look. The ruler is de-
scribed as “desiring to see” (yu jian 欲見). Certainly the Song accounts of this
painting give the impression that the female figures, constructed as feeling af-
fection and desire for the men they entertain, were initially objects of Li Yu’s
gaze.
At the same time, these texts indicate that the ruler’s voyeurism was inap-
propriate. The Xuanhe Painting Catalogue account, for example, ends with the
argument that Night Revels should not be viewed:
As for [Li Yu] having his minister’s dirty laundry painted so that he could
look at it, this is an excessively strange pleasure. It is like the story of
Zhang Chang’s [d. 51 bce] explanation of his customary painting of [his
wife’s] eyebrows, already lacking in propriety. What possible further pur-
pose could there be for leaving it to the world? After one look, one can
throw it away.
至於寫臣下私褻以觀，則泰至多奇樂，如張敞所謂不特畫眉之說，已
自失體，又何必命傳於世哉。一閱而棄之可也。159
157 Xuanhe huapu, 7.193.

158 Ciyuan, s.v. qie, kui.
159 Xuanhe huapu, 7.194.

via free access
Nonetheless, at some point in the Song dynasty, the original composition of

Night Revels of Han Xizai was copied, ensuring that the story would continue to
exist in pictorial form. One official who viewed the Song copy now in the Palace
Museum, Beijing (figs. 9.1–9.5) is Shi Miyuan 史彌遠 (fl. 1195–1220): his seal ap-
pears on the painting.160 Critic Tang Hou also viewed the copy, most likely in
the late thirteenth century; he characterizes it as “not a proper object of enjoy-
ment for a scholar’s collection” (非文房清玩).161 Although the scroll depicts
men and women together, it seems to be associated primarily with a male au-
dience, either court figures or scholars, despite suggestions that it is inappro-
priate for any audience, and the different subjectivities of patron and viewers
lead to different interpretations of the subject.
…
Questions of authorship and audience complicate the construction of the fem-
inine image in works on romantic themes. Perhaps so many paintings with
romantic themes present only women because a male author or viewer can
look at a female figure and imagine himself as the object of her desire if no
male figure is present to belie the fantasy. While male poets, painters, and pa-
trons are largely responsible for the poetic and pictorial images of women that
depict them as experiencing longing or desire, women also participated in the
construction of these personae and figures. Thus, the subjectivities repre-
sented in these works cross between masculine and feminine, containing both
elements. The desiring female persona or figure is necessarily artificial, with
the consequence that authenticity is of great concern in these images. The ef-
fort to establish authenticity for the persona is apparent in critics’ readiness to
see female-authored poetry as representative of the author’s subjectivity. It is
also apparent in commentary on erotic paintings that betrays the writer’s ex-
pectations that the female figures reflect reality.
Some of the unattributed Song paintings discussed in these pages, perhaps
especially those that would have appealed to a female audience, may have
been the work of female painters. But because the aims of a female painter in
making images of desiring women might have been identical to those of a
male painter—to relate an allegory, to comment on her own experiences, to
160 Xu Bangda 徐邦達, “Gu Hongzhong hua Han Xizai yeyan tu 顧閎中畫《韓熙載夜宴
圖》 [Ku Hung-chung’s ‘Night Revels of Han Hsi-tsai’],” Zhongguo wenwu 中國文物
2 (March 1980): 26–27.
161 The Chinese text appears in Chou, Tang Hou’s “Huajian,” 163.

via free access
76 Chapter 1
supply women with models of femininity, or to convey something about her

own relationship—it is impossible to discern female authorship of any of
these paintings without other kinds of evidence. Indeed, many Song images of
women attempt to encompass both male and female perspectives.

via free access
Political Interpretations of Desire 77
Chapter 2
Political Interpretations of Desire
Because they correspond to poetic themes, some paintings of women experi-

encing longing or desire can be interpreted allegorically. Early Chinese critics
read much of the ancient poetry about a woman longing for a man as an alle-
gory of a minister’s desire for his ruler’s respect, and textual evidence suggests
that some among the Song literati continued to perceive marital relationships
(and, by extension, sexual relationships) as analogues for ruler-subject rela-
tionships.1 Given the interest in representing emotional attachment in this pe-
riod, however, a literal reading of poems and paintings on these themes also
seems appropriate. In this chapter, I examine whether early political interpre-
tations of themes of desire provide insight into Song literary and visual repre-
sentations of heteroerotic desire, focusing on the rare paintings that show
interaction between male and female figures. Such works might incorporate
both levels of meaning.
Some of the first poems to be reinterpreted as allegory include love or court-
ship poems from the Book of Songs.2 The Mao edition, in circulation between
the first and third centuries, introduced commentary on folk songs from the
section “Airs of the States” (Guofeng 國風) that interpreted them as allegories
referring to specific political events.3 The new readings indicate that critics
considered frankly erotic poems to be unfitting for an anthology that suppos-
edly contained moral lessons compiled by Confucius.4 Some centuries later,
Liu Xie’s The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons (Wenxin diaolong 文心
雕龍) reiterated that the poems had a political basis:
1 On allegorical interpretations of Chinese poetry, see Yu, The Reading of Imagery; Kang-i Sun
Chang, “Symbolic and Allegorical Meanings in the Yüeh-fu pu-t’i Poem Series,” Harvard Journal
of Asiatic Studies 46, no. 2 (December 1986): 353–85. Sima Guang reiterated that a wife’s loyalty
to her husband could serve as a model for a minister’s loyalty to his ruler; Ching, “Sung
Philosophers on Women,” 261–62. Paul Rouzer expands upon the assumption that the Chinese
literature of desire, from the Zhou (ca. 1050–256 bce) through the Song dynasty, is inherently
political throughout Articulated Ladies.
2 Pauline R. Yu, “Allegory, Allegoresis, and the Classic of Poetry,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic
Studies 43, no. 2 (December 1983): 377–412.
3 Rouzer, Articulated Ladies, 23, 77.
4 Frankel, The Flowering Plum and the Palace Lady, 50–51; Watson, The Columbia Book of Chinese
Poetry, 5; Yu, The Reading of Imagery, 46; Waley, The Book of Songs, 335–37.
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004369399_004Lara C.W. Blanchard - 978-90-04-36939-9

via free access
78 Chapter 2
The Book of Poetry was inspired by the dictates of the heart and long pent-
up indignation; it expressed the emotions and nature of the poets, in
order to satirize their rulers.
蓋風、雅之興，志思蓄憤，而吟詠情性，以諷其上。5
In the Song dynasty, however, scholars Ouyang Xiu, Su Che 蘇轍 (1039–1112),

and Zhu Xi argued for a more literal understanding of the folk songs.6 Evidently,
the poems in the Book of Songs admit multiple levels of meaning.7
Deliberately allegorical poems that ostensibly concern a love relationship
appear in the Warring States period (475–221 bce). In “Encountering Sorrow”
(Lisao 離騷), poet Qu Yuan 屈原 (343–290 bce) assumes a female persona who
laments her lover’s inconstancy, a situation encoding Qu’s own neglect by
King Huai of Chu 楚懷王 (r. 328–299 bce) due to slander.8 Critic Wang Yi 王逸
(fl. 110–120) explains the role of the female persona here:
Women are yin and do not act on the principle of independent responsi-
bility, just as, when the ruler acts, the minister follows. Thus they have
been used as a comparison to ministers.
女，陰也，無專擅之義。猶君動而臣隨也，故以喻臣。9
Thereafter, writers often implicitly compare the relationship of subject to ruler

to that of an abandoned woman and her absent lover.10 By the Tang dynasty,
the poetic image of the neglected and frustrated woman languishing within
5 Translated by James J.Y. Liu in The Art of Chinese Poetry, 71–72; Liu, “Qing cai 情釆 [Emo-
tion and Literary Expression],” Xinyi “Wenxin diaolong,” 7.503.
6 Yu, The Reading of Imagery, 60, Frankel, The Flowering Plum and the Palace Lady, 50–51;
Rouzer, Articulated Ladies, 17, 21–22. In this vein, Marcel Granet and Arthur Waley have
attempted to restore the “original intentions” of the poems, as discussed in Yu, “Allegory,
Allegoresis, and the Classic of Poetry,” 378–79; cf. Marcel Granet, “Chansons d’amour de la
vieille Chine,” Revue des arts asiatiques 2, no. 3 (September 1925): 24–40; idem., Fêtes et
chansons anciennes de la Chine, 2nd ed. (Paris: Librairie Ernest Leroux, 1929), 18; and
Waley, The Book of Songs, 336–37.
7 Rouzer, Articulated Ladies, 22–23.
8 Watson, The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry, 46, 54–66.
9 Translated by Pauline Yu in The Reading of Imagery, 92; citing Wang Yi, Lisao jing zhangju
離騷經章句 [Commentary on the Classic of Encountering Sorrow], in Chuci buzhu 楚辭
補註 [Annotated “Songs of Chu”], ed. Hong Xingzu (1070–1135) 洪興祖 (reprint, Taipei:
Yiwen yinshuguan, 1969), 1.12a.
10 Wai-yee Li, Enchantment and Disenchantment: Love and Illusion in Chinese Literature
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 19. Jean-Pierre Diény observes that these
two images are so closely bound that one can eliminate neither reading in a poem

via free access
the inner quarters may serve as a trope for an under-utilized scholar’s dissatis-
faction, suggesting a political reading for paintings of neglected women such
as Ladies Playing Double-Sixes (Neiren shuanglu tu 内人雙陸圖), attributed to
Zhou Fang.11
Still, it is difficult to determine whether Song paintings that present aban-
doned or neglected women were intended or perceived as allegorical at the
time. None of the paintings of lonely women has historically been discussed as
allegory. Critics did not initially interpret erotic song lyrics of the Song period
as allegorical, nor did composers of such lyrics explain their choice of theme
this way.12 Northern Song writers kept an uncharacteristic silence about their
lyric compositions, which were sometimes denounced as scandalous. Song lyr-
ics that dealt with sexual liaisons often reflected the involvement of literati
with female entertainers, an association considered inappropriate by many
educated men.13 Perhaps for these reasons, the expression of erotic love in
these verses sometimes resulted in the poets’ self-censure.14 But in the
Southern Song, after writers such as Su Shi began to expand the topics of the
concerning such a relationship in “Les Dix-neuf poèmes anciens 古詩十九首,” Bulletin

de la Maison Franco-Japonaise, n.s. 7, no. 4 (1963): 54; cited in Yu, The Reading of Imagery,
123.
11 Jerome Silbergeld, China into Film: Frames of Reference in Contemporary Chinese Cinema
(London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 135, 140. Ladies Playing Double-Sixes is attributed to Zhou
Fang but probably dates to the Song dynasty and belongs to the Freer Gallery of Art,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (F1939.37 and F1960.4, dually numbered
because it was once divided into sections that entered the museum separately); for exten-
sive documentation of the painting, see Stephen D. Allee, Joseph Chang, and Ingrid
Larsen, Song and Yuan Dynasty Painting and Calligraphy (Washington, D.C.: Freer Gallery
of Art, Smithsonian Institution, 2012), <http://www.freersackler.si.edu/wp-content/up
loads/2017/10/F1939-37andF1960-4_Documentation.pdf> (accessed 29 October 2017).
Reproductions of the painting are available at Smithsonian Institution, “Palace Ladies
Playing Double Sixes,” Smithsonian, <http://www.si.edu/object/fsg_F1939.37> (accessed
21 December 2017).
12 While Su Shi was charged with political defamation in 1079 because of the content of his
shi poetry, his song lyrics were not used against him because this genre was not associated
with political commentary; Egan, The Problem of Beauty, 287–90. In the Qing dynasty, the
Changzhou 常州 School of critics suggested that song lyrics were allegorical commentary
on contemporary events in the manner of The Book of Songs and “Encountering Sorrow”;
Chia-ying Yeh Chao, “The Ch’ang-chou School of Tz’u Criticism,” in Chinese Approaches to
Literature: Confucius to Liang Ch’i-ch’ao, ed. Adele Austin Rickett (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1978), 152.
13 Ronald C. Egan, “The Problem of the Repute of Tz’u during the Northern Sung,” in Yu,
Voices of the Song Lyric in China, 201–202.
14 Fong, “Engendering the Lyric,” 109.

via free access
80 Chapter 2
genre, critics discuss lyrics on the abandoned woman theme as deliberately

allegorical, and the literati start to write lyrics with this intention.15 Parallels
between poetry and painting suggest that pictorial compositions with erotic
themes from the Southern Song on could well have been intended as
allegorical.
Handscrolls of Goddess of the Luo River
A narrative of desire and rejection that can be interpreted as allegory is Goddess

of the Luo River, also known as Nymph of the Luo River.16 Three well-known
handscrolls on this theme, in the Liaoning Provincial Museum (figs. 6.1–6.12),
the Palace Museum in Beijing (figs. 7.1–7.10), and the Freer Gallery of Art (figs.
8.1–8.5), probably date to the Song. They present a romanticized female figure
from a male perspective17 and are thus closely related to shinü hua.
Although all three paintings were long thought to derive from a composi-
tion by Gu Kaizhi, recent scholarship suggests a more complicated provenance.
The Liaoning and Beijing scrolls may be copies of a sixth-century Goddess
composition, and the Freer scroll seems to be a copy of the Beijing scroll.18 In
addition, the Liaoning scroll may be partially based on a Tang composition, as
it includes details featured only in Tang annotations to the poem from which it
derives.19 Critics Wang Yun 王惲 (1227–1304), in 1276, and Tang Hou, sometime
in the following two decades, were apparently the earliest to mention seeing a
composition of this title attributed to Gu Kaizhi; the painting that they saw
may have been the Liaoning scroll.20
15 Chao, “The Ch’ang-chou School,” 166–67.

16 Wang Yao-t’ing [Wang Yaoting] 王耀庭, “Images of the Heart: Chinese Paintings on a
Theme of Love,” Part 2, trans. Deborah A. Sommer, National Palace Museum Bulletin 22,
no. 6 (January–February 1988): 1.
17 Wu, The Double Screen, 95, 96–97.
18 Chen, “The Goddess of the Lo River,” 1:110–11, 169–72, 244–45.
19 Thomas Lawton, “Obituary: Wai-kam Ho (1924–2004),” Artibus Asiae 65, no. 1 (2005): 148.
20 Shih, “Poetry Illustration and the Works of Ku K’ai-chih,” 16; Chen, “The Goddess of the Lo
River,” 1: 92, 92 n. 84; cf. Wang Yun, Shuhua mulu 書畫目錄 [Catalogue of Calligraphy and
Painting], in Shuhua lu 書畫路 [Record of Calligraphy and Painting, 1276], ed. Yang Jialuo,
Yishu congbian, ser. 1, no. 17 (reprint, Taipei: Shijie shuju, 1968), 1:155; and Tang Hou, Hua-
jian (see Chou, Tang Hou’s “Huajian,” 157).

via free access
Analyzing their literary source, Cao Zhi’s 曹植 (192–232) “Rhyme-Prose on

the Goddess of the Luo” (Luoshen fu 洛神賦),21 provides insight into the paint-
ings’ possible rhetorical functions. Cao’s preface states that he is following an
earlier rhapsody, Song Yu’s “Rhyme-Prose on the Goddess” (Shennü fu 神女賦),
and formal similarities between the two poems include significant points of
correspondence in their plots.22 Song Yu’s poem, however, has an ambiguous
voice: critics have argued whether its described dream is supposed to be at-
tributed to the poet or his king. Perhaps because Cao’s poem is written in the
first person, actually beginning with the pronoun “I” (yu 余), some critics un-
derstand it as veiled autobiography and an allegory on his own circumstances.23
Readers of early works in the fu 賦 genre (translated as either “rhyme-prose” or
“rhapsody”) believed that the narratives expressed the author’s feelings.24
“Rhyme-Prose on the Goddess of the Luo” relates this tale: returning home
from the capital, the narrator stops at the Luo River, where he encounters a
female figure of incomparable loveliness whom his companions cannot see.
This is the goddess Fufei 宓妃, mentioned in three poems in the Songs of Chu
(Chu ci 楚辭).25 He offers her a token of his affection; she responds in kind and
suggests a tryst in the depths of the river. He demurs (in the manner of narra-
tors “stilling passions,” ding qing 定情),26 and she expresses distress in agitated
21 Cao Zijian 曹子建 [Cao Zhi], “Luoshen fu er shou 洛神賦二首 [Rhyme-Prose on the
Goddess of the Luo, Two Poems],” in Xiao and Hu, Wen xuan, 19.7b–10b. All subsequent
translations of lines from this poem come from Watson, The Columbia Book of Chinese
Poetry, 116–21.
22 K.P.K. Whitaker, “Tsaur Jyr’s ‘Luohshern Fuh,’” Asia Major, n.s. 4, no. 1 (1954): 36–39. Song
Yu’s rhapsody is translated in full in Owen, An Anthology of Chinese Literature, 190–93, and
by David Knechtges in Xiao, Selections of Refined Literature, 3: 355–65.
23 Rouzer, in an analysis of Jian’an 建安 poets (including Cao Zhi), discusses the tendency of
early literati to identify a first-person speaker as the author’s authentic voice; see his Artic-
ulated Ladies, 60–63, 80, 82–83.
24 Chen, “The Goddess of the Lo River,” 1:39. In this era, however, poets typically wrote on
melancholy subjects regardless of their own emotional states; Hans H. Frankel, “Fifteen
Poems by Ts’ao Chih: An Attempt at a New Approach,” Journal of the American Oriental
Society 84, no. 1 (January–March 1964): 14.
25 Whitaker, “Tsaur Jyr’s ‘Luohshern Fuh,’” 36. Fufei appears in “Encountering Sorrow,” “The
Far-Off Journey” (Yuan you 遠遊), and “The Nine Laments” (Jiu tan 九歎); David Hawkes,
trans., Ch’u Tz’u: The Songs of the South, An Ancient Chinese Anthology (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1959), 29, 86, 163. The Chinese text appears in Zhu Xi, ed., Chu ci jizhu
楚辭集注 [Collected Annotations to the “Songs of Chu”], 8 juan (reprint; Shanghai: Sanye
shanfang, 1930).
26 For more on the “stilling the passions” theme in rhapsodies, see Rouzer, Articulated Ladies,
49–58.

via free access
82
Figure 6.1 Goddess of the Luo River. Traditionally attributed after Gu Kaizhi, Song dynasty; handscroll, ink and color on silk, 26.3 × 646.0 cm.
Collection Of Liaoning Provincial Museum, Shenyang, P.R.C.
Chapter 2
via free access

83
via free access

84
Chapter 2
via free access

85
via free access

86
Chapter 2
via free access

87
via free access

88
Chapter 2
via free access

89
via free access

90
Chapter 2
via free access

91
via free access

92
Chapter 2
via free access

93
via free access

94 Chapter 2
movements and wails. Other deities then join her, and this development intro-
duces an element of uncertainty, as she finds herself torn between the realms
of gods and humans.27 Ultimately, she renounces consummation, indicating
that divinities and mortals should not mix. As she leaves, she presents the nar-
rator with an earring and professes her undying love. In the final lines, he is the
undecided figure, trying to move on yet unwilling to leave Fufei behind.
Compositions of the Song Dynasty Paintings

None of the surviving Song paintings reproduces the entire composition of the
source painting. The Liaoning painting is the longest, preserving a pivotal
scene that does not survive in the other versions. The Beijing scroll, a rendering
of figures in a blue-green landscape befitting the otherworldly subject matter,
presents several scenes that seem augmented in comparison to the Liaoning
scroll, and some judge this painting to be the most complete and most faithful
to Cao Zhi’s poem.28 The Freer version reproduces only the latter part of the
Beijing scroll, including some of the more problematic passages.
The Liaoning scroll differs from the others in that Cao Zhi’s text appears
in the composition’s negative space. The first twenty columns of writing dif-
fer stylistically from those succeeding, presumably replacing text that was
lost or damaged. More importantly, the latter part of the text recalls the style
of both Southern Song Emperor Gaozong and his consort, Empress Wu 吳
(1115–97), and could have been written by one of Gaozong’s concubines. This
evidence suggests that the Liaoning scroll was produced at the mid-twelfth-
century court.29 The Beijing scroll might be attributed to a late Northern Song
27 Her liminal state is important to understanding her position; Wai-yee Li, “Dream Visions
of Transcendence in Chinese Literature and Painting,” Asian Art (Fall 1990): 68–69.
28 On connections between blue-green landscape painting and connotations of other
worldliness in the Song dynasty, see Susan E. Nelson, “On Through to the Beyond: The
Peach Blossom Spring as Paradise,” Archives of Asian Art 39 (1986): 28–29, 30–31. On the
relative completeness of the Beijing version of Goddess of the Luo River, see Ellen John-
ston Laing, “Erotic Themes and Romantic Heroines Depicted by Ch’iu Ying,” Archives of
Asian Art 49 (1996): 81; and Shih, “Poetry Illustration and the Works of Ku K’ai-chih,” 16.
29 Chen, “The Goddess of the Lo River,” 1:191, 192, 209–10, 242. On Empress Wu and concu-
bines who served as scribes for Emperor Gaozong, particularly Liu Guifei, see Hui-shu
Lee, “The Emperor’s Lady Ghostwriters in Song-Dynasty China,” Artibus Asiae 64, no. 1
(2004): 63–64, 67, 70–76. Julia K. Murray discusses Gaozong’s interest in narrative hand-
scrolls in “Sung Kao-tsung as Artist and Patron: The Theme of Dynastic Revival,” in Artists
and Patrons: Some Social and Economic Aspects of Chinese Painting, ed. Chu-tsing Li (Law-
rence, Kans.: Kress Foundation Department of Art History, University of Kansas; Kansas
City, Mo.: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1989), 30.

via free access
academic painter and the Freer scroll, clearly later, to a Southern Song court
painter.30 Certainly the media of all three versions (ink and color on silk) are
consistent with court patronage. The provenance of the scrolls, however, is un-
clear until some centuries later. The Liaoning scroll passed through private col-
lections before the Qianlong 乾隆 emperor (r. 1736–96) obtained it sometime
after 1789. The Beijing scroll entered his collection in 1741, and nothing con-
crete may be said of it before that (colophons purporting to be of Yuan or Ming
date are likely inauthentic). As for the Freer painting, no record of it existed
before Dong Qichang acquired it in the late Ming; his colophon claims that it
previously belonged to the Ming imperial collection. Subsequently, numerous
private collectors owned it.31 Thus, though all three scrolls likely originate with
court patronage and returned to imperial collections, they did not remain at
court throughout their history.
The unknown copyists illustrate select images from the poetry. The begin-
ning of the Beijing scroll (fig. 7.1) shows horses at rest and their grooms, corre-
sponding to the beginning of Cao Zhi’s poem. The Liaoning scroll begins with
the second scene of the Beijing scroll: the narrator and his retinue gaze upon
the goddess, standing on a riverbank (figs. 6.1–6.2, 7.2). In the Beijing scroll,
Fufei holds a “circular five-jeweled fan with two tufts of hair.”32 Both versions
show the narrator second from the left, larger than the other figures and stand-
ing beneath an umbrella held by an attendant. (The Liaoning scroll, however,
includes a maid standing just behind Cao Zhi’s entourage, which is otherwise
entirely male, whereas the Beijing scroll has no maid and one fewer male fig-
ure.) Swans and a dragon in flight appear to the goddess’s right; above her, the
moon is partly obscured by clouds; to her left, a red sun (inscribed with a crow)
rises through the mist, and a lotus blooms upon the water. These are Cao Zhi’s
metaphors for Fufei’s grace and splendor; in the Liaoning scroll, each image is
annotated with corresponding lines from the poem.
Where the poem includes a long section rhapsodizing upon the goddess’s
beauty, the painters of both the Beijing and Liaoning scrolls render it through
looped hair, pale skin, elaborate clothing, and trailing scarves. We next see
30 Chen, “The Goddess of the Lo River,” 1:244–45, 260, 283. Wai-yee Li suggests that the Freer
scroll dates to the twelfth to thirteenth centuries in “Dream Visions of Transcendence,”
66.
31 Chen, “The Goddess of the Lo River,” 1:93–96, 279, 284–85. The inscriptions and seals on
the Freer scroll are documented in Allee, Chang, and Larsen, Song and Yuan Dynasty
Painting and Calligraphy, <http://www.freersackler.si.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/
F1914-53_Documentation.pdf> (accessed 29 October 2017).
32 Laing, “Erotic Themes and Romantic Heroines,” 81. The Liaoning scroll’s figure seems to
hold this tufted fan as well, but it is so damaged that it is difficult to be sure.

via free access
96
Figure 7.1 Goddess of the Luo River. Traditionally attributed after Gu Kaizhi (ca. 345–406), Song dynasty;
handscroll, ink and color on silk, 27.1 × 572.8 cm. Palace Museum, Beijing, P.R.C. Photograph
provided by the Palace Museum.
Chapter 2
via free access

Figure 7.2 Goddess of the Luo River. Traditionally attributed after Gu Kaizhi (ca. 345–406), Song dynasty; handscroll, ink and color on silk,
27.1 × 572.8 cm. Palace Museum, Beijing, P.R.C. Photograph provided by the Palace Museum.
97
via free access

98
Figure 7.3 Goddess of the Luo River. Traditionally attributed after Gu Kaizhi (ca. 345–406), Song dynasty; handscroll, ink and color on silk, 27.1 × 572.8 cm.
Palace Museum, Beijing, P.R.C. Photograph provided by the Palace Museum.
Chapter 2
via free access

Figure 7.4 Goddess of the Luo River. Traditionally attributed after Gu Kaizhi (ca. 345–406), Song dynasty; handscroll,
ink and color on silk, 27.1 × 572.8 cm. Palace Museum, Beijing, P.R.C. Photograph provided by the
Palace Museum.
99
via free access

100
Figure 7.5 Goddess of the Luo River. Traditionally attributed after Gu Kaizhi (ca. 345–406), Song dynasty;
handscroll, ink and color on silk, 27.1 × 572.8 cm. Palace Museum, Beijing, P.R.C. Photograph
provided by the Palace Museum.
Chapter 2
via free access

Figure 7.6 Goddess of the Luo River. Traditionally attributed after Gu Kaizhi (ca. 345–406), Song dynasty; handscroll, ink
and color on silk, 27.1 × 572.8 cm. Palace Museum, Beijing, P.R.C. Photograph provided by the Palace
Museum.
101
via free access

102
Figure 7.7 Goddess of the Luo River. Traditionally attributed after Gu Kaizhi (ca. 345–406), Song dynasty; handscroll, ink and color on silk, 27.1 ×
572.8 cm. Palace Museum, Beijing, P.R.C. Photograph provided by the Palace Museum.
Chapter 2
via free access

Figure 7.8 Goddess of the Luo River. Traditionally attributed after Gu Kaizhi (ca. 345–406), Song dynasty; handscroll,
ink and color on silk, 27.1 × 572.8 cm. Palace Museum, Beijing, P.R.C. Photograph provided by the
Palace Museum.
103
via free access

104
Figure 7.9 Goddess of the Luo River. Traditionally attributed after Gu Kaizhi (ca. 345–406),
Song dynasty; handscroll, ink and color on silk, 27.1 × 572.8 cm. Palace Museum,
Beijing, P.R.C. Photograph provided by the Palace Museum.
Chapter 2
via free access

Figure 7.10 Goddess of the Luo River. Traditionally attributed after Gu Kaizhi (ca. 345–406), Song dynasty; handscroll, ink
and color on silk, 27.1 × 572.8 cm. Palace Museum, Beijing, P.R.C. Photograph provided by the Palace
Museum.
105
via free access

106 Chapter 2
illustrations of her “planting her colored pennants” (yi caimao 倚采旄): in the
Beijing scroll she appears twice, standing on waves and hovering beside pen-
nants fastened to poles (fig. 7.3), but the Liaoning scroll includes only the latter
figure (fig. 6.3). She does not hold the tufted fan in either painting, a lapse dif-
ficult to explain considering how consistently it appears subsequently. A tex-
tual passage preceding this section in the Liaoning scroll relates most of Cao
Zhi’s poetic rapture on Fufei’s beauty; the annotations within the scene de-
scribe her planting flags, then gathering irises from the water.
At this point, there is a break in the Beijing scroll, with a short length of silk
added to create a new juncture.33 What should appear here, judging from the
poem, are the parts of the tale wherein the narrator offers a love token, Fufei
responds by indicating where they might tryst, the narrator hesitates, and the
goddess becomes distressed. The Liaoning scroll preserves their initial ex-
change: goddess (holding her tufted fan) and narrator face each other beside
the river in the company of three attendants, the narrator offering his “girdle-
jade” (yupei 玉珮), an ornament that stretches from his hand down to the
ground (fig. 6.4). This scene suggests the narrator’s rejection of Fufei both
through his change in position—he faces right rather than left, a significant
difference from earlier and subsequent scenes—and through the figure of one
attendant, who turns his back on the viewer.34 This interchange between nar-
rator and goddess is arguably one of the most important parts of the composi-
tion, if one interprets this work as focusing on desire and rejection. It seems
unlikely that the painter deemed this meaningful encounter unnecessary to
the narrative; more probably, this section was removed from the Beijing scroll
because it could stand for the entire story on its own (especially considering
the disjuncture found here).
What one finds next in both the Beijing and Liaoning scrolls is a representa-
tion of multiple female deities; the Beijing scroll presents seven figures in four
groups (figs. 7.3–7.4), while the Liaoning scroll has only four figures in two
groups (fig. 6.5), corresponding to the first two groups shown in the Beijing
scroll. Four of the figures depicted in the Beijing scroll are relatively tall and
carry tufted fans, suggesting that they represent repeated appearances of Fufei
in a continuous narrative.35 This scene likely represents a later section of the
poem, where other deities, including the two queens of Xiang (Xiang zhi erfei
湘之二妃) and the Wandering Girl (Younü 游女), join Fufei; these precise pas-
sages of the text are written in this section of the Liaoning scroll.
33 Shih, “Poetry Illustration and the Works of Ku K’ai-chih,” 22.

34 Chen, “The Goddess of the Lo River,” 1: 69–70.
35 Shih, “Poetry Illustration and the Works of Ku K’ai-chih,” 22, 23.

via free access
The scene immediately following in both the Liaoning and Beijing scrolls
shows the narrator seated among five attendants, with Fufei hovering before
him, holding her tufted fan (figs. 6.5–6.6, 7.4). In representing her with her
head turned toward him and her body turned away, the artists illustrate her
wavering. This scene represents another instance where Cao Zhi’s poem men-
tions his response to the goddess: “her fair face all loveliness—/ she makes me
forget my hunger!” (華容婀娜。令我忘餐。) In fact, in virtually every instance
where the pronouns “I” (yu) or “me” (wo 我) appear in the poem, the figure of
the narrator appears in the corresponding part of the paintings. Notably, the
Freer fragment begins with the conflicted figure of Fufei, her quandary mani-
fested in her disconcerted facial expression and in the way her fluttering
scarves emphasize the forward movement of her body even as her head turns
back (fig. 8.1).
In all three paintings, more deities appear in the succeeding scene (figs. 6.6,
7.5, 8.1), including Bingyi 屏翳 calling the winds, the River Lord (Chuanhou 川
后) gesturing at the waves, Nüwa (also pronounced Nügua) 女媧 floating in
midair, and Pingyi 馮夷 beating a drum. Nüwa, also female, has furry legs and
clawed feet; in earlier literature, she is an animalian goddess, described as half-
serpent, half-woman.36 The deities’ materialization signals the moment when
Fufei begins to have second thoughts about the narrator.
The next scene modifies the sequence of events presented in the poem. Cao
Zhi’s poem devotes several lines to Fufei’s carriage, pulled by dragons, with
whales on either side, and describes her traveling some way in it before turning
back to make a parting speech and to present a final gift. In the paintings, god-
dess and narrator are together again: Fufei rides a “jade phoenix,”37 and the
narrator stands by the river beneath umbrellas held by his attendants, his
empty hand stretched toward her (figs. 6.7, 7.6, 8.2). Fufei holds her tufted fan
in the Liaoning scroll but not in the Beijing or Freer scrolls.38 Only after this
scene do the painters show the goddess in her carriage with her fan, turning to
look back toward the narrator (figs. 6.8–6.9, 7.7, 8.3). Perhaps the original
painter judged that their leave-taking required a clearly rendered moment of
acknowledgment on the part of both figures.
36 Edward H. Schafer, The Divine Woman: Dragon Ladies and Rain Maidens in T’ang Litera-
ture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), 29.
37 Shih, “Poetry Illustration and the Works of Ku K’ai-chih,” 23. She suggests that a section of
the Beijing scroll, between the figures of the goddess and the poet, has been removed.
38 Chen Pao-chen, discussing the Liaoning scroll, suggests that this female deity is not the
Luo River goddess but one of her guardians; Chen, “The Goddess of the Lo River,” 1:77.

via free access
108
Figure 8.1 Goddess of the Luo River. Traditionally attributed after Gu Kaizhi, Southern Song dynasty, 12th–13th century; handscroll, ink and color on silk,
24.2 × 310.9 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.: Gift of Charles Lang Freer (F1914.53).
Chapter 2
via free access

24.2 × 310.9 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.: Gift of Charles Lang Freer
(F1914.53).
109
via free access

110
24.2 × 310.9 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.: Gift of Charles Lang Freer
(F1914.53).
Chapter 2
via free access

Figure 8.4 Goddess of the Luo River. Traditionally attributed after Gu Kaizhi, Southern Song dynasty, 12th–13th century; handscroll, ink and color on
silk, 24.2 × 310.9 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.: Gift of Charles Lang Freer
111
(F1914.53).
via free access

112
24.2 × 310.9 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.: Gift of Charles Lang Freer (F1914.53).
Chapter 2
via free access

The ending of each of the paintings is straightforward: the narrator embarks

in his boat, as described in the poem (figs. 6.9–6.10, 7.8, 8.4). In all three scrolls,
he holds Fufei’s fan: something that any viewer would more readily recognize
as her token than the earring mentioned in the poem. We subsequently see the
narrator sitting on a bed by candlelight, indicating his sleeplessness (figs. 6.10,
7.9, 8.5). The Freer fragment ends here, but the Beijing and Liaoning scrolls
present a final scene: the narrator in his carriage, looking back toward the river
before he resumes his journey (figs. 6.11–6.12, 7.10). The poem does not describe
him looking back, but this visual detail makes his longing for the goddess plain.
In summary, the surviving Song compositions are remarkably faithful to the
sequence presented in Cao Zhi’s rhapsody. Yet the two relatively complete
scrolls are not entirely consistent with the poem, and the places where they
break from the textual precedent all correspond to moments depicting the
deep feeling between narrator and goddess. The additions are most striking.
First, the painters amplify a moment when the narrator exclaims how Fufei’s
beauty affects him—which merits only a few words in the text. Second, they
reinterpret the moment of the goddess’s departure, adding a scene that sug-
gests more intimate interaction between Fufei and the narrator than the poem
does (a scene preserved in the Freer composition as well). Finally, they render
the narrator’s regrets in the final scene. These embellishments suggest a height-
ened interest in interiority among Song court circles. The subtractions, how-
ever, may also be significant: the Beijing scroll lacks the moment of the first
meeting of goddess and narrator, and the Liaoning scroll seems to treat this
important moment rather briefly as well. Perhaps collectors identified a sec-
tion representing the first declaration of mutual love as the essence of the
story, making it ideal to present as a gift or to sell on the market. A similar fate
could have befallen the first part of the Freer fragment. That scroll only pre-
serves the scenes representing Fufei’s wavering (including the forces that con-
vince her of the untenable nature of her love) and her ultimate rejection of the
narrator. The missing pieces include the first encounter, the pledge of love, and
representations of the goddess’s longing—in other words, moments that rep-
resent the passion of both figures.
Reading Desire and Rejection

Some scholars who see the poem and paintings of Goddess of the Luo River as
allegory argue that they encode, in the male narrator’s love for the goddess, a
narrative of Cao Zhi’s loyalty to his older brother, Cao Pi 曹丕 (187–226), who
ruled from 220 as Emperor Wen of the Wei dynasty 魏文帝.39 Cao Pi viewed
39 Stuart, “Revealing the Romance in Chinese Art,” 13–14. An alternative viewpoint is pre-
sented in Watson, The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry, 116.

via free access
114 Chapter 2
Cao Zhi as a rival, and the classic theme in Chinese political allegory is the
trouble between a ruler and subject, couched as the protagonist’s heteroerotic
longing for an unattainable or rejecting other. Fufei is mentioned in the alle-
gorical poem “Encountering Sorrow,” and in many respects Cao Zhi’s language
echoes Qu Yuan’s.40 Qu Yuan’s narrator also makes a pledge to the goddess,
offering his sash to her, but though he does enlist the help of a go-between—
a minister of the sage emperor Fuxi 伏羲 (who was Fufei’s father) or possibly
the goddess Nüwa—narrator and goddess meet and separate repeatedly, never
entering into a covenant. Qu Yuan’s narrator then complains that Fufei “lacks
decorum” (wuli 無禮).41 Cao Zhi’s allusions to “Encountering Sorrow” were
signs to a discerning reader. Perhaps most importantly, in “Rhyme-Prose on the
Goddess of the Luo” the relationship between Fufei and the narrator becomes
one of Confucian restraint.42 In weaving Confucian philosophy into his tale of
longing, Cao Zhi affirms that he accepts his place in the subject-ruler hierarchy.
The gender dynamic in both poem and painting is, however, unusual.
Allegorical poetry that suggests the loyalty of subject to ruler usually features a
woman longing for a man; here, the male narrator makes the first pledge of
sincerity. In some respects, this conforms with offerings from shamans to fickle
goddesses in the Songs of Chu (Fufei is described as fickle in “Encountering
Sorrow”), but this narrator seems confident that Fufei will return his feelings.43
Indeed, she promptly invites him to join her in the river, expressing disap-
pointment when he declines (a scene absent from the Song paintings). The
goddess ultimately recognizes the impossibility of the affair, leaving the narra-
tor despairing. Then it is his turn to long for her.
Unusually, the figures’ longing is mutual, rejections occurring on both sides.
Cao Pi and Cao Zhi were brothers, emperor and prince, whose relationship was
more complex than a simple hierarchy of ruler and subject, and perhaps this is
why Cao Zhi frames a story of mutual longing and rejection in “Rhyme-Prose
on the Goddess of the Luo.” The status of the narrator and Fufei in relation to
each other is indeterminate, with their actions and speech suggesting that one
or the other might be superior at various points.44 The power balance between
the two changes throughout the course of the story: their relationship stands
for that of two imperial brothers, both of whom were at different times favored
to assume the throne. Both goddess and narrator hold power, as rendered visu-
40 Whitaker, “Tsaur Jyr’s ‘Luohshern Fuh,’” 39–42.

41 Watson, The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry, 61, 61n21; Zhu, Chu ci jizhu, 1.12a.
42 Ibid., 37–38.
43 Li, “Dream Visions of Transcendence,” 68.
44 Whitaker, “Tsaur Jyr’s ‘Luohshern Fuh,’” 41.

via free access
ally in the Song scrolls. They tend to stand on the same plane when they inter-
act; when he first catches sight of her in the Beijing scroll, she hovers above
him, but usually when the painters picture her in midair they are not together.
Leaving aside indications that their carriages are of different realms, Fufei’s
appears better appointed (pulled by six steeds rather than four, and with more
trailing banners). Though divine Fufei’s powers are supernatural, the narrator
enjoys imperial status, with an entourage of solicitous attendants. These paint-
ings serve as allegories of the loyalty of each figure to the other.
Complicating matters, a second critical interpretation of Cao Zhi’s poem
suggests that a real woman, the Empress Zhen 甄 (Cao Pi’s wife), inspired the
figure of Fufei. Editions of the Selections of Refined Literature (Wen xuan 文選)
include commentary, possibly authored by Li Shan 李善 (d. 689), suggesting
that Cao Zhi loved the empress before she married his brother.45 This interpre-
tation appears in Tang literature as well: the “Story of the Goddess of the Luo”
(Luoshen zhuan 洛神傳), written by Xue Ying 薛瑩 (n.d.), suggests that Fufei is
the empress’s ghost. In Tang poetry, Fufei’s divine status is underplayed, possi-
bly in order to make her the model for a court beauty.46 Although many Qing
and twentieth-century critics reject outright the identification of the Luo River
goddess with Empress Zhen, citing both the age difference between her and
Cao Zhi (he was a child when she married) and Cao Pi’s jealousy, poetic sources
suggest that this story circulated in the Tang and Song periods.47 Its dissemina-
tion among Song readers suggests not only that the allegorical explanation was
not wholly satisfactory, but also that the taste for romantic tales was unusually
strong at this time.
How, then, does one interpret the rhetorical functions of the three Goddess
of the Luo River paintings? If they were commissioned by court patrons (as
indeed all three scrolls might have been), one might privilege the allegorical
interpretation, as a patron might use a painting on this theme to affirm the po-
litical hierarchy. The Liaoning scroll may have originated in Emperor Gaozong’s
painting academy and embodied themes of loyalty to the ruler.48 Gaozong is
known to have made gifts of calligraphy to high-ranking members of his court,
possibly as a means of ensuring their loyalty, and narrative paintings that al-
luded to the devotion of a subject to a ruler might well have functioned in the
45 This text is translated in Idema and Grant, The Red Brush, 90–91.
46 Schafer, The Divine Woman, 88–91, 132–33.
47 Whitaker, “Tsaur Jyr’s ‘Luohshern Fuh,’” 44–48. An untitled poem by Li Shangyin that
alludes to this interpretation of the poem is translated in Rouzer, Articulated Ladies, 298.
48 Chen, “The Goddess of the Lo River,” 1: 242.

via free access
116 Chapter 2
same way.49 Yet at the time the scrolls were made, the love theme might have
been considered primary, given the circulation of the Empress Zhen origin
story and Zhu Xi’s emphatically anti-political interpretation of the courtship
poems of The Book of Songs. If one of Emperor Gaozong’s concubines served as
the calligrapher for the Liaoning scroll, that might suggest an increased inter-
est in the romantic aspects of the poem. Intriguingly, concubine Liu Guifei is
described as one of Gaozong’s principal scribes, one who was involved in art
collecting and connoisseurship and, moreover, received “tremendous favor”
from Gaozong because of this.50 Without evidence of an artist’s or patron’s
identity for any of the scrolls, however, it is impossible to pinpoint why they
were made. Looking at how critics of the period interpreted potentially alle-
gorical tales with erotic themes is the only thing that can give a fuller picture
of the purposes of such a painting, and for that it is necessary to turn to a story
that has been more extensively documented, not only in critical treatises on
painting but also in dynastic histories.
The Beijing Handscroll Night Revels of Han Xizai
Han Xizai 韓熙載 was an official who advised all three Southern Tang rulers
but gained notoriety during the reign of the Last Ruler, Li Yu. Reputedly, when
this newly ascended ruler sought to promote him, he began to host infamous
parties, providing courtesans for his students’ and colleagues’ entertainment.
The events generated a series of paintings as well as written commentary that
reveals different interpretations of his actions. A Song painting of Han Xizai
includes imagery that, I argue, identifies him as a court hermit, indicating his
loyalty to the state. The narrative departs from the allegorical figure of a woman
pining for a man who has rejected her, focusing instead on courtesans simulat-
ing desire.
The handscroll Night Revels of Han Xizai in the collection of the Palace
Museum, Beijing (figs. 9.1–9.5) is probably a copy of a painting commissioned
by Li Yu. Though court painter Zhou Wenju also reputedly made a painting on
this theme, another court painter, Gu Hongzhong 顧閎中 (fl. 943–60), receives
credit for the original composition.51 The Beijing scroll most likely dates to the
49 Murray, “Sung Kao-tsung as Artist and Patron,” 28.

50 Lee, “The Emperor’s Lady Ghostwriters,” 64 n. 15.
51 John Kwang-ming Ang identifies Zu Wupo’s 1079 colophon as the first to attribute the
painting to Gu Hongzhong, describe it, and discuss its creation, in “Redating The Night
Revels of Han Hsi-tsai 韓熙載 Attributed to Ku Hung-chung 顧閎中 in the Peking, Palace

via free access
early Southern Song,52 based on the evidence of its seals and the eleventh- or
twelfth-century style of depicted material culture, including landscape
screens.53 The Southern Song court during the reign of Emperor Gaozong
sometimes commissioned copies of paintings,54 and the Beijing scroll’s recipi-
ent may have been Shi Miyuan or his father, Shi Hao 史浩 (d. 1190).55
The painter creates a subtle portrait of Han Xizai by simultaneously ma-
nipulating the figures and the setting. Han Xizai is unquestionably the most
important figure; the painter depicts him as bigger than his guests and
Museum” (Master’s thesis, University of Michigan, 1985), 11. Zhou Wenju’s painting is
mentioned in Tang Hou’s Huajian (see Chou, Tang Hou’s “Huajian,” 163); Xia, Tuhui bao-
jian, 3.3a; and Zhou, Yunyan guoyan lu, 1.37b. Wu Hung proposes that a painting titled A
Court Concert in the Art Institute of Chicago might be a copy of it; Wu, The Double Screen,
73–74, 127–29, 267 n. 82. The different versions are discussed in Weitz, Zhou Mi’s “Record of
Clouds and Mist Passing before One’s Eyes,” 120–21, 281–82.
52 I presented evidence for this date in Lara C.W. Blanchard, “A Scholar in the Company of
Female Entertainers: Changing Notions of Integrity in Song to Ming Dynasty Painting,”
NAN NÜ: Men, Women and Gender in China 9, no. 2 (2007): 223.
53 The seals are discussed in Xu, “Gu Hongzhong hua Han Xizai yeyan tu,” 26–27. On material
culture in this painting, see Yu Hui 餘輝, “Han Xizai yeyan tu juan niandai kao—jian tan
zaoqi renwu hua de jianding fangfa 《韓熙載夜宴圖》卷年代考–兼探早期人物畫
的鑑定方法 [A Study of the Date of the Scroll The Nocturnal Entertainments of Han
Xizai],” Gugong Bowuyuan yuankan 故宮博物院院刊 (Palace Museum Journal), no. 4
(1993): 38–49; and Michael Sullivan, “Notes on Early Chinese Screen Painting,” Artibus
Asiae 27, no. 3 (1965): 246.
54 Zhou Mi discusses many aspects of the imperial art collection in the Shaoxing reign in
“Shaoxing yufu shuhua shi 紹興御府書畫式 [Styles of Calligraphy and Painting in the
Shaoxing Imperial Court],” Qidong yeyu 齊東野語 [Words from the Country East of Qi], 20
juan (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1935), 6.1a–7a. He names the connoisseurs who
worked on cataloguing Gaozong’s collection, lists works of calligraphy and painting in the
collection, and also notes that the court commissioned copies (using the words lin 臨 and
mo 摹) of both calligraphic and painted works. For more on the connoisseurs who worked
with the collection, see Charles Hartman, “Cao Xun and the Legend of Emperor Taizu’s
Oath,” in State Power in China, 900–1325, ed. Patricia Buckley Ebrey and Paul Jakov Smith
(Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2016), 67. Peter Charles Sturman, in
“Mi Youren and the Inherited Literati Tradition: Dimensions of Ink-Play” (Ph.D. diss., Yale
University, 1989), 408, cites Zhou Mi’s text in his discussion of copying at the Southern
Song court; he also cites R.H. van Gulik’s Chinese Pictorial Art as Viewed by the Connoisseur
(Rome: Instituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriento, 1958; reprint, Taipei: Southern
Materials Center, 1981), 211.
55 Yu, “Han Xizai yeyan tu juan niandai kao,” 53–54; De-nin D. Lee, The Night Banquet: A
Chinese Scroll through Time (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2010),
28, 35–37, 41–45.

via free access
118 Chapter 2
distinguishes him with a tall, tasseled hat, a long beard, and long fingernails.
The remaining figures fall into two broad groups: guests (mostly scholars) and
attendants (courtesans and servants). The scholars all dress in dark robes (with
the exception of one in red) and caps with hanging ties. Minimal facial hair
indicates their youth. The only guest who is not a scholar is a monk with shaved
head and saffron robe. The courtesans are vividly painted: most wear V-necked
blouses and flowing skirts in delicate patterns, with colorful sashes and scarves,
and adorn their topknots with hairpins and ribbons. Many wear love-knots,
which would likely increase their appeal. Younger entertainers and maids wear
fewer adornments and plainer clothing—long, high-necked dresses with side
slits that reveal their underskirts, sometimes with a sash or girdle. The groups
are gendered: host and guests are all male, entertainers and servants are all
female.
The handscroll employs the structure of a continuous narrative and com-
prises five scenes. Each is composed of a group of figures that either interact
directly with each other or observe the same activity, framed by figures turning
inward. Screens mark three of the transitions between scenes:56 a standing
screen divides Scenes I and II, a folding screen separates III and IV, and an-
other standing screen appears between IV and V. The lack of a partition be-
tween Scenes II and III may mean that part of the silk was removed.57
Significantly, Han Xizai appears five times. Although he is always recognizable
by his size, beard, and hat, his clothes change throughout the scroll: he appears
in a black robe, a yellow robe belted over an undergarment, or the undergar-
ment alone. The changes of clothing could represent different temporal mo-
ments or his participation in the sexual activities offered by the courtesans.
The ever-present hat reminds viewers of Han Xizai’s status.58 Three scenes
feature musical performance, and two emphasize direct communication be-
tween scholars and courtesans.
Similar to Goddess of the Luo River, Night Revels considers the interaction of
the sexes rather than focusing solely on female figures. The entertainers are
essential to the narrative, and the guests appear captivated by them. The
56 Xu, “Gu Hongzhong hua Han Xizai yeyan tu,” 26; Wu, The Double Screen, 56.
57 Wan-go H.C. Weng and Yang Boda 翁萬戈、楊伯達, The Palace Museum: Peking Trea-
sures of the Forbidden City (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1982), 161; Li Song 李松, Wudai Gu
Hongzhong “Han Xizai yeyan tu” 五代顧閎中韓熙載夜宴圖 [“Night Revels of Han Xizai”
by Gu Hongzhong of the Five Dynasties] (Beijing: Bamin meishu chubanshe, 1979), 17.
58 Tao Gu 陶穀 (ca. 902–70), in Qingyi lu 清異錄 [Record of the Pure and Unusual], 4 vols.
(reprint, Taipei: Yiwen yinshuguan, 1965), 3:3.21a, writes: “In Jiangnan, Han Xizai created a
light gauze cap. Hat makers referred to it as ‘Mr. Han’s relaxed style.’” (韓熙載在江南，
造輕紗帽，匠帽者謂為韓君輕格。)

via free access
presence and activities of these courtesans flesh out the story of Han Xizai. His
command of the services of numerous women attests not only to his power,59
but also to his character.
Singing Girls in Tang and Song Texts

Tang and Song dynasty “singing girls” (geji 歌姬, literally “singing entertainers”)
or “courtesans” (ji 妓) were composers and performers: women who possessed
unparalleled talent at music or poetry and whom scholars especially admired
for the ability to write verse.60 They also provided sexual entertainment. In
these periods, a courtesan’s musical or literary accomplishments inextrica-
bly connect to an erotic performance at which she excelled; singing, playing
instruments, dancing, and composing poetry were all considered superior
vehicles for the expression of feelings of longing and desire. The visual repre
sentation of courtesans in Night Revels draws upon not only their historical
circumstances, but also literature, particularly poetry, which figured largely in
the lives of actual courtesans.
Tang society divided courtesans into four different ranks.61 At the top was
the “palace courtesan” (gongji 宮妓), who learned to perform new music in the
Music Bureau (Jiaofang 教坊) established by Emperor Xuanzong in 714; infor-
mation about these entertainers is recorded in Cui Lingqin’s 崔令欽 Records of
the Music Bureau (Jiaofang ji 教坊記).62 A palace courtesan performed in the
Pear Garden Conservatory (Liyuan 梨園) or at official banquets.63 The second
rank belonged to “household courtesans” (jiaji 家妓).64 They typically served
wealthy men and acted as status symbols. A third group consisted of “govern-
ment courtesans” (guanji 官妓), assigned to officials posted to rural areas, and
“barracks courtesans” (yingji 營妓), sent to the frontiers to serve the military.
Independent courtesans who lived in urban brothels formed the lowest ranked

60 Beverly Bossler, “Shifting Identities: Courtesans and Literati in Song China,” Harvard Jour-
nal of Asiatic Studies 62, no. 1 (2002): 6–7.
61 Robert des Rotours, trans., Courtisanes chinoises à la fin des T’ang, entre circa 789 et le 8
janvier 881, Pei-li tche (Anecdotes du quartier du Nord) [Beili zhi] (Paris: Presses universita-
ires de France, 1968), 11–14; and Wagner, The Lotus Boat, 82.
62 Rotours, Courtisanes chinoises à la fin des T’ang, 53 n. 5; cf. Cui Lingqin [Sai Reikin] and
Sun Qi [Son Kei] 崔令欽、孫棨, Jiaofang ji, Beili zhi [Kyoboki, Hokurishi] 教坊記、北里
志 [Records of the Music Bureau; Records of the Northern Ward], ed. Saitō Shigeru 斉藤茂
(ca. 749, ca. 889; reprint, Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1992), 242–51.
63 Wagner, The Lotus Boat, 65, 82.
64 Yao Hsin-nung, “When Sing-song Girls Were Muses,” T’ien Hsia Monthly 4, no. 5 (May
1937): 476.

via free access
120 Chapter 2
group; some historians refer to these women as “common courtesans” (minji 民

妓), but this appears to be a later coinage.65 By the ninth century, independent
courtesans in Chang’an primarily inhabited the Pingkang district, also known
as the Northern Ward (Beili 北里). The best of them possessed talent at music,
dance, or poetry. Biographies of these women, such as those included in Sun
Qi’s 孫棨 Records of the Northern Ward (Beili zhi 北里志), emphasize musical
skills or wit over beauty. The classifications of courtesans were not necessarily
discrete: for example, independent courtesans could register at the Music
Bureau and therefore be on call for government service.66
Following the An Lushan Rebellion of 755, the Music Bureau’s palace cour-
tesans fled the capital for other cities, where they regrouped in “courtesan
houses” (jiguan 妓館). These venues continued to expand even after the Music
Bureau reopened in 757.67 As former palace courtesans had prestigious train-
ing, they enjoyed higher status than local courtesans, and they produced and
performed new music in hierarchically organized houses located in urban cen-
ters such as Yangzhou, Suzhou, and Hangzhou.68
In the Southern Tang, the stratification among courtesans remained the
same. The Southern Tang state (which became a vassal of the Song dynasty
within twenty-five years and ceased to exist within forty) enjoyed a well-devel-
oped economy, with the capital located in Nanjing, on the Yangtze River. Its
rulers patronized music and the arts, and Li Yu, who was famous for writing
song lyrics, summoned courtesans to his palace.69
What helped make these women appealing companions was men’s value of
their literary talent. Tang scholars developed relationships with courtesans
based on a shared love of music and poetry,70 and gatherings of scholars and
65 Bossler, Courtesans, Concubines, and the Cult of Female Fidelity, 23 n. 29.

66 Cui and Sun, Jiaofang ji, Beili zhi, 252–71. Rouzer analyzes gendered rhetoric in the text in
Articulated Ladies, 249–83; his observation about independent courtesans and the Music
Bureau appears on p. 250.
67 Kishibe Shigeo 岸邊成雄, Tōdai ongaku no rekishiteki kenkyū 唐代音樂の歷史的研究
[Research on the History of Tang Dynasty Music] (Tōkyō: Tōkyō Daigaku shuppankai, 1960),
1:90, cited in Chang, The Evolution of Chinese Tz’u Poetry, 9 n. 26.
68 Kishibe, Tōdai ongaku no rekishiteki kenkyū, 1:82–106, cited in Wagner, The Lotus Boat, 80;
and Chang, The Evolution of Chinese Tz’u Poetry, 9–10, 13.
69 Yan Ming 嚴明, Zhongguo mingji yishushi 中國名妓藝術史 [Famous Courtesans in Chi-
nese Art History] (Taipei: Wenjin chubanshe, 1992), 53, 58–59. He divides Tang courtesans
into palace, government, and household courtesans. For Li Yu’s song lyrics, see Daniel
Bryant, trans., Lyric Poets of the Southern T’ang: Feng Yen-ssu, 903–960, and Li Yü, 937–978
(Vancouver and London: University of British Columbia Press, 1982).
70 Wagner, The Lotus Boat, 84.

via free access
courtesans were customary: Records of the Northern Ward indicates that cele-
brations for successful examination candidates, held in the Music Bureau or
the Pingkang district, regularly included singing girls.71 After such an introduc-
tion, the stage was set for further interaction. Outside the capital, literati poets
visited courtesan houses for inspiration in writing song lyrics.72
In the Song dynasty, collections of anecdotes mention courtesans in the
capitals of Kaifeng and Hangzhou,73 and their remarkable literary and musical
talents inspired the literati to write song lyrics about them.74 These sources
reveal the same stratification into four categories found in the Tang. Emperors
Taizu 太祖 (r. 960–76), Taizong 太宗 (r. 976–97), and Renzong 仁宗 (r. 1023–63)
each established a Music Bureau at the court to provide entertainment at ban-
quets and other festivities, yet in the Northern Song this institution declined as
the entertainment quarters flourished. Palace courtesans were highly visible
figures even outside the court, which may have made this sort of entertain-
ment more widely fashionable, leading to an increase in the numbers of inde-
pendent courtesans. In the Southern Song, Emperor Gaozong dissolved the
Music Bureau, reinstated it, then dissolved it again; subsequent emperors
chose instead to hire entertainers as needed.75 The registration of government
courtesans who could provide entertainment to officials in the prefectures
continued in both the Northern and Southern Song, and in the later period
such entertainment was staged in “wine storehouses” (jiuku 酒庫) or “wine-
houses” (jiulou 酒樓).76 But while courtesan banquets were important venues
for the development of connections among men, some felt that it was inap-
propriate for scholars to develop intimate connections with courtesans, even
as poetry and fiction continued to romanticize such relationships: certain
sources suggest that officials were neither supposed to consort with indepen-
dent courtesans, nor to become too close to government courtesans.77 An inti-
mate relationship was best pursued with a household courtesan, who was
71 Rotours, Courtisanes chinoises à la fin des T’ang, 54–55; cited in Wagner, The Lotus Boat, 85.
73 Bossler, “Shifting Identities,” 7–8; cf. Meng Yuanlao 孟元老, Dongjing meng hua lu 東京
夢華錄 [Bright Dreams of Kaifeng] (Beijing: Zhongguo shangye chubanshe, 1982); Wu
Zimu 吳自牧, Mengliang lu 夢梁錄 [Dreams of Hangzhou] (1274; reprint [Yonghe, Taipei
County]: Wenhai chubanshe, [1981]); and Zhou Mi, Wulin jiushi 武林舊事 [Old Affairs of
Hangzhou] (reprint; Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1991).
74 Bossler, Courtesans, Concubines, and the Cult of Female Fidelity, 29, 31–32, 34–35, 36, 37–38.
75 Ibid., 16, 18–19, 22, 27–28, 167–69; Chang, The Evolution of Chinese Tz’u Poetry, 14, 108–109.
76 Bossler, Courtesans, Concubines, and the Cult of Female Fidelity, 19–21, 172–74; Ebrey, The
Inner Quarters, 219; and Gulik, Sexual Life in Ancient China, 231.
77 Bossler, Courtesans, Concubines, and the Cult of Female Fidelity, 24–25, 28–29, 30, 31–32, 34.

via free access
122 Chapter 2
something more than an ordinary servant but less than a concubine. Household
courtesans could also be used to entertain male guests, and this in turn fos-
tered a deeper connection among men.78
The entertainment district of the Southern Song capital was known as the
Pingkang Ward (Pingkang li 平康里), recalling its Tang counterpart. In Old
Affairs of Hangzhou (Wulin jiushi 武林舊事), Zhou Mi 周密 (1232–1308) divides
independent courtesans into groups according to where they worked. In his
recounting, first-class independent courtesans commanded high prices for re-
fined musical entertainment in settings that included “singing establishments”
(geguan 歌館) or “teahouses” (chafang 茶房、茶坊). Second-class independent
courtesans primarily entertained officials in private winehouses (known by the
same name used for the government-owned winehouses, jiulou).79 Third-class
prostitutes worked in “tiled brothels” (wazi goulan 瓦子勾欄 or washe 瓦舍) es-
tablished by the Southern Song army, according to Wu Zimu’s 吳自牧 Dreams
of Hangzhou (Mengliang lu 夢梁錄), and predominantly served ordinary citi-
zens and soldiers. Although these establishments may have taken their name
from Hangzhou’s Wazi market, Wu Zimu offers a different explanation:
As for the denizens of the tiled brothels, their arrival is likened to “the
loose formation of tiles” and their departure to “the smashing of tiles,”
meaning that they are easily assembled and just as easily dispersed.
瓦舍者，謂其來時瓦合，去時瓦解之義，易聚易散也。80
His comment suggests high turnover among the women as the basis for the
name of these places.
Preconceived notions about men’s affections play into perceptions of both
marital relationships and those with courtesans. In a society where parents
and matchmakers arranged marriages as familial alliances, one might expect
little love between the two parties,81 though under ideal circumstances such
78 Ibid., 71, 79–80, 85, 87, 88–89. For anecdotes about household courtesans, see Ebrey, The
Inner Quarters, 219, 225. Poets sometimes commemorated them in song lyrics, as in Su Shi,
“Zeng Junyou jiaji 贈君猷家姬 [For Xu Junyou’s Household Courtesan],” Tune: “Jianzi
mulan hua 減子木蘭花 [Magnolia Blossoms, Abbreviated, 3/8],” QSC, 1:322.
79 Bossler, Courtesans, Concubines, and the Cult of Female Fidelity, 174–75; Gulik, Sexual Life
in Ancient China, 230–31; and Zhou, Wulin jiushi, 6.125–29.
80 Gulik, Sexual Life in Ancient China, 231; and Wu, Mengliang lu, 19.519–21.
81 Some writers criticized the system of arranged marriage: for example, Bai Juyi, “Yi hun 議
婚 [A Debate on Marriage],” from the series “Qinzhong yin shi shou 秦中吟十首 [Songs
of Chang’an, Ten Poems, 1/10],” QTS, 7:425.4674; cf. translation in Alley, Bai Juyi, 120–21.

via free access
unions were believed to foster devoted attachment. An early poem, “Southeast

the Peacock Flies” (Kongque dongnan fei 孔雀東南飛), concerns a husband
and wife forced to divorce by his mother, who kill themselves rather than en-
tering new marriages, while both a poem and a lyric by Lu You 陸游 (1125–1210)
commemorated his first wife, driven away by his mother against the wishes of
both.82 Conservative scholars in the Song continued to prize virtuous wives,
and thus girls studied moral texts.83 Yet girls’ education broadened in the Tang
through Song periods, with daughters of literary families also studying subjects
such as classical literature, philosophy, painting, and music.84
Still, while educated wives made good companions, scholars might have ex-
pected courtesans to prove a better match for their intellectual interests. A pro-
spective courtesan studied music and poetry more extensively than most girls
destined to marry, generally beginning in adolescence. Household courtesans
were perceived as fitting companions for scholars, though men did also pursue
relationships with both government courtesans and independent courtesans.
These affairs may sometimes have represented a lasting attachment on the
man’s part,85 though presumably the woman had little control over whom she
entertained.
That entertainment often entailed performances of songs that presented a
woman’s perspective on longing and desire, which may have been equated
with genuine romantic expression. Desire was usually expressed through fe-
male voice,86 a convention that correlates well with courtesans’ singing of
erotic lyrics, and this contributed to the construction of courtesans as roman-
tic figures. A courtesan might appear to sing of her own feelings just before
having sexual relations, as convincing clients of her ardor could only add to her
appeal.
82 “Kongque dongnan fei 孔雀東南飛,” YTXY, 1.23b–31a; cf. translation in Watson, The
Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry, 82-92. For translations of Lu You’s poem and lyric, see
Watson, The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry, 320, 371; the latter is in QSC 3:1585, under the
tune title “Chai tou feng 釵頭鳳 [Phoenix Hairpin].”
83 Sima Guang, Jiafan 家範 [Precepts for Family Life] (reprint, [Taipei?]: Zhongguo zixue
mingzhu jicheng, [1977?]), 6.594. For discussions of this idea, see Ebrey, The Inner Quar-
ters, 123–24; and Ching, “Sung Philosophers on Women,” 263.
84 Priscilla Ching Chung, Palace Women in the Northern Sung: 960–1126 (Leiden: E.J. Brill,
1981), 82–83; Egan, The Burden of Female Talent, 12–13. Tang accounts of women with a
command of classical literature include a text by Bai Juyi; Robertson, “Voicing the Femi-
nine,” 72.
85 Bossler, Courtesans, Concubines, and the Cult of Female Fidelity, 62.
86 Owen, “Meaning the Words,” 33.

via free access
124 Chapter 2
Liu Yong’s body of work, which includes song lyrics written from his own
subjective position, occasionally addresses the authenticity of a courtesan’s
performance. As a young man, he visited the entertainment district frequently,87
and he never forgets that a musician who plays a love song for an audience of
men does not express her feelings of love for them. Yet even for him it seems
unthinkable that such a woman not be expressing feelings for someone through
her music, as seen in the second stanza of one of his lyrics:
She strikes a pose, enveloped in a sunset robe.

She shakes ivory castanets, beating the time,
but thoughts of lament are hard to bear.
Nevertheless she lets her voice resonate
as she returns to playing soft music,
then gazes about, crinkling her lined eyes,
emptily catering to the hearts of Wuling men.
She88 needs to believe the words
of “green feelings” convey her thoughts,
but her soulmate is elsewhere.
凝態掩霞襟。動象板聲聲，怨思難任。嘹亮處，迥壓絃管低沈。時恁
迴眸斂黛，空役五陵心。須信道，緣情寄意，別有知音。89
Throughout this verse, Liu Yong stresses the artificiality of the protagonist’s
performance. He implies the fickleness of her audience through an allusion to
Bai Juyi’s “Song of the Pipa,” in which youths of Wuling competed for the atten-
tions of a young courtesan before she fell out of favor.90 This singing girl appar-
ently feels nothing for the men she entertains, but her feelings of love (rendered
in the poem as “green feelings”) are genuine. They address an absent man, her

88 With no pronoun in the line and therefore no change of subject, I believe that Liu Yong
continues to describe the female musician here. Other translators, such as Owen in
“Meaning the Words,” 47 n. 24, and James R. Hightower in “The Songwriter Liu Yung: Part
II,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 42, no. 1 (1982): 50, take this line to describe the audi-
ence’s need to believe the singer’s words. In any case, the line refers to the suspension of
reality required to believe in the performance.
89 Liu Yong, Tune: “Rui zhegu [The Auspicious Partridge, 1/2],” QSC, 1:49. The lyric is trans-
lated in full in Hightower, “The Songwriter Liu Yung: Part II,” 50.
90 Bai Juyi, “Pipa yin,” QTS, 7:435.4821–22; cf. translation in Watson, The Columbia Book of
Chinese Poetry, 249–52.

via free access
soulmate, literally the “one who understands the music” or sympathetic lis-
tener (zhiyin).91
The determination to cast courtesans as lovelorn women meant that early
poetry about them often refrained from mentioning payment, similar to mid-
Tang stories of courtesan-scholar liaisons and in direct contrast to historical
accounts of such interactions.92 In New Songs from a Jade Terrace, only a hand-
ful of palace-style poems refer to monetary transactions between courtesans
and men.93 The discussion of price becomes more open in Song poetry: for
example, Liu Yong’s lyrics sometimes mention the cost of women’s entertain-
ment. His verses to the tunes “Light Willow Waist” (Liu yao qing 柳腰輕) and
“River Tales” (He chuan 河傳) describe men bidding for a dancer’s attention,
while those to the tunes “The Auspicious Partridge” (Rui zhegu 瑞鷓鴣) and
“Joys of Longevity” (Changshou le 長壽樂) claim that one note of a song or a
single smile determines a courtesan’s fee, described as “a thousand in gold”
(qian jin 千金).94 Most poems of the palace-style and song lyric genres, how-
ever, omitted explicit details of these transactions. The elision suggests that an
essential part of the idealized courtesan’s image was the idea that she felt love
for a client, eliminating any hint of crass materialism.
In literature and art, then, writers often render the courtesan as a willing
partner in an ongoing affair, whereas in historical accounts, a singing girl ap-
pears to have little agency over the direction of her own life: her performance
of “love” could be purchased.95 The performers mentioned most often in po-
91 Martin Powers translates this term as “soulmate” in “Love and Marriage in Song China,” 57.
92 Owen, The End of the Chinese ‘Middle Ages,’ 132. There are exceptions, and Paul Rouzer
suggests that the discussion of economic obligations is the norm in Articulated Ladies,
242.
93 Shen Yue 沈約 (441–513), “Shaonian xinhun wei zhi yong 少年新婚為之詠 [For a Newly
Married Youth]”; Wang Sengru 王僧孺 (465–522), “Yueye yong Chen Nankang xin you
suona 月夜詠陳南康新有所納 [Moonlight Song of Chen Nankang’s New Arrival]”;
idem., “Jian guizhe chu ying shengji liao wei zhi yong 見貴者初迎盛姬聊為之詠 [On
Seeing a Lord Receiving His Beautiful Concubine]”; Fei Chang 費昶 (fl. ca. 510), “Wushan
gao 巫山高 [Mount Wu High]”; Bao Zhao 鮑照 (412?–66?), “Dai baizhu geci er shou 代白
紵歌辭二首 [After ‘Song of White Sackcloth,’ Two Poems, 2/2]”; Liu Xiaowei 劉孝威 (d.
548), “Yong jiali 詠佳麗 [On a Beauty],” YTXY, 5.4b–5b, 6.6b, 6.7a, 6.15b, 9.16a, 10.24a–b; cf.
translations in Birrell, New Songs from a Jade Terrace, 137–38, 166, 176, 245–46, 294.
94 Liu Yong, “Liuyao qing [Light Willow Waist],” “He chuan [River Tales],” “Rui zhegu [1/2],”
“Changshou le [Joys of Longevity],” QSC, 1:15–16, 47, 49, 50–51; cf. translations in High
tower, “The Songwriter Liu Yung: Part I,” 341–42, 346; and idem., “The Songwriter Liu Yung:
Part II,” 50, 53–54.
95 Eventually, poetry too would address courtesans’ lack of agency. Qing dynasty poems
written by scholars and popular songs attributed to anonymous courtesans describe girls’

via free access
126 Chapter 2
etry are singers, lutenists, flutists, and dancers. In painting, stringed instru-
ments, flutes and pipes, and dancing become important visual cues for the
pictorial rendition of women’s emotions. Still, the performer is key: musical
performance and dance, as outward manifestations of feelings, indeed repre-
sent emotions, according to the Great Preface. Poet, reader, painter, and viewer
understood how a musician’s apparent emotional response could arouse simi-
lar feelings among the members of the audience. In Night Revels of Han Xizai,
the depiction of the courtesans correlates with the idealized poetic vision. The
women are most likely household courtesans, though they might also be inde-
pendent courtesans from the entertainment district. While some texts clarify
that they enact scenarios imagined first by their host, pictorial references to
their feelings of longing or desire suggest the women as romanticized figures.
Content of the Beijing Scroll

Scene I of the Beijing scroll opens with an image that dispenses with subtlety:
the oblique representation of a bed, its curtains tied open to reveal rumpled
bedclothes and a pipa’s neck, suggesting that the bed contains a guest and a
courtesan (fig. 9.1). Though their liaison occurs within sight of many figures
within the room (the frame of an adjacent couch offers some concealment),
most pay no attention. The open drapes reveal that modesty is unnecessary.
This tantalizing suggestion of uninhibited sexual activity serves as an intro-
duction to the painting’s content: the unapologetically intimate relationship
between courtesans and scholars attending a banquet (or a series of banquets),
which in turn affirms the homosocial bonding of male guests and their host.
To the left of the curtained bed, seven scholars and four courtesans have as-
sembled to hear a pipa performance. The numerous verses concerning lute-
nists and lute-playing in Complete Song Lyrics of the Song Dynasty (Quan Song
ci 全宋詞) reveal the instrument’s erotic associations. Zu Wupo’s 1079 colo-
phon describing the content of a Night Revels scroll suggests that the original
work also began with such a scene:
At the beginning of this scroll, Han is with his students; Secretariat Zhu
Xian; Yin Can, who ranked first in the imperial examination; Li Jiaming,
misery at being bought and sold and indicate that a courtesan’s flirtatious behavior dis-
guises her suffering; Paul S. Ropp, “Ambiguous Images of Courtesan Culture in Late Impe-
rial China,” in Widmer and Chang, Writing Women in Late Imperial China, 32–41.

via free access
Figure 9.1 Night Revels of Han Xizai. After Gu Hongzhong ( fl. ca. 943–60), Southern Song dynasty, ca. 1127–1200; handscroll, ink and colors on silk, 28.7 ×
127
via free access

128 Chapter 2
Assistant Director in the Music Bureau,96 and Li’s younger sister, who
plays a foreign lute.97
其卷首即與公門生，朱銑紫微，印粲狀元，及教坊副使李嘉明，并其
妹按胡琴。98
This comment predates the Beijing scroll. Zu Wupo focuses on five people; he
may have seen his priority as identifying the host, the highest-ranked scholars,
and the pipa player. An anonymous, undated colophon attached to the Beijing
scroll names more figures:
[Han Xizai] often met to drink with Erudite of the Court of Imperial
Sacrifices Chen Zhiyong, the pupil Shu Ya, Secretariat Zhu Xian, Principal
Graduate99 Lang Can, and Assistant Director in the Music Bureau Li
Jiaming. Li’s younger sister played the foreign lute, the host beat the
drum, and the courtesan Wang Wushan danced “double-sixes.”
常與太常博士陳致雍，門生舒雅，紫薇朱銑，狀元郎粲，教坊副使李
家明會飲。李之妹按胡琴，公為撃鼓，女妓王屋山舞六么。100
Virtually all of the figures in this first scene are engrossed in the lutenist’s per-
formance, judging by their intent expressions and inclined postures.
Han Xizai is the large, bearded man wearing a tall hat, and the other schol-
ars are his associates and students. Han sits on a couch with the red-robed
Principal Graduate, who scored highest on an imperial examination. A table in
front of them bears bowls of food, wine ewers in ceramic warmers, and cups.
The man seated at the table’s far end, clasping his hands, is one of three figures
who do not look at the pipa player; instead, he looks directly at the viewer of
the painting. This is a rare occurrence in Song painting, and given that his gaze
suggests his awareness of the viewer, I argue that this figure represents Gu
Hongzhong: as a “painter-in-attendance” (daizhao 待詔), he would wear an of-
ficial’s robes, and crossed hands were a gesture of respect dating from the Tang
96 Hucker, A Dictionary of Official Titles, s.v. 7545 tzu-wei; s.v. 2101 fu-shih.
97 A pipa was sometimes called a “foreign lute” (huqin) due to its origins among nomad
peoples.
98 Zu, “Ba Han Xizai yeyan tu,” 13b–14a.
99 Hucker, A Dictionary of Official Titles, s.v. 6143 t’ai-ch’ang po-shih; s.v. 1515 chuang-yuan.
100 An image of this inscription is published in Gugong Bowuyuan, Gugong Bowuyuan cang-
hua ji, 1:14.

via free access
dynasty.101 Perhaps this figure expresses deference to the primal viewer, Li Yu,
in a visual equivalent of the original signature, which might have read “Your
servitor, Gu Hongzhong” (Chen Gu Hongzhong 臣顧閎中). Two more scholars
stand in the background: one taps a flute against his hand while watching the
pipa player, and the other, also with clasped hands, looks across the room at
Han Xizai. Beside the lutenist, another scholar leans forward to see her better.
Courtesans mingle with the scholars. One stands beside Han Xizai. Close to
the lutenist is an adolescent girl whose outfit suggests her lower status: she
wears a simple blue robe with a beige girdle and a black belt. But she also wears
hair ornaments, indicating that she ranks higher than a servant. Behind her is
another courtesan, standing near three scholars. The only courtesan who does
not mix with the company hides in the background, next to two drums, peer-
ing out at the audience from behind a screen.
Most of the figures seem intent on the lutenist’s performance. Following
their gazes, the viewer finds the center of attention: Li Jiaming’s sister, playing
her pipa. This woman is one of two identified by Zu Wupo: later in his colo-
phon, he refers to her as Ningsu 凝酥 and mentions that she left home as a
child, presumably to begin apprenticeship as a courtesan.102 She holds a plec-
trum in her right hand, pressing the strings at the neck with her left. She wears
a love-knot, suggesting both her capacity for attachment and that her lute is a
medium for expressing romantic feelings.103 All elements of her appearance
seem seductive.
Significantly, Ningsu avoids the gaze of anyone in the audience,104 concen-
trating on her fingering. The slanting lines of her pipa’s tuning pegs join with
angled planes on the rock in the painting behind her to create a diagonal that
interposes between her eyes and the face of the scholar beside her, indicating
that she looks downward, toward the instrument. In poetry, her evasion of ev-
101 Yu, “Han Xizai yeyan tu juan niandai kao,” 43–44. Other figures that make this gesture—a
scholar in Scene I and the Buddhist monk in Scene II—look directly at the figure of Han
Xizai.
102 Zu Wupo writes: “The two maids ordered to leave home as children were called Ningsu
and Suzhi” (幼命二婢出家號凝酥、素質) in Zu, “Ba Han Xizai yeyan tu,” 13b–14a; see
also Chen Wannai 陳萬鼐, “Zhi tan Yeyan tu 摭談夜宴圖 [Resuming Discussion of the
Painting Night Revels],” Gugong wenwu yuekan 故宮文物月刊 [The National Palace
Museum Monthly of Chinese Art], no. 24 (March 1985): 44, 46. This identification is reas-
serted in the Beijing scroll’s short biographical colophon.
103 I earlier published this idea about Ningsu’s love-knot in Blanchard, “Lonely Women and
the Absent Man,” 42.
104 Audrey Spiro reads this differently, arguing that she meets the gaze of the scholar sitting
next to her, in “Creating Ancestors,” 62.

via free access
130 Chapter 2
eryone’s gaze would suggest the absence of her beloved. Most likely, she is sup-
posed to be performing a love song as if it expressed her own feelings for an
absent lover, revealing an appealing vulnerability. The painter, in showing the
other courtesans as active viewers, suggests that the men in Han Xizai’s home
are not the only ones to derive pleasure from the lute performance.
Scene II (fig. 9.2) focuses on a young courtesan’s performance of the dance
known as “double-sixes” or “sixes-in-dice” (liu yao 六么), or alternatively as
“green waist” (lüyao 綠腰). Zu Wupo’s description identifies her:
Han Xizai appears again beating a drum as the courtesan Wang Wushan
dances double-sixes. Wang Wushan was unusually intelligent, and Han
Xizai felt most tender towards her.
又公自擊鼓，妓王屋山舞六么。王屋山俊慧非常，公最憐。105
Zu Wupo later gives her nickname as Suzhi, and says that she too left home as
a child. The popular liu yao dance was “gentle,” or a lithe dance that expressed
feeling, as opposed to “vigorous.” The dancer characteristically expressed her-
self entirely through the movement of her sleeves, stamping her foot to mark
the rhythm.106
This abbreviated scene includes Han Xizai, four scholars, a monk, and two
young women. The gaze of the figures provides an organizing principle: one
group looks at Han Xizai, the other at the dancer. Han Xizai, wearing yellow,
plays a large standing drum, similar to those visible in the background of Scene
I. His brow is furrowed, suggesting weariness or unhappiness, yet his expres-
sion as he watches Suzhi dance seems indulgent. A scholar beside him smiles
and claps. Beyond them stands a monk. Tao Yue 陶岳 first suggested the atten-
dance of monks in his account of the night revels;107 in later centuries, writers
identify this monk as Deming 德明, one of Han Xizai’s friends. His presence
here is significant: Buddhist monks should have avoided this kind of revelry.108
Han Xizai and the remaining figures all gaze at the dancer. The Principal
Graduate, still in red, sits in a chair, twisting his body as if a moment earlier he
had been watching Han Xizai play. In front of the monk stands a scholar who

106 Li, Wudai Gu Hongzhong “Han Xizai yeyan tu,” 10, 11, 19 n. 14.
107 Tao, “Han Xizai weibo bu xiu,” 12a-b, <https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100367254>
(accessed 22 March 2018).
108 Weng and Yang, The Palace Museum, 161. Sun Chengze 孫承澤 (1592–1676) identifies the
monk in Gengzi xiaoxia ji 庚子銷夏記 [Notes Written in the Summer of 1660] (1660;
reprint, China: Bao Tingbo, 1760–61), 8.4a–b.

via free access
Figure 9.2 Night Revels of Han Xizai. After Gu Hongzhong ( fl. ca. 943–60), Southern Song dynasty, ca. 1127–1200; handscroll, ink and
colors on silk, 28.7 × 335.5 cm. Palace Museum, Beijing, P.R.C. Photograph provided by the Palace Museum.
131
via free access

132 Chapter 2
plays a clapper and smiles enthusiastically at Suzhi. Beside her is another fe-
male figure, in a plain dress suggesting youth or the status of a servant, who
smiles and applauds.
Suzhi also appeared in the first scene. Here it becomes clear that her girdle
and belt are designed to emphasize her waist, regarded as able to transmit feel-
ing in dance. A bent leg suggests her stamping foot. Her left hand rests on her
hip, and her right arm moves; long sleeves cover her hands, their movement
essential to the dance. Turning her back on the painting’s viewer, she turns her
head to face Han Xizai. Choosing a dance regarded as emotionally evocative
and allowing her gaze to meet his makes her performance seductive.
Scene III dispenses with musical performance and depicts the direct com-
munication of Han Xizai and six female figures who serve him (fig. 9.3). The
viewer first sees two who approach Han Xizai. One is a maid with pinned-up
hair, seen from behind and wearing a simple dress. She balances a tray with a
wine ewer and two cups on her shoulder. The courtesan next to her, holding
three flutes and a pipa, has half-turned and bent her head toward the maid.
They stand next to another bed, again with open bedcurtains, in which an-
other couple has retired, their forms hidden by the bedclothes. Though the
other people in the room seem uninterested, the maid cranes her neck in order
to see into this alcove. The courtesan tries to block the inquisitive maid’s view
of the bed with the pipa.
Han Xizai sits with four courtesans on a couch adjacent to the bed. The fe-
male figure at right, head inclined, looks at Han Xizai. The two figures next to
her engage in conversation: one, hands hidden in long sleeves, turns her head
as if in response to the other, who leans forward in an attitude of eagerness. A
fourth sits on the back section of the couch, gazing at Han Xizai. He wears a
black robe and washes his hands in a basin held by Suzhi.109 Their reciprocal
gaze bespeaks the affection that Han reportedly felt for this young woman. But
whereas Suzhi smiles at him, he seems weary. His hand-washing may suggest
his dissociation from the impure activities taking place all around him. At the
same time, the disparity between his large figure and her diminutive one re-
minds the viewer of their age difference and his relative power.
Scene IV incorporates two groups of figures: a half-dressed Han Xizai at-
tended by three courtesans and a quintet of flutists with a scholar accompany-
ing them on the clapper (fig. 9.4). The most visually arresting figure in the
group at the right is a courtesan shown from behind. The back of her gray robe
is decorated with pairs of geese, metaphors for lifelong love, and she holds an
oval fan with a picture of a blossoming tree, suggesting transient beauty—an
109 Ang, “Redating The Night Revels,” 8.

via free access
133
via free access

134
Chapter 2
via free access

interesting juxtaposition of temporal cues. She turns her head toward another
courtesan. Han Xizai sits cross-legged in a chair, his shoes discarded on the
footrest, clad only in his hat and a long-sleeved underrobe that hangs open to
reveal his rounded stomach. Perhaps he has interacted sexually with some of
the courtesans. He holds an undecorated square fan up to his face, shielding it
from the third courtesan, who stands before him, looking at him attentively.
She holds a clapper, part of which is visible by her left shoulder. Although the
two groups do not interact, Han Xizai gazes toward the flutists, leading the
scroll’s viewers to look there as well. The quintet includes courtesans on the
right and at center playing transverse flutes, while the other three play double-
reed pipes, creating an image suggestive of fellation. They alternate head posi-
tions, imparting a sense of liveliness to the performance. Each one wears a
love-knot, suggesting once again that men would understand them to express
their own feelings of romantic attachment through their instruments. To their
left, a lone scholar accompanies them on a clapper. His participation indicates
his enthusiasm for the music and perhaps insinuates a connection to one of
the courtesans.
In Scene V, courtesans and scholars form groups of two or three (fig. 9.5).
Beside a screen, a courtesan engages a bearded scholar standing with arms
folded. Only his head turns toward her, as if he had been enjoying the flute
performance. The painter suggests that the courtesan is making conversation
by showing her gesticulating with one hand. To their left is a group of three
figures: a scholar and two courtesans. The scholar sits sideways on a chair, his
black robe gaping at the hem. He gazes up at one of the courtesans, grasping
her wrist. She rests her hand possessively on his shoulder but does not engage
his gaze. Instead, she looks balefully at the other courtesan, who leans on the
back of the scholar’s chair and stares back at her. Although this tableau may
represent the prelude to a ménage à trois, it is equally likely that the scholar is
deciding whom he prefers as a sexual partner, or that the first courtesan is
warning the second away. Han Xizai stands in the center of this scene, facing
the threesome. He appears as he did in Scene II, wearing his hat and a belted
yellow robe and holding drumsticks. He raises his hand as if to bid his guests
goodnight.
The last two figures of the handscroll are another scholar, whose thin mus-
tache and lack of beard suggest youth, and a courtesan, dressed in a flowered
skirt adorned with a love-knot. He looks at her with a cajoling expression. One
of his hands presses against the small of her back, while the other points into
the distance, urging her to accompany him. She seems troubled and hesitant,
one hand pressed to her mouth and eyes downcast. The long sleeves extending
beyond her hands are the most exaggerated example of the fashion seen thus

via free access
136
Chapter 2
via free access

far, making her seem childlike. The viewer might read this pair as a sign that
the painter understood how little agency courtesans had in their professional
lives, but there is another, more likely interpretation: this last courtesan pre-
tends reluctance in order to excite her partner.
Early Assessments of Han Xizai’s Character

Night Revels of Han Xizai includes features of a pictorial narrative: a linear
structure with discrete episodes, an easily recognizable protagonist and sev-
eral supporting characters, as well as an identifiable setting. But a strict defini-
tion of narrative requires the elements of action, change, and time,110 and the
Beijing scroll seems to lack the element of change, what one might refer to as
the plot. Without this part of the narrative structure, the carefully crafted inter-
action collapses into a morass of detail. The structure seems closer to song
lyric’s employment of juxtaposed and disconnected images.111 The painting
presents filtered impressions of Gu Hongzhong’s initial observations. An offi-
cial throws a party for students and colleagues, with courtesans, wine, music,
and ultimately sex. Though the host may participate, it seems equally possible
that he encourages his guests but walks out alone himself, as suggested in
Scene V of the Beijing scroll.
Song-era viewers regarded this volatile combination of images as impugn-
ing Han Xizai. Various descriptions of the painting appear in painting cata-
logues, informal histories, and dynastic histories dating from the Song period
onward; these cite his relationship with courtesans as evidence of his charac-
ter. Although the writers clearly encountered different compositions, most ac-
counts pay particular attention to Han Xizai’s so-called debauchery, mainly
embodied in the figures of the courtesans.112 In most of the Song and Yuan
texts, his banquets signal his abandonment of scholarly ideals, which is often
interpreted as a reflection of his dissolute character.
The earliest account, titled “Han Xizai’s Curtains Are Not Drawn” (Han Xizai
weibo bu xiu 韓熙載帷箔不修), dates to 1012 and appears in Tao Yue’s
Supplement to the History of the Five Dynasties (Wudai shibu 五代史補). The ti-
tle refers to the opened curtains of Han Xizai’s beds—a metaphor for public
110 Julia K. Murray, “What Is ‘Chinese Narrative Illustration’?” The Art Bulletin 80, no. 4
(December 1998): 605, 608.
111 Brook Ziporyn describes this phenomenon in song lyric in “Temporal Paradoxes: The
Intersections of Time Present and Time Past in the Song Ci,” Chinese Literature: Essays,
Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 17 (December 1995): 92–93.
112 I presented this argument previously in Blanchard, “A Scholar in the Company of Female
Entertainers,” 222.

via free access
138 Chapter 2
lewdness.113 This account emphasizes Li Yu’s displeasure, stating that the ruler
explicitly commissioned the painting in order to shame Han:
Han Xizai was an official in Jiangnan who rose to the rank of Vice Min
ister.114 In his late years, he was unrestrained. He had a hundred female
servants. Whenever he invited guests to his home, he first ordered his
female servants to exchange glances with them. Some of the women
would flirt with them, some would hit them, and some would go so far as
to fight over their boots or official tablets, without the music ever stop-
ping. Afterward, Han Xizai would eventually emerge. This became habit
and was repeated often. Doctors and several monks who made Daoist
drugs always came. All had attained greatness in their fields. They mixed
freely with the female servants and other women. The puppet emperor
[Li Yu] learned of this, and although he was angry, this was his highly
ranked minister, so he didn’t want a direct confrontation of his activities.
Instead, the ruler ordered his painter-in-attendance to make a painting of
these events, in order to present it to him and make him ashamed of him-
self. Yet Xizai looked at it calmly.
韓熙載仕江南官至諸行侍郎。晚年不羈，女僕百人。每延請賓客，而
先命女僕與之相見，或調戲，或毆擊，或加以爭奪靴笏，無不曲盡。
然後熙載始緩步而出，析以為常。復有醫人及燒煉僧數輩每來，無不
升堂，入室與女僕等雜處。偽主知之，雖怒以其大臣，不欲直指其
過，因命待詔畫為圖以賜之，使其自愧。而熙載視之安然。115
Though the text describes female servants (nüpu 女僕) and does not explicitly
refer to courtesans, I surmise that “servants” is a euphemism.116 Han Xizai di-
rects his household courtesans to engage with important guests; in the Song,
when Tao Yue wrote this account, such a performance did fall within the realm
of expectation for household courtesans,117 but it would normally be consid-
ered improper for other women in an official’s household. Nothing else here
speaks to Han Xizai’s fitness as an adviser to the ruler. He is judged by the con-
duct of his “servants,” specifically their interaction with other men.
113 Ibid., 222–23.

114 Hucker, A Dictionary of Official Titles, s.v. 5278, shih-lang.
115 Tao, “Han Xizai weibo bu xiu,” 12a-b, <https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100367254>
(accessed 22 March 2018).
116 Song household courtesans were often referred to by vernacular coinages involving
another word for servant (shi 侍); Bossler, “Shifting Identities,” 23.
117 Bossler, Courtesans, Concubines, and the Cult of Female Fidelity, 71, 79–80.

via free access
Two other Song accounts give a different reason for the ruler’s commission
of the painting, yet still emphasize Han Xizai’s licentious activities. These pas-
sages paint Li Yu as a would-be voyeur. The earlier is Zu Wupo’s colophon of
1079, which, as discussed in Chapter 1, claims that the ruler wished to spy on
Han Xizai’s revels and used Gu Hongzhong to “catch” him. The early twelfth-
century description that appears in the Northern Song imperial Xuanhe
Painting Catalogue substantially concurs with Zu’s account:
[…] the Secretariat Drafter, Han Xizai, valued mixing with aristocrats and
really loved singing girls, especially during evening drinking parties,
although his guests mixed together in confusion, shouted wildly, and
were completely unrestrained. Li Yu valued his ability, so he disregarded
this and didn’t ask about it. But when talk began to spread and the ruler
heard one-sided accounts of Han’s wild indulgences, he thereafter wished
to see his staging of noisy drinking parties in a setting of wine vessels,
lamps, and candles. Since the ruler considered this impossible, he ordered
Hongzhong to go to Han’s house at night to spy on him, then to remem-
ber what he saw and paint it. In this way Night Revels of Han Xizai has
passed down to us.
是時中書舍人韓熙載，以貴游世胄，多好聲伎，專為夜飲，雖賓客揉
雜，歡呼狂逸，不復拘制，李氏惜其才，置而不問。聲傳中外，頗聞
其荒縱，然欲見樽俎燈燭間觥籌交錯之態度不可得，乃命閎中夜至其
第竊窺之，目識心記，圖繪以上之，故世有『韓熙載夜宴圖』。118
As in Zu Wupo’s colophon, this passage foregrounds the ruler’s value of Han’s

“ability” as an official. These passages do not explicitly say that the ruler com-
missioned the paintings in order to assess Han’s fitness as a minister. Clearly,
though, his behavior was regarded as irregular.
In the Yuan dynasty, Tang Hou’s Examination of Painting included a descrip-
tion of the Beijing version of Night Revels (it mentions a colophon still attached
to the scroll along with one of its seals). Again, the author refers to Han Xizai’s
impropriety, but unlike the earlier writers, Tang Hou ignores biographical de-
tails, confining his observations to what is reflected in the painting:
118 Xuanhe huapu, 7.193. The passage must have recorded a scroll different from that now in
Beijing, as the Beijing scroll bears no Xuanhe huapu seals; Ang, “Redating The Night Rev-
els,” 13. The phrase “a setting of wine vessels” (zunzu jian 樽俎間) connoted revelry (yan-
hui 宴會) in the Song period; Ciyuan, s.v. zunzu.

via free access
140 Chapter 2
Li the Last Ruler ordered Zhou Wenju and Gu Hongzhong to do pictures

of Night Revels of Han Xizai. I saw two versions by Zhou, and in the capital
I saw Hongzhong’s brushwork, which differs slightly from Zhou’s work. It
has a colophon by Shi Wei, Wang Hao and a Shaoxing seal.119 Although
not a proper object of enjoyment for a scholar’s collection, it may at least
serve as a warning against illicit pleasures.
李後主命周文矩，顧閎中圖『韓熙載夜宴圖』，余見周畫二本。至京
師，見弘中筆，與周事蹟稍異，有史衛，王浩題字，並紹興印。雖非
文房清玩，亦可為淫樂之戒也。120
This author implies that the behavior of Han Xizai and his friends was regarded
as a type that should not be openly practiced or viewed.
A slightly later passage by Tuotuo 脫脫 (1313–55) in Song History (Songshi 宋
史) reads in part:
He accumulated many gifts over a period of time, and thus he acquired

over forty courtesans and concubines, all of whom were extremely accom
plished musicians. These women were not subject to normal constraints,
but brazenly entered the outer rooms to mingle with Han’s guests and
students. Li Yu was impressed with Han’s loyalty and his views on state
matters, and he wished to help him. At last, though, because of “the cur-
tains and screens not being closed,” as a reprimand Li Yu demoted him to
the position of Minister of the Right, putting him in charge of Hongzhou.
Han Xizai dismissed all his courtesans and set off in a single cart. Then
Li Yu detained him, appointing him to the post of Director of the Palace
Library, an office he held only briefly. The courtesans who had been dis-
missed returned one by one, and soon everything was as before. Li Yu
sighed, “I have no recourse!”
又累獲賞賜，由是蓄妓妾四十餘人，多善音樂，不加防閑，恣其出入
外齋，與賓客生徒雜處。煜以其盡忠言事，垂欲相之，终以帷薄不
修，責授右庶子，分司洪州。熙載盡斥諸妓，單車即路，煜留之，改
119 The Beijing scroll actually has a Shaoxun 紹勛 seal; Tang Hou simply misread the charac-
ters. Xu Bangda identifies the seal’s owner as Shi Miyuan. As for the colophon, its signa-
ture may read Shi Hao, Wei Wang, and refer to Shi Miyuan’s father. Xu, “Gu Hongzhong
hua Han Xizai yeyan tu,” 26–27.
120 The Chinese text appears in Chou, Tang Hou’s “Huajian,” 163.

via free access
秘書監，俄而復位。向所斥之妓稍稍而集，頃之如故。煜歎曰：“吾
亦無如之何！”121
Tuotuo was not so much objecting to Han’s acquisition of household courte-

sans as to his failure to keep them segregated from other men. One might sus-
pect that Han had flouted notions of gendered space: generally, a woman’s
entry into masculine space, as depicted in the Beijing scroll, would contradict
conventions of gender segregation that dictated that women should keep to
the inner quarters. But courtesans were not like wives or daughters, and lack of
concern with such segregation was typical among even palace courtesans.122
Reading between the lines, what Tuotuo finds egregious is Han Xizai’s blatant
and widely remarked use of his own household women to entertain other
scholars in his official residence. Tang scholars regularly discussed professional
and political matters among independent courtesans (outside the home).123
Han Xizai, however, invited guests into his home to enjoy the services of his
own courtesans and concubines, so often that it became public knowledge. In
doing so, he violated a long-standing cornerstone of Chinese bureaucratic the-
ory: the separation of private affairs—a category under which personal rela-
tions with women in one’s own home would fall—from public business.124 The
transgressive entry of the courtesans into the “outer rooms” represented in the
painting seems designed to disclose salient information about Han’s character:
that he has abandoned the appropriate behavior of a high-ranking official.
Political Interpretations of Night Revels

A further key to the outrage incited by Night Revels can be found in the end-
ing to the Xuanhe Painting Catalogue entry on Gu Hongzhong (translated
in Chapter 1). The story of the Former Han official Zhang Chang 張敞 do-
ing his wife’s makeup125 is one of unseemly indulgence in sensuality (such a
121 Tuotuo, Songshi [Song History] (reprint, Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1977), 40:478.13866–67.
122 Bossler, “Shifting Identities,” 9–10.
123 Lois Fusek, trans., Among the Flowers: The “Hua-chien chi” (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1982), 22.
124 On public and private in the Han court, see Martin J. Powers, Art and Political Expression
in Early China (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991), 194–95, 367–68. On
the Song dynasty perception of corruption as a private offense distinct from administra-
tive delinquency, see E.A. Kracke Jr., Civil Service in Early Sung China, 960–1067; with Par-
ticular Emphasis on the Development of Controlled Sponsorship to Foster Administrative
Responsibility (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), 171–72.
125 Ciyuan, s.v. “Zhang Chang,” and Birrell, New Songs from a Jade Terrace, s.v. “Chang of the
capital.”

via free access
142 Chapter 2
voluptuous interest in body or surface would be more fitting for a relation-

ship with a courtesan), but his explanation exacerbated the situation because
it called attention to the act. In a sense, Gu Hongzhong’s original painting
similarly publicized something that ought to have been swept under the car-
pet—a scene of unabashed indulgence in the pleasures of the flesh. (Perhaps
someone ultimately discarded the original painting in an apprehension that
documenting Han Xizai’s behavior was going too far.) All subsequent paintings
on the theme violated the same principle: certainly the painter of the Beijing
scroll, in beginning with a representation of an occupied bed, intended his
painting to be shocking. This is why Tao Yue excuses the original painting as
intended to shame the subject, and Tang Hou assesses the Beijing scroll as a
warning of what not to do. While seeing Han’s home as public space is integral
to understanding the consequences of the events taking place within, the very
existence of paintings of these events brought them into the public realm as
well. This emphasis on the public nature of both the events and visual repre-
sentations of them helps to establish a political interpretation for both.
At this point, let us reconsider Zu Wupo’s colophon. In Chapter 1, I trans-
lated an excerpt that mentions Li Yu’s motives for commissioning the painting,
but the part immediately preceding that suggests that Han was reacting to an
untenable situation at court:
The Southern Tang Vice Minister of the Secretariat, Lord Han Xizai, knew
that the Last Ruler could lose his throne. He let go of his inhibitions, wal-
lowing in cups of wine and polluting himself. The Last Ruler wanted to
appoint him as a minister, but from the time he heard that Han was
indulging himself in reclusion unobserved, he always wanted to spy on
the parties in Han’s home. Thus he ordered painter Gu Hongzhong to do
a painting that would catch Han Xizai.
南唐中書侍郎韓公熙載後主時知國祚將廢。放懷杯酒間以自污。後主
欲用為相，而聞縱逸不檢，每伺其家宴，命畫工顧閎中丹青以追。126
This account assigns a political meaning to Han Xizai’s actions. “Reclusion”

usually refers to a scholar’s practice of retiring from court to the wilderness. Zu
Wupo hints that although Han Xizai had not left court, he deliberately made it
impossible for Li Yu to consult him, effecting a quasi-retirement while
continuing to serve. He had essentially taken the role of court hermit, the most

via free access
exalted rank of recluses.127 Zu Wupo’s text includes what may be the first sug-
gestion that Han Xizai had a political purpose for behaving as he did, and it is
strikingly different from other accounts of Night Revels that focus on how out
of character his actions were.
Still, some Song and Yuan sources do allude to Han Xizai’s political difficul-
ties. A passage that links his unseemly behavior to his position at court can be
found in Zhou Mi’s Guixin Miscellaneous Records (Guixin zashi 癸辛雜識), pub-
lished in the late Southern Song and titled “Begging for Food in the Singing
Girls’ Courts” (Qi shi geji yuan 乞食歌姬院):
Han Xizai served as a minister in Jiangnan. When Li the Last Ruler

ascended the throne, he was rather suspicious of northerners, and some
died of poison. Xizai feared disaster; therefore, he openly indulged his
feelings and did not observe propriety. He destroyed his house in acquir-
ing and selling one hundred courtesans and musicians, who played music
in an uncultivated and lewd manner. There was nothing that they did not
get up to, and the monthly salary he received could not provide for them.
Thereafter in tattered clothing and broken-down shoes, he pretended to
be a blind man carrying a stringed lute, prompting his pupil Shu Ya, hold-
ing a clapper in his hand, to pull him along, accompanying him through
the house, in order to get enough for daily meals. Afterward someone
painted Night Revels in order to ridicule him; for this reason he felt miser-
able. In the Tang dynasty, the aged Pei Xiu, in order to mend his torn furs,
went to the singing girls’ courts holding an alms bowl and begging for
food, and this was not perceived as tainted by vulgarity. One can say that
the actions make the man: now, it is known that before Xizai this prece-
dent already existed, and although Lord Pei escaped into Chan Buddhism,
and Xizai was fleeing disaster, I say that Xizai was acting in accordance
with traditional practice, whereas Lord Pei was acting according to his
own inclinations. Their real intentions were not the same.
韓熙載相江南，後主旣位頗疑北人，有鴆死者。熙載懼禍，因肆情坦
率，不遵禮法。破其家財售妓樂數百人，荒淫為樂，無所不至，所受
月俸至不能給。遂敝衣破履作瞽者持絃琴，俾門生舒雅執板挽之，隨
房乞丐以足日饍。後人因畫夜宴圖以譏之，然其情亦可哀矣。唐裴休
晚年亦披毳衲于歌姬院持鉢乞食，不為俗情所染。可以説法爲人，乃
127 For the respect accorded court hermits, see Li Chi, “The Changing Concept of the Recluse
in Chinese Literature,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 24 (1962–63): 243.

via free access
144 Chapter 2
知熙載之前已有此例，雖裴公逃禪，熙載避禍，余謂熙載是世法，裴
公是心法，心跡不同也。128
The text gives the impression that as an unappreciated northerner (he was
from present-day Shandong province), Han Xizai gave up any hope of service
or else decided to indulge his own predilections while he could; though the
passage connects the political climate with Han Xizai’s behavior in using the
telling conjunction “therefore” (yin 因), his actions are not entirely consistent
with those of a court hermit. Where the writer compares Han Xizai to Pei Xiu,
he uses Buddhist metaphors: one might also translate this part to read “Xizai is
the dharma; Lord Pei is the esoteric teachings,” meaning that Pei Xiu behaved
in a way that better accords with inner truth, while Han Xizai merely followed
a script. The writer sees nothing admirable about the latter’s actions.
Tuotuo, however, gives the following praiseworthy assessment of the man:
Xizai’s talent was superior, and when he had an opportunity to use it he

was utterly diligent. His character was noble and frank, with no inferior
or crooked aspects. He did not accede to anyone. Although he was
expelled, to the end his integrity was unchanging, and in Jiangzuo he was
called “Master Han.”
熙載才氣俊逸，機用周敏，性高簡，無所卑屈，未嘗拜人。雖被遣
逐，終不改節，江左號為“韓夫子”。129
While a reader might see a hint of the respect accorded to a court hermit here,
Tuotuo (unlike Zhou Mi) does not explicitly link Han’s political difficulties to
his organization of the night revels. While both sources intimate a political
motive for Han’s behavior, they do not make the case for it as directly as some
later sources do.
One might dismiss Zu Wupo’s mention of reclusion as inconsistent with
other accounts of the period, except that the Southern Song painter of the
Beijing scroll also clearly intended to depict Han Xizai as a recluse.130 This was
recognized in the Yuan dynasty: Ban Weizhi’s 班惟志 1326 poetic colophon to
128 Zhou Mi, comp., Guixin zashi [Guixin Miscellaneous Records] (reprint, Taipei: Yiwen yin
shuguan, 1966), 1: 37a–b. Wu Hung, in The Double Screen, 263 n. 36, claims that this pas-
sage appeared in an earlier text, but I have not been able to confirm this.
129 Tuotuo, Songshi, 40:13866–67.
130 This aspect of my argument has been published in a different form in Blanchard, “A
Scholar in the Company of Female Entertainers,” 225–27.

via free access
the Beijing scroll suggests Han Xizai as a court hermit.131 The pictorial cues are
unmistakable: first, the figure of Han Xizai is reminiscent of renowned political
recluses of the past. Scene IV of the Beijing scroll shows his gaping undergar-
ment, suggesting the untrammeled behavior (and dress) of such prototypical
recluses as the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, who lived during the third
century, also a time of political turmoil. Anecdotes about them were recorded
in A New Account of Tales of the World.132 They not only refused to serve in
political office, but also reveled, indulged in wine, and sat about naked: all
practices referenced in Night Revels. Later commentators regarded the Seven
Sages in two ways: as immoral men or as serious dissenters of both politics and
convention.133 Tellingly, the former description meshes well with early inter-
pretations of Night Revels, while the latter defines a recluse’s behavior. Pictorial
representations of the Seven Sages include fourth- to fifth-century tomb depic-
tions at Xishanqiao, which show them in casual poses and attire, drinking and
enjoying lute music.134 The painter of Night Revels seems to incorporate textual
and visual accounts of the Seven Sages into his depiction of Han Xizai. Second,
the assembly of so many like-minded men at Han Xizai’s house brings to mind
the close friendships based on shared values that recluses typically cultivat-
ed.135 Finally, the representation of uninhibited interaction with courtesans
may be linked to the representation of Han Xizai as a court hermit: the wom-
en’s interaction with scholars signals that Han Xizai has discarded decorum
and begun to engage in a recluse’s untrammeled behavior (as may also be said
of his compatriots). However, the fact that Ningsu had a brother who worked
in the Music Bureau would likely remind the viewer that the most talented
131 Wu, The Double Screen, 46; Lee, The Night Banquet, 56–62.
132 The anecdotes appear at various places in the text but especially at the beginning of
Chapter 23; Liu, Shishuo xinyu, 1:7.28a–30b; cf. Richard Mather’s translation in Liu, Shih-
shuo Hsin-yü, 371–76.
133 Audrey Spiro, Contemplating the Ancients: Aesthetic and Social Issues in Early Chinese Por-
traiture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 92–93.
134 Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove and Rong Qiqi, Eastern Jin dynasty, late 4th cent.;
stamped bricks, 2.4 m l., from the Tomb at Xishan Bridge, Nanjing; Nanjing Museum. For
discussions and illustrations of these reliefs, see Spiro, Contemplating the Ancients, 91–121;
and Ellen Johnston Laing, “Neo-Taoism and the ‘Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove’ in
Chinese Painting,” Artibus Asiae 36, no. 1/2 (1974): 1–54, fig. 2.
135 For discussions of poetry on this theme, see Frankel, “Man in His Relations with Other
Men,” Chapter 3 in The Flowering Plum and the Palace Lady, 33–40; Burton Watson, “The
Poetry of Reclusion,” Chapter 5 in Chinese Lyricism: Shih Poetry from the Second to the
Twelfth Century, with Translations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), 68–89.

via free access
146 Chapter 2
courtesans lived and worked within the capital, and Han’s continued presence
there suggests him as a court hermit.
In the Beijing scroll, the events take place in the masculine space of Han’s
residence: the painter suggests this through details such as the screen paint-
ings found there. Most are landscapes depicting imagery gendered as mascu-
line.136 Scholars traveled through mountainous terrain and along rivers to
assume their political posts;137 they could also retire to remote places, leaving
their official duties behind. In helping to identify the rooms depicted here as
masculine space, these paintings-within-the-painting establish the transgres-
sion that Tuotuo assigns to the courtesans (significantly, Tuotuo’s may be the
first text to identify the setting as the “outer rooms” of Han’s home). But these
screen paintings also add to the political reading of the scroll: several may be
interpreted as landscapes of reclusion, befitting Han Xizai’s assumption of the
role of court hermit. The screen visible at the foot of the bed in Scene I depicts
a fisherman in a boat, a metaphor for a recluse: numerous literary sources de-
scribe fishermen as having escaped the drudgery of the outside world, living
carefree lives in the wilderness.138 Meanwhile, the standing screen behind the
pipa player features a tall, gnarled pine rooted in rocks, a metaphor for the
upright, stalwart character of a scholar who maintains his integrity through
adversity. This painting is firmly situated within the Li-Guo tradition, featuring
the characteristic use of diffuse ink, the rendering of deep distance, a pine tree
painted in the Li Cheng 李成 (919–67) style with dramatic crab-claw branches,
and rocks in the manner of Guo Xi 郭熙 (ca. 1001–90) with rough textures
showing the effects of time on the landscape. It resembles paintings of a type
produced for the appreciation of the late eleventh-century court.139 Even a
painting that does not represent a landscape can be interpreted as related to
the theme of reclusion: in Scene III, a section of a couch-screen visible be-
tween two conversing courtesans shows a flowering branch. While such im-
ages often represent a woman’s beauty, flowering branches are also associated
with the recluse,140 and this interpretation of the painting better matches its
location in the apartments of a man portrayed as a court hermit.
136 For more on this idea, see Blanchard, “Lonely Women and the Absent Man,” 38, 41, 42.
137 Egan, The Burden of Female Talent, 335.
138 John Hay, “Along the River during Winter’s First Snow: A Tenth Century Handscroll of an
Early Chinese Narrative,” The Burlington Magazine 114 (May 1972): 297–98.
139 Deng Chun 鄧椿 reported that Emperor Shenzong 神宗 (r. 1068–85) “loved Guo Xi paint-
ings” (昔神宗好熙筆) in Huaji 畫繼 [More on Painting] (1167; reprint, Beijing: Renmin
meishu chubanshe, 1963), 10.123. Shenzong also collected Li Cheng paintings; Wai-kam
Ho, “Aspects of Chinese Painting from 1100 to 1350,” in Eight Dynasties of Chinese Painting,
xxviii.
140 Bickford, Bones of Jade, Soul of Ice, 22.

via free access
The pictorial evidence suggests that the twelfth-century painter of the

Beijing scroll represented Han Xizai as a scholar who wished to retire and de-
liberately caused the ruler to forfeit his counsel by behaving in a debauched
manner. As early histories and colophons suggest, Han directs the courtesans
to entertain his guests musically and sexually, and the public mixing of the two
sexes is foregrounded here. Paradoxically, taking on a court hermit’s role im-
plies a noble objective on Han’s part: he will not serve an ineffective ruler. Later
descriptions of the painting, particularly by intellectuals with troubled politi-
cal careers, assign exactly this sort of motive for Han Xizai’s revelry.141 No tex-
tual accounts that predate the Southern Song overtly characterize Han Xizai’s
intentions the way later sources do.
The Beijing scroll itself goes farther toward making the case for Han as a
court hermit than any of the pre-twelfth-century textual accounts. The story of
Han’s attempt to avoid serving in an official position by adopting scandalous
behavior could originate with versions of the painting from the Southern Song
or later—any copies of Gu Hongzhong’s work must have taken some liberties
with the content of the original painting—with the idea of Han as a court her-
mit only being recorded in texts after this date. Perhaps Song commenters
tended to focus upon the public enactment of the scholars’ desire for courte-
sans because the political interpretation, while possible, had not been natural-
ized at that time. That interpretation now seems standard: modern historians
assert that Han Xizai had given Li Yu’s father, Li Jing 李景 (r. 943–61), some
strategic counsel that he had ignored, resulting in the Song empire’s conquest
of the Southern Tang state, and, moreover, that Han suffered from the slander
of members of a different political faction at court.142 These are offered as the
impetus for Han’s night revels.143
What is more surprising is that, in keeping with poetic idealization of cour-
tesans, the painter of the Beijing scroll presents them, at times, in romanti-
cized ways. Night Revels of Han Xizai, like Goddess of the Luo River, presents a
complex picture of a problematic political situation, with the women’s pres-
ence indicating that Han Xizai affects the role of a court hermit. Simultaneously,
though, the painter presents the courtesans as feeling affection for him: Suzhi’s
gaze in Scene III, the robe embroidered with geese in Scene IV, and, possibly,
the ubiquitous love-knots. Becoming entangled with government or private
141 Sun, Gengzi xiaoxia ji, 8.4a–b.

142 Johannes L. Kurz, “Han Xizai (902–970): An Eccentric Life in Exciting Times,” in Five
Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, ed. Peter Lorge (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2011),
84–85.
143 Li, Wudai Gu Hongzhong “Han Xizai yeyan tu,” 7.

via free access
148 Chapter 2
courtesans was not only inappropriate for officials but also possibly illegal, po-
tentially leading to charges of debauchery,144 and perhaps these signs of the
courtesans’ relationship with the host accounts for some of the scandal pro-
voked by Night Revels.
One must ask whether their devotion to Han, who often seems somewhat
impassive, could be read as an allegory for Han’s loyalty to his state or to a ruler
who does not appreciate him. Zu Wupo’s colophon suggests this when he calls
attention to Han Xizai “beating a drum” (ji gu 擊鼓). “Beating a Drum” is a
poem in the Book of Songs that describes soldiers following a leader to defeat
and, thereafter, despairing of returning home.145 The events described in the
poem resonate with Han’s situation, as later viewers describe Han’s inability to
prevent the downfall of the Southern Tang. This might indicate that the drums
in Scenes I and II could be subtle metaphors for a minister’s lack of apprecia-
tion by his ruler, exactly the basis for so much allegorical poetry.
Still, an allegorical reading of the Beijing scroll presents several problems.
For one, it includes some anti-Confucian content: in addition to showing its
protagonist behaving in ways considered beyond the pale by Neo-Confucian
writers of the period, it depicts him in ways that recall Daoist figures (e.g., the
Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove) and features the figure of a Buddhist monk.
These elements readily persuade the viewer that Han Xizai was engaging in the
behavior of a recluse, but it is less clear that we should read the connection
between the courtesans and him as a Confucian allegory of loyalty. In addition,
Song viewers did not understand this scroll as an allegory. Early viewers of the
original painting repeatedly denounced its subject, and a reader receives the
impression that most do not admit the interpretation of Han as a court hermit,
much less one loyal to his state. Perhaps the original scroll contained no obvi-
ous references to eremitism. These may have been introduced by the Song
copyist who created the Beijing scroll, in an attempt to recoup his subject’s
reputation—akin in some ways to the allegorical interpretations appended to
the love poems of the Book of Songs.
The need to rehabilitate the content of the original version of Night Revels
of Han Xizai becomes clearer when compared to a roughly contemporary
144 Bossler, “Shifting Identities,” 16; Bossler, Courtesans, Concubines, and the Cult of Female
Fidelity, 24–25.
145 Ruan, Maoshi zhengyi, 2.80–81 (accessed 30 May 2016). This phrase also forms the begin-
ning of an idiom, jigu mingyuan 擊鼓鳴寃, which one dictionary translates “to beat the
drum at the magistrate’s door to bring a grievance to his attention”; Liang Shih-chiu, ed.
梁實秋, A New Practical Chinese-English Dictionary [Zuixin shiyong Han-Ying cidian 最新
實用漢英辭典] (Taipei: Far East Book Co., 1971), s.v. 2069, jigu mingyuan.

via free access
Figure 10.1 Palace Banquet. Northern Song dynasty, late 10th–early 11th cent.; hanging scroll,
ink and color on silk, 162 × 111 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, ex
coll.: C.C. Wang Family, Gift of Oscar L. Tang Family, 2010 (www.
metmuseum.org).

via free access
150 Chapter 2
Figure 10.2 Detail of Palace Banquet. Northern Song dynasty, late 10th–early 11th cent.;
hanging scroll, ink and color on silk, 162 × 111 cm. The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, ex coll.: C.C. Wang Family, Gift of Oscar L. Tang
Family, 2010 (www.metmuseum.org).
painting, Palace Banquet (fig. 10.1). This hanging scroll depicts the preliminar-
ies to a festive occasion involving palace women and possibly the emperor,
who has not yet arrived. Unlike Night Revels, it is set in the women’s quarters,
shown in the foreground, with a series of locked gates and doors placed fur-
ther back that emphasize how access to this inner space is restricted (fig. 10.2).
Most of the figures gather in a courtyard where a table for the banquet has
been laid beneath paulownia trees. One attempts to thread a needle, an activ-
ity with erotic overtones that indicates the occasion as Seventh Night, when
according to myth the Weaving Maiden and the Cowherd were briefly reunit-
ed.146 The figures located within the adjacent areas engage in activities that re-
fer to sexual anticipation: one woman, her back to the viewer, plays a pipa (fig.
10.3), and two young girls within an enclosed garden hold flowers and a fan and
146 Maxwell K. Hearn, Along the Riverbank: Chinese Paintings from the C.C. Wang Family
Collection (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1999), 60–62. Anne Birrell mentions
that threading needles had an erotic meaning in New Songs from a Jade Terrace, 320.

via free access
Figure 10.3 Detail of Palace Banquet. Northern Song dynasty, late 10th–early 11th cent.;
hanging scroll, ink and color on silk, 162 × 111 cm. The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, ex coll.: C.C. Wang Family, Gift of Oscar L. Tang
Family, 2010 (www.metmuseum.org).
attempt to capture a butterfly (fig. 10.4). In an interior room, someone sleeps

beneath heaped blankets (fig. 10.5), painted in a way that presages the beds
in the Beijing Night Revels scroll. This portrayal of the prelude to an evening
banquet, however, only suggests the coming merriment; unlike Night Revels,
it does not actually show it. Yet because of the existence of these tropes for
social and sexual interaction, the painter of Night Revels could create a hand-
scroll whose political charge is primarily manifested in the erotic interaction
of scholars and courtesans.
Night Revels and Pictorial Cross-Dressing

The representations of intimate exchanges between courtesans and scholars
in Night Revels present interesting problems of subjectivity: I posit that it may
stand as a pictorial counterpart of the phenomenon of literary cross-dressing.
The courtesans mostly seem nonchalant or enthusiastic participants in the
revelry, although two notable exceptions occur in the last scene: one figure in
the putative ménage à trois, who glares at her rival, and the reluctant figure at

via free access
152
Figure 10.4 Detail of Palace Banquet. Northern Song dynasty, late 10th–early 11th cent.; hanging scroll, ink and
color on silk, 162 × 111 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, ex coll.: C.C. Wang Family,
Chapter 2
Gift of Oscar L. Tang Family, 2010 (www.metmuseum.org).
via free access

Figure 10.5 Detail of Palace Banquet. Northern Song dynasty, late 10th–early 11th cent.; hanging scroll, ink and
color on silk, 162 × 111 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, ex coll.: C.C. Wang Family,
153
Gift of Oscar L. Tang Family, 2010 (www.metmuseum.org).
via free access

154 Chapter 2
the end of the scroll. One must understand the courtesans as expert perform-
ers of a facsimile of desire. Accounts of this painting that treat Han Xizai’s de-
bauchery as embodied in the courtesans’ transgressions, such as Tao Yue’s
“Han Xizai’s Curtains Are Not Drawn,” do so because the painter depicted
them, not Han Xizai, as instigators of the activity.
Though Han Xizai directed the courtesans to interact with his guests, in the
handscroll he seems passive, with all the activity initiated by the women. In
Scene I, he is a mere observer as a female musician entertains the room with
her pipa. In Scene II, although Han accompanies the dancing on a drum, his
facial expression suggests weariness, as if the women or his guests had only
with great effort persuaded him to play along. Compare him to the two women
in this scene: Suzhi waves her sleeves and stamps her feet, and the maid is ani-
mated as she claps with the rhythm. In Scene III, Han ignores the conversation
of the courtesans around him as Suzhi waits upon him and yet another courte-
san entertains someone sexually in the adjacent bed. In Scene IV, Han hides
his face behind his undecorated fan (which obscures rather than reveals his
interiority) as three courtesans seek to engage him and a quintet of flutists
bends to their instruments. Han bids his guests and the women goodnight in
Scene V with the weary posture of a man who has no more interest in the party.
Nearby, a courtesan attracts a scholar’s attention, two more fight over a second
scholar, and a third scholar persuades a fourth courtesan to join him as she
puts on a show of reluctance; their night is just beginning even as Han Xizai’s
ends. Throughout the scroll, the good humor exhibited by the courtesans and
his guests eludes him.
What the painter has done might be regarded as the visual equivalent of
appropriating a woman’s voice. Just as male lyricists might adopt female voice
to make a female protagonist an active speaker, here the painter depicts the
courtesans as engaged to create a sense of their agency. In Night Revels of Han
Xizai, the musical performances, which can all be construed as conveying
some heartfelt emotion, are implicitly seductive. The courtesans’ appearances
are designed to appeal, with elaborate adornments intended to enhance their
beauty and suggest an ability to form genuine attachments. The men are either
passive observers like Han Xizai or at most minor participants in the musical
performances. They need do nothing to attract the women’s attention: it is the
women’s role to engage them. Even in the case of the final couple, where the
scholar coaxes a courtesan to tarry with him, the viewer suspects that she only
feigns hesitation in order to seem more seductive. As a result, the men within
the painting seem taken in by the courtesans’ performances of desire, and male
viewers of the painting were struck by the women’s “brazen” attitudes147—
147 Tuotuo, Songshi, 40:13853–72.

via free access
when of course it was the painter who created these figures. The painter’s ac-
knowledgment of the courtesans’ performative role reflects the perception of
courtesans that one receives from erotic poetry (whether authored by men or
women) and thus seems authentic, yet simultaneously reiterates the artifice
that inflects the construction of their personae. Considering that the interac-
tion between the courtesans and Han Xizai is a factor that permits a political
reading of the Beijing scroll, the painter’s manipulation of the female figures
helps to create a nuanced comment on Han Xizai’s integrity.
…
Reading heteroerotic longing or desire as inherently allegorical or political is a
long-standing critical tradition, at least in Chinese poetry. It begins with Han
dynasty criticism of courtship poems of the Book of Songs, and thereafter this
interpretation is applied to other collections of love poetry. But the Southern
Song period witnesses two significant and apparently contradictory develop-
ments: Zhu Xi argues that the Book of Songs’ erotic verses were not composed
as allegories, and poets begin to employ the form of the song lyric, previously
associated almost exclusively with erotic content, for the purpose of political
commentary. It is exactly at this point that matters become more complicated.
When love themes start to achieve primacy, as they begin to in the Tang–Song
periods, does that mean that they need to be taken at face value only, excluding
the allegorical reading? Or can both readings coexist?
Song paintings such as Goddess of the Luo River and Night Revels of Han Xizai
suggest that in this period, viewers might not only enjoy the pictorial represen-
tation of longing and desire but also, if so inclined, see the stories as inherently
political or allegorical. Significantly, both explicitly show heteroerotic interac-
tion and are located in settings other than a household’s inner quarters:
Goddess of the Luo River is set in nature and Night Revels in the public spaces of
Han Xizai’s home. These two scrolls break the formula presented in examples
of shinü hua, leading critics to look for meanings beyond the familiar narra-
tives of female desire from poetry. The Goddess of the Luo River scrolls reinter-
pret a poem that is regularly read as allegorical, and thus the Liaoning version
at least might have been used to express devotion to Gaozong of the Southern
Song. While the original version of Night Revels of Han Xizai may have had Li
Yu’s desire to look upon debauched behavior as its basis, the Beijing scroll also
seems to be a production of the Southern Song court, suggesting a political
reason for its making. Zu Wupo sees its protagonist as a recluse, a reading that
is now widely cited and supported by visual evidence. At the same time, the
painting depicts some courtesans as devoted to Han Xizai, again suggesting the

via free access
156 Chapter 2
greater cultural interest in romantic themes in this period. While a viewer

might cast the affection of courtesans for the protagonist as an allegory for
Han’s loyalty to the Southern Tang state, protestations of his loyalty do not
clearly emerge until accounts that postdate the Song. Nevertheless, when one
looks back at texts of the Song period and the Beijing scroll, one can glimpse
the kernels of this interpretation as well. As we turn to classic examples of
shinü hua—paintings that focus on female figures who can be perceived as
ladies rather than goddesses or courtesans—we should keep the possibilities
of allegory in mind.

via free access
Male Audience and Authorship 157
Chapter 3
Male Audience and Authorship: Projecting Desire

and Longing onto the Female Figure
Quintessential examples of shinü hua focus on virtuous women, desirable

women, or women who are both virtuous and desirable, usually representing
them as isolated from men. In the absence of male figures, images of isolated
women experiencing desire can seem one-sided, suggesting that desire itself
may have been gendered as feminine in certain historical contexts. Tang and
Song culture evidently construed longing and desire as appealing feminine
traits and required that an explicit image of men’s desire be recast as some-
thing else altogether. Though the commingling of male and female figures in
certain court paintings encourages an allegorical reading, an image of women
longing for unseen men permits this and other interpretations, while com-
menting on and revealing much about masculine desires.
Scholars have argued that in some examples of literature and visual culture,
female figures can serve as surrogates for male figures.1 Chinese poetry pro-
vides ample evidence for a rhetorical displacement of male desire or longing
onto a female figure, and contemporary explanations for this displacement ar-
gue that it affords vicarious pleasure, gives a sense of control, or represents a
form of repression.2 Another interpretation is that a male writer might adopt
a female persona in order to express feelings that he could not openly discuss.3
I propose that the notion of a man’s feelings for a woman as improperly indul-
gent and best unmentioned may explain the early emergence of figures of
lovelorn women as a sublimated expression of men’s interiority.
A comparable situation can be found in film theory: Laura Mulvey proposes
two possible dynamics whereby a cinematic female figure may embody mas-
culine desire. In the first instance, a “determining male gaze projects its fantasy
on to the female figure which is styled accordingly”; though she speaks of a
1 Lawrence Lipking, Abandoned Women in Poetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1988), 50.
2 Egan, The Problem of Beauty, 240; Li, Enchantment and Disenchantment, 42; Rouzer, Writing
Another’s Dream, 73–74; Birrell, “The Dusty Mirror,” 67; and Fong, “Engendering the Lyric,” 114.
3 Florence Chia-ying Yeh, “Ambiguity and the Female Voice in ‘Hua-chien Songs,’” in Studies in
Chinese Poetry, by James R. Hightower and Florence Chia-ying Yeh (Cambridge, Mass., and
London: Harvard University Asia Center, 1998), 127–28; Samei, Gendered Persona and Poetic
Voice, 4, 6–7, 10, 11, 36 n. 11; Egan, The Burden of Female Talent, 162.
via free access
158 Chapter 3
male writer or director, this dynamic finds a parallel in a male painter’s or pa-
tron’s vision of an ideal woman. In the second instance, Mulvey suggests a
means by which a male viewer might see his own desire reflected in a lovelorn
figure: through identifying with a male protagonist to whom a female charac-
ter becomes attached, thereby becoming subject to his gaze alone.4 Song ex-
amples of shinü hua usually lack a present male figure to which female figures
address their longings—no pictured male with whom the viewer may identify.
Nevertheless, Chinese paintings of women in love do possess two features
identified by Mulvey as important. They similarly tend to represent glamorous
women and generally allude to different narratives of female desire, in this
case, those familiar from genres of erotic poetry. A male viewer looking at a
painting of a lovelorn woman might well enjoy imagining himself as the object
of her desire, perhaps especially because of the lack of male figures.5 By the
Song dynasty, the female figure might embody the feelings of male painters or
viewers.
Representations of emotional attachments between couples became more
common in Song poetry and painting; the actual letters of lonely women to
their absent husbands were even published.6 By the late eleventh century,
poets more frequently wrote shi poetry or lyrics in a male voice that expressed
their romantic yearnings or frustrations.7 But this leads to a question: where
are the paintings of men yearning for absent women? I argue that paintings of
lonely or desiring women, which were, after all, generally of male authorship,
tell more about how the culture viewed men in regard to their relationships
with women than they do about the typical woman’s experience. Although
these paintings seem superficially to be concerned only with a woman’s feel-
ings, they may also refer obliquely to a man’s longing for a woman from whom
he is separated and, more generally, to a traveler’s homesickness (with the pos-
sibility of extrapolating further, using these feelings as similes for others that
might have nothing to do with love).8 I surmise that conceptions of masculin-
ity preferred that a man be the invisible object of a woman’s desire.9
4 Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 11, 13.

5 Wu, The Double Screen, 98–99.
6 Owen, The End of the Chinese ‘Middle Ages,’ 130; Powers, “Love and Marriage in Song China,”
51–62.
7 Colin S.C. Hawes, The Social Circulation of Poetry in the Mid-Northern Song: Emotional Energy
and Literati Self-Cultivation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 55–56; Egan,
The Problem of Beauty, 327, 347.
8 Samei, Gendered Persona and Poetic Voice, 176–90.
9 Anna Shields, in a discussion of ninth- and tenth-century song lyric, suggests that it may be a
matter of propriety instead; Shields, Crafting a Collection, 262.

via free access
It was not considered unseemly for a man to express his feelings about cer-
tain kinds of personal relationships. Many poems and paintings celebrate
men’s friendships with other men.10 For instance, reclusion is a predominant
theme that, perhaps somewhat ironically, focuses on a man’s relationship with
like-minded individuals; Night Revels of Han Xizai alludes to this idea. Another
Song painting that raises the topic of friendship is a painting attributed to Qiao
Zhongchang 喬仲常 (fl. early twelfth century), The Red Cliff (Hou chibi fu tu
後赤壁賦圖), which is based upon Su Shi’s second prose poem on the subject.
In one detail of Qiao Zhongchang’s scroll, Su Shi and his friends enjoy wine
together: a sign of their bond.11 Farewell paintings, presented on the occasion
of parting, also attest to the enduring relationship between men. An early ex-
ample, Hu Shunchen’s 胡舜臣 (fl. 1119–31) Calligraphy and Painting for He
Xuanming upon His Dispatch to Qin (He Xuanming shi Qin shuhua hebi tujuan
郝玄明使秦書畫合璧圖卷), dated to 1122, shows a mounted official ascending
a mountain path, with the academy painter’s poem to the recipient inscribed
at the top left; minister Cai Jing 蔡京 (1047–1126) added his own farewell poem
to the scroll as well.12 Paintings such as these, which commemorate homoso-
cial relationships, suggest the value of connections between men.
Overt male expressions of intense attachment to a woman were somewhat
less common in Chinese culture. There are poems of undeniably male author-
ship in which a man speaks movingly of an absent woman, and some of these
can be interpreted as authentic expressions of personal feelings. A relatively
early example is Du Fu’s poem “Moonlit Night,” which describes how the
eighth-century poet, far from home, gazes at the moon and wonders longingly
whether his wife looks up at it too.13 In the eleventh century, Su Shi writes a
lyric on his abiding grief at the death, ten years previous, of his beloved wife
10 On the poetic exchanges of mid-Tang literati friends, see Shields, One Who Knows Me,
133–99.
11 Qiao Zhongchang, The Red Cliff, ca. 1123, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Mo.
The scroll is fully illustrated online at Center for the Art of East Asia, Digital Scrolling
Paintings Project, <http://scrolls.uchicago.edu/scroll/illustration-second-prose-poem-
red-cliff> (accessed 30 May 2016).
12 Elizabeth Brotherton, “Two Farewell Handscrolls of the Late Northern Song,” Archives of
Asian Art 52 (2000–2001): 44–45, 60 nn. 5–7; figs. 1–2 in this source illustrate the painting,
Calligraphy and Painting for He Xuanming upon His Dispatch to Qin, which is in the collec-
tion of the Osaka Municipal Museum of Art.
13 Du Fu, “Yue ye 月夜 [Moonlit Night],” dated 756, QTS, 4:224.2403; cf. translation in Wat-
son, The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry, 224.

via free access
160 Chapter 3
(an atypical topic for a song lyric at the time).14 By the late Northern Song, cer-
tain songwriters who employed male personae and themes of heteroerotic at-
tachment crafted a distinctly masculine voice.15 Nevertheless, poems in which
a lonely man expresses his sorrow at having to part from a woman are relatively
few, while the reverse situation is ubiquitous. In painting, the discrepancy is
even greater: the pictorial depiction of a man overcome with emotion at sepa-
ration from a woman is almost unknown. The prince at the end of the Liaoning
and Beijing versions of the Goddess of the Luo River paintings (figs. 6.11, 7.10)
looks back regretfully toward a female figure that is supernatural, not an ordi-
nary woman. Otherwise, I can think of only one Song example: the scene in the
Boston fragment of Lady Wenji’s Return to China where Cai Wenji’s nomad hus-
band breaks down as she prepares to return to her homeland (fig. 5). Because
he was not Chinese, his representation is not circumscribed by constructions
of Chinese masculinity. To be sure, the lack of paintings of Chinese men la-
menting an absent woman may reflect the small percentage of Song paintings
that have survived to the present, but if they did once exist, that might also
reveal that such themes did not prove popular with collectors.
While painters seem reluctant to represent explicitly men’s attachment to
women, a complicated system of poetic and pictorial tropes developed to de-
note women’s attachment to men. Yet because most works representing desir-
ing women were attributed to men, they cannot be transparent depictions of
women’s feelings. Many images of desiring women are better understood as
idealizations with particular, often allegorical, connotations (similar to the
paintings discussed in Chapter 2), or, when one can make a case for their use in
a private or intimate context, implicit representations of men’s attachment to
women. The image of the lonely woman might be best understood as a male
projection, itself an acknowledgment of men’s desire to remain central in the
thoughts of the women they leave behind. Think back to Tang Hou’s sugges-
tion, discussed in the Introduction, that the most appealing paintings of
women from the Tang and later periods provide insight into the figures’ emo-
tional state. Indeed, many Song paintings of women portray them in regard to
their intimate relationships with men. In this chapter, I consider examples
14 Su Shi, “Gong zhi furen Wang shi xian zu, wei ci ci, gai daowang ye 公之夫人王氏先卒，
味此詞，蓋悼亡也 [My Wife, Ms. Wang, Died First, so I Wrote This Lyric in Mourning],”
Tune: “Jiang shenzi 江神子 [River Goddess, 9/9],” QSC, 1:300. See my translation in Chap-
ter 4. Egan has discussed the ambitious nature of this lyric, which in its treatment of a
particular occasion reflects the sensibilities of shi poetry, in The Problem of Beauty, 282.
15 Shields, Crafting a Collection, 275–76; Egan, The Problem of Beauty, 241, 272–73, 327–47;
Egan, The Burden of Talent, 371–72.

via free access
acknowledged to derive from the styles of two artists mentioned by Tang Hou:
Zhang Xuan and Zhou Fang.
Huizong’s Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk
The painting Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk (figs. 11.1–11.2), attributed
to Northern Song emperor Huizong, stands as an unmistakable representation
of women’s desire.16 The composition shows three distinct aspects of textile
work, and a short version of its Chinese title is Pounding Silk (Dao lian tu 擣練
圖), describing an activity carried out by four women that is depicted at the
beginning of the handscroll. Subsequently, we see a woman either spooling
thread or spinning17 and a woman sewing, as well as multiple figures using a
pan filled with hot coals to iron a length of silk. Possibly the most charming
image in the painting is a little girl playing peek-a-boo beneath the stretched
cloth.
Their fashionable appearance and luxurious ornaments indicate that the
female figures are imperial concubines and their maids or daughters, with the
setting presumably the women’s quarters of the palace. All are dressed in richly
colored garments of silk patterned with abstract designs, floral motifs, or
paired birds. The younger figures wear their hair in looped braids or little chi-
gnons held with combs and ribbon—styles that seem simple next to the con-
cubines’ loose topknots, secured with spotted bamboo combs, hairpins, and
plaques of jade. All but the child wear makeup, accentuating their foreheads
with beauty marks. Palace women are common subjects of early shinü hua and
erotic poetry. A literary scholar, in a discussion of the palace poems (gongci 宮
詞) of Wang Jian 王建 (768–833), explains their appeal: they were sequestered
within the palace and leading lives of privilege, yet drawn from the ranks of
ordinary citizens.18 Because of this scroll’s association with Huizong’s author-
ship, it seems quite natural that the painting should depict palace women. It is
necessary, however, to recognize this as a meaningful choice on the part of the
16 Much of the material in this section has already been published in Lara C.W. Blanchard,
“Huizong’s New Clothes: Desire and Allegory in Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk,”
Ars Orientalis 36 (2006): 111–35.
17 Wu Tung, Tales from the Land of Dragons: 1,000 Years of Chinese Painting (Boston: Museum
of Fine Arts, 1997), 142; Wu Hung, “The Origins of Chinese Painting (Paleolithic Period to
Tang Dynasty),” in Richard M. Barnhart et al., Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press; Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1997),
77.
18 Egan, “Huizong’s Palace Poems,” 364.

via free access
162
Figure 11.1 Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk. Attributed to Emperor Huizong (r. 1101–25), after Zhang Xuan ( fl. 713–42), Northern Song dynasty,
early 12th century; handscroll, ink, color, and gold on silk, 37.1 × 145 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Special Chinese and Japanese Fund
(12.886). Photograph © 2017 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Chapter 3
via free access

Male Audience and Authorship
Figure 11.2 Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk. Attributed to Emperor Huizong (r. 1101–25), after Zhang Xuan ( fl. 713–42), Northern Song dynasty,
early 12th century; handscroll, ink, color, and gold on silk, 37.1 × 145 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Special Chinese and Japanese Fund
(12.886). Photograph © 2017 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
163
via free access

164 Chapter 3
painter, one that reverberates with traditions of erotic poetry and suggests this
painting as a carefully crafted comment on the emperor himself.
The scroll is accepted as a free copy after a painting by Tang court artist
Zhang Xuan. In fact, the full title, inscribed on the scroll by Emperor Zhangzong
of the Jin dynasty, is Tianshui’s Copy of Zhang Xuan’s “Pounding Silk” (Tianshui
mo Zhang Xuan Dao lian tu 天水摹張萱擣練圖). Tianshui is a nickname for
Huizong, but he may not have made the painting himself: court painters likely
acted as his surrogate in most (if not all) instances, which helps to account
for the large quantity of scrolls that he is recorded to have produced.19 The
title is written in a style that resembles Huizong’s renowned slender-gold cal-
ligraphy, which Zhangzong also practiced, and the scroll bears at least seven of
Zhangzong’s seals, including one impressed on the title.20 Zhangzong’s inter-
ventions with the scroll attest to its provenance in Huizong’s collection; pre-
sumably, the Jurchens took the painting after Huizong’s capture.21
Still, even if the painting is not of Huizong’s authorship in the traditional
sense, it was probably made for him, and therefore we may still refer to it as
Huizong’s scroll. The scroll features stylistic elements common to seven other
important Huizong attributions, including the isolation of the figures against a
blank ground, precise brushwork, and vivid color.22 The absence of Huizong’s
cipher and inscription suggests only that it was not intended for official use as
an imperial instrument.23 As for Zhang Xuan’s painting, the Xuanhe Painting
19 Maggie Bickford, “Huizong’s Paintings: Art and the Art of Emperorship,” in Ebrey and
Bickford, Emperor Huizong and Late Northern Song China, 498–513.
20 Zhangzong’s seal Mingchang 明昌 is stamped on the title. Tseng Yu-Ho Ecke, in “Emperor
Hui Tsung, the Artist, 1082–1136” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1972), 25, 137, 138, claims
that seven of Zhangzong’s seals appear on this painting. Preceding the painting, on the
mounting, one finds Zhangzong’s gourd-shaped seal reading Bi fu 袐府 (before the title
strip) and another reading Mingchang baowan 明昌寳玩 (at the bottom edge). On the
seam between the end of the painting and the mount, one finds two more seals identified
as Zhangzong’s: Yufu baohui 御府寳繪 (at the top edge) and Neidian zhenwan 内殿珍玩
(at the bottom edge). Facsimiles of these four seals appear in Victoria Contag and Wang
Ch’i-Ch’ien, Seals of Chinese Painters and Collectors of the Ming and Ch’ing Periods, Repro-
duced in Facsimile Size and Deciphered, rev. ed. (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press,
1966), 665. A fifth seal reading Mingchang yulan 明昌御覽 can be seen mounted after the
painting, but its impression does not match that of the seal pictured in ibid., 666.
21 Wu, Tales from the Land of Dragons, 143 n. 1.
22 Maggie Bickford, “Emperor Huizong and the Aesthetic of Agency,” Archives of Asian Art 53
(2002–2003): 76.
23 Bickford notes which paintings tend to bear Huizong’s inscription and cipher and how
they functioned as “works of state” in “Huizong’s Paintings,” 457, 466, 471–72, 485, 488–89,
498–513.

via free access
Catalogue records that Huizong owned a painting by that artist titled Pounding
Silk,24 which makes it plausible that Huizong’s scroll is a copy. Unfortunately,
the original version of Pounding Silk has not survived. Zhang Xuan specialized
in depicting ladies, and because Tang Hou alluded to his facility in represent-
ing their emotional attachments, we might expect that his original painting
focused on women’s longing or desire. This is, in fact, suggested by Huizong’s
copy. The theme of women making cloth and particularly pounding silk is well
known from palace-style poetry, Music Bureau poetry, and song lyric, where it
is understood as an expression of feminine longing for an absent man.
Pounding Silk and Women’s Work
A green jade pounding-cloth stone

and a seven-jeweled, golden-lotus mallet—
I raise it high and slowly let it fall,
softly pounding just for you.
碧玉擣衣砧，七寶金蓮杵。高舉徐徐下，輕擣只為汝。25
This poem, titled “Qingyang Ford,” dates to the sixth century and is one of
many that treat the activity of pounding cloth (dao yi 擣衣) as a trope for desire
and/or longing. The process was one of several stages in the production of
cloth. As “Qingyang Ford” is a Music Bureau poem, it was likely meant to be
performed, perhaps by a singing girl for a male audience, given the unmistak-
ably erotic connotations of the words. They are spoken (or sung) in the voice of
an aristocratic woman, one whose pounding implements are fashioned of jade
or encrusted with jewels. The precious nature of her tools suggests her high
status and betrays the construct: this is an image designed to appeal to a male
audience, not a representation of the reality of domestic labor.
This representation of pounding cloth as a chore undertaken for men’s titil-
lation is primarily a construction of poets and painters; it plays upon the more
usual associations of other types of work with cloth, particularly weaving and
needlework, with domesticity. One can trace those associations to the long-
standing perception that such work was closely linked to female virtue. Ban
Zhao 班昭 (ca. 45–ca. 115), a female historian of the Latter Han dynasty
(25–220) and the author of Instructions for Women (Nü jie 女誡), listed
24 Xuanhe huapu, 5.157. In addition to Pounding Silk, the catalogue records two scrolls titled
Palace Women (Gongnü tu er 宮女圖二).
25 “Qingyang du 青陽度 [Qingyang Ford, 2/3],” YFSJ, 3:49.711.

via free access
166 Chapter 3
“womanly work” (nügong 女工) as one of four elements that women should
strive to cultivate; it encompassed spinning, weaving, and food preparation.26
The term is sometimes written as nügong 女紅, with the same pronunciation
but a slightly modified second character, specifically classifying the labor as
work with cloth.27 Moreover, an old adage, “men plow, women weave” (nan
geng nü zhi 男耕女織), neatly assigns agriculture to the realm of men and seri-
culture to that of women,28 in accordance with the gendered dialectic of outer
as masculine and inner as feminine. A Song court painter preserved this close
association between womanly work and feminine virtue in an illustrated ver-
sion of the Classic of Filial Piety for Girls (Nü xiaojing 女孝經), depicting spin-
ning and sewing as model activities for filial women of the common people.29
In the Tang and Song dynasties, poets introduced a critical perspective by em-
phasizing the demands of the labor, sometimes contrasting the differing cir-
cumstances of women who made fine silk and those who wore it, and at other
times raising taxation issues that by their very nature revealed political and
economic concerns.30 Several extant Song paintings of sericulture seem to
26 The full text is translated in Idema and Grant, The Red Brush, 36–42, with the pertinent
passage appearing on p. 39.
27 Francesca Bray, Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 184.
28 In practice, of course, the division was not so clear-cut. For a discussion of sericulture in
the Song dynasty, see Ebrey, The Inner Quarters, 131–51. For more on the gendered division
of labor in China, see Bray, Technology and Gender, 183–205.
29 The painting is attributed to Ma Hezhi 馬和之 (fl. ca. 1130–80), “Common People,” chap-
ter/section 5 of the Classic of Filial Piety for Girls, National Palace Museum, Taipei. For a
discussion and illustrations of this painting, see Murray, “Didactic Art for Women,” 27–53.
The text of the Classic of Filial Piety for Girls dates between the mid-Tang and Northern
Song dynasties, and Chapter 5 mentions both spinning and sewing; Julia K. Murray dis-
cusses the date of the text and translates it in “The Ladies’ Classic of Filial Piety and Sung
Textual Illustration: Problems of Reconstruction and Artistic Context,” Ars Orientalis 18
(1988): 95–129.
30 One Tang example is by Wang Jian, “Dang chuang zhi 當窗織 [Weaving at the Window],”
QTS, 5:298.3380; cf. translation by William H. Nienhauser in Liu Wu-chi and Irving
Yucheng Lo, eds., Sunflower Splendor: Three Thousand Years of Chinese Poetry (Garden
City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1975), 192–93. Others are found in Bai Juyi, “Zhong fu
重賦 [Heavy Taxes],” from the series “Qinzhong yin shi shou [2/10],” QTS 7:425.4674; cf.
trans. in Alley, Bai Juyi, 121–22; and idem., “Liaoling, nian nügong zhi lao ye 繚綾、念女
工之勞也 [Liaoling Silk—Commemorating the Tribulations of Womanly Work],” QTS,
7:427.4704 and YFSJ, 4:99.1380 (under title “Liaoling”); cf. translation in Watson, The
Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry, 245–46. For Song poetry on women making cloth that
does not construct them as erotic objects, see Ebrey, The Inner Quarters, 131–51.

via free access
accentuate this account of women’s work.31 Perhaps for these reasons, when
cloth-making becomes an erotic theme, poets and painters generally cast the
female personae or figures as wives, concubines, or nubile girls. Conveniently,
the word for a bolt of cloth (pi 疋) was a homophone (and thus likely a pun) for
the word mate (pi 匹).32
“Pounding cloth” and the more specific “pounding silk” (dao lian 擣練) are
phrases that refer to the beating of textiles with pestles or mallets. Translators
of Chinese poetry have for decades referred to this process as “fulling,” a term
that emphasizes the cleansing that results from the action of pounding—
though in an erotic context the action itself ultimately proves most significant.
Several sources provide further information about what pounding silk accom-
plished. From the Former Han dynasty on, a worker would apply plant ash to
raw silk and then beat it in order to remove gum, thus making it soft and sup-
ple. Variant interpretations of the term suggest that the procedure could pre-
pare silk for dyeing, or that “pounding clothes” later came to mean pounding
laundry.33
“Qingyang Ford” illustrates the potential for innuendo inherent in the theme
of pounding cloth. The implement the woman uses to beat her cloth,34 the
slow and steady rhythm she attains, the intimate tone in which she tells a lover
that she does it just for him—all of these factors reveal why pounding cloth
became a metaphor for erotic reverie. The unknown poet of “Qingyang Ford”
(and any singing girl asked to perform it) simulates a sexual act in four short
lines, with the cloth likened to vaginal tissue. But this is an exceptional poem,
for its female persona either attempts to seduce a potential partner or engages
31 On sericultural paintings, see Roslyn Lee Hammers, Pictures of Tilling and Weaving: Art,
Labor, and Technology in Song and Yuan China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press,
2011).
32 Ronald C. Miao, “Palace-Style Poetry: The Courtly Treatment of Glamour and Love,” in
Studies in Chinese Poetry and Poetics, ed. Ronald C. Miao (San Francisco: Chinese Materi-
als Center, 1978), 15–16.
33 Ulla Cyrus-Zetterström, Textile Terminology: Chinese-English-French-Swedish (Borås, Swe-
den: Centraltryckeriet Åke Svenson AB, 1995), s.v. dao lian; Angela Yu-yun Sheng, “Textile
Use, Technology, and Change in Rural Textile Production in Song China (960–1279)”
(Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1990), 52–53; Luo Zhufeng, ed. 羅竹風, Hanyu da
cidian 漢語大詞典 [The Great Chinese Dictionary] (Shanghai: Shanghai cishu chuban-
she, 1986–), s.v. dao yi 擣衣.
34 Anne Birrell writes that “the word for the fulling tool used to pound silk fibres (love) was
a complicated pun for a husband or lover,” but doesn’t tell the basis for the pun, in New
Songs from a Jade Terrace, 21.

via free access
168 Chapter 3
in an ongoing affair. Most other poems on this theme describe women pound-
ing cloth for men who have left them lonely.
The classic scenario of a woman pounding cloth fixes the setting as an au-
tumn night.35 This helps to set the desired tone: autumn is a naturally gloomy
time of year when nights grow longer and landscape features become barren,
and the character for “melancholy” (chou 愁) combines the characters for “au-
tumn” (qiu 秋) and “heart” (xin 心). Thus, in the Chinese poetic tradition, refer-
ences to autumn not only call to mind aging and the passage of time, but also
serve as metaphors for separation. The woman worries about her husband,
drafted into service some months earlier. Her distress over their separation be-
comes concern for his well-being, which in turn takes the form of anxiety over
his clothing: because neither had imagined such a long separation, he has only
spring- or summer-weight garments with him. Too worried to sleep, and sexu-
ally frustrated as well, she spends her nights pounding cloth and making a set
of winter clothes to send him. Thus the sound of poles striking stones becomes
a synecdoche for melancholy.36 The story shares some elements of the Meng
Jiangnü 孟姜女 legend related in the Zuozhuan 左傳.37 Meng Jiangnü’s hus-
band, Qi Liang 杞梁, had been conscripted to help build the Great Wall.
Because he counted on the government to provide him with clothing, he took
no winter clothes with him. Meng Jiangnü, presumably worried about his wel-
fare, makes him some winter-weight clothing and takes the garments to the
site herself. There she discovers, to her grief, that her husband is not only dead
but buried in the Wall.38
35 Song Qici 宋齊辭 (fl. Jin), “Qiu ge shiba shou 秋歌十八首 [Eighteen Autumn Songs,
16/18],” from the series “Ziye si shi ge qishiwu shou 子夜四時歌七十五首 [Ziye Songs for
the Four Seasons, 75 Poems],” YFSJ, 2:44.648. Xie Huilian 謝惠連 (407–33), “Dao yi 擣衣
[Pounding Cloth],” YTXY, 3.16a–b, and see my translation below; Liu Yun 柳惲 (465–511),
“Dao yi shi yi shou 擣衣詩一首 [Pounding Cloth, One Poem],” YTXY, 5.10b–11b; cf. trans-
lation in Birrell, New Songs from a Jade Terrace, 144–45.
36 Cao Pi, “Ye ting dao yi yi shou 夜聽擣衣一首 [Listening to Someone Pounding Cloth at
Night, One Poem]”; Xiao Gang 蕭綱 (503–51) [Emperor Jianwendi of the Liang 梁簡文帝,
r. 549–51], “Qiugui yesi 秋閨夜思 [Night Thoughts in an Autumn Bedroom],” YTXY, 3.12a–
b; 7.14a–b; cf. translations in Birrell, New Songs from a Jade Terrace, 101, 194, and Robertson,
“Voicing the Feminine,” 71.
37 This Confucian text existed by the Former Han dynasty; for a summary of its origins and
scholarship on it, see Loewe, Early Chinese Texts, 67–76.
38 Marsha Wagner discusses the legend and translates relevant poems from the Dunhuang
repository in The Lotus Boat, 93–96; cf. “Meng Jiangnü,” Tune: “Dao lianzi 擣練子 [Pound-
ing Silk, 1/4 and 3/4],” Dunhuang nos. P. 3911, P. 2809, and P. 3319, in Ren Bantang 任半塘
[Ren Na 任訥], ed., Dunhuang geci zongbian 敦煌歌詞總編 [A Corpus of Song’s Words in
Dunhuang Manuscripts, hereafter abbreviated as DHGC], 3 vols. (reprint, Shanghai:

via free access
Poems dating to the Southern Dynasties and earlier usually tell the woman’s
sorrow at length, emphasizing her appearance as she does her work. The pal-
ace-style poems in New Songs from a Jade Terrace, in particular, detail how
women dress in their finest garments and jewels to perform this labor. Although
in some poems male personae imagine the wives they left behind faithfully
pounding cloth, in others female personae refuse to pound cloth while their
lovers are traveling.39 Most poems deal with separated spouses, but this is not
always the case, as in a work where the poet shares his fantasies of the unseen
woman he hears pounding cloth in the night—someone who must be both
lonely and beautiful.40 In the poetic construct, pounding cloth could be a way
for an aristocratic woman, with no need to support herself through work, to
express feelings of longing. In sixth-century variations, the theme becomes so
closely associated with longing that it is used as a leitmotif in poems that focus
on a different theme, and the mention of a woman pounding cloth suffices to
set a sorrowful tone in very short poems.41
In the Tang dynasty, “Pounding Silk” (Dao lianzi 擣練子) becomes a tune ti-
tle for song lyrics, indicating the popularity of this theme. Such lyrics often fo-
cus on the sadness of parting.42 At the same time, the idea of a woman
Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1987), 2:3.549. For more details, see Jao Tsong-yi [Rao Zongyi]
饒宗頤 and Paul Demiéville, Airs de Touen-houang (Touen-houang k’iu 敦煌曲) (Paris:
Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1971), 64–65, 67, 114–15; Arthur Waley, trans.,
Ballads and Stories from Tun-huang: An Anthology (New York: Macmillan Company, 1960),
145–49; Wang Ch’iu-kuei, “The Formation of the Early Versions of the Meng Chiang-nü
Story,” Tamkang Review 9, no. 2 (Winter 1978): 111–40.
39 For a poem featuring a male persona imagining his faithful wife, see Qiao Zhizhi 喬知之
(d. 697), “Cong jun xing,” YFSJ, 2:33.485. An example of a lonely female persona refusing to
pound cloth can be found in a woman’s poem: Bao Linghui, “Ti shu hou ji xingren 題書後
寄行人 [Poem Sent to a Traveler],” YTXY, 4.12a; cf. translation in Birrell, New Songs from a
Jade Terrace, 123.
40 Fei Chang, “Hua guan sheng zhongye wen chengwai dao yi 華觀省中夜聞城外擣衣
[Hearing Someone Pounding Cloth beyond the Wall at Midnight],” YTXY, 6.12b–13b; cf.
translation in Birrell, New Songs from a Jade Terrace, 173–74.
41 Wang Sengru, “Dao yi [Pounding Cloth]”; Xiao Yi 蕭繹 (507–55) [Emperor Yuandi of the
Liang 梁元帝, r. 555], “Hanxiao san yun 寒宵三韻 [Cold Night, Three Rhymes]”; Jiang
Hong 江洪 (fl. ca. 502), “Qiufeng er shou 秋風二首 [The Autumn Wind, Two Poems,
2/2]”; YTXY, 6.7b–8a; 7.22b; 10.12a; cf. translations in Birrell, New Songs from a Jade Terrace,
167, 203, 277.
42 See, for example, Tune: “Dao lianzi,” Dunhuang no. P. 3718, DHGC, 2:3.563–64. An
exception is a cycle of lyrics titled “Meng Jiangnü,” Tune: “Dao lianzi (3/4),” Dunhuang
nos. P. 3911, P. 2809, and P. 3319, DHGC, 2:3.549; cf. translation in Wagner, The Lotus Boat,
94–95.

via free access
170 Chapter 3
pounding cloth becomes an overwhelmingly aural image. Poem after poem

uses the “sound of pounding cloth” (daoyi sheng 擣衣聲)—the beat of poles
against resonant stones—to convey the feelings of personae. For the male trav-
eler, this primarily means homesickness (xiangxin 鄉心),43 brought on by the
familiar sound of a domestic activity that his loyal partner would perform.
Although he misses his partner, she represents the comforts of home, and it is
difficult to separate his feelings for her from his homesickness. For the woman
left behind, however, the feelings stirred by this sound generally strike at the
heart of her relationship, whether she fights to sustain it or has given up hope.44
Her emotions might range from worry,45 melancholy (chou 愁),46 “wavering
feelings” (yaoqing 搖情),47 or longing (si 思 or xiangsi 相思), to heartbreak
43 Liu Changqing 劉長卿 (709–80?), “Yugan lüshe 餘干旅舍 [At an Inn in Yugan],” QTS,
3:147.1493; cf. translation by William H. Nienhauser in Liu and Lo, Sunflower Splendor, 116.
Du Fu 杜甫 (712–70), “Qiuxing ba shou 秋興八首 [Autumn Thoughts, Eight Poems, 1/8],”
QTS, 4: 230.2509; cf. translation by Wu-chi Liu in Liu and Lo, Sunflower Splendor, 141, and
David Hinton, trans., The Selected Poems of Tu Fu (New York: New Directions Books, 1989),
81.
44 Nevertheless, not all the poems dealing with the effect of the sound on a female persona
focus on her emotions regarding an absent man: they can also reflect her empathy for
another woman. Li Bai, “Bayue ge 八月歌 [Song of the Eighth Month],” from the series
“Yuejie zhe yangliu ge shisan shou 月節折楊柳歌十三首 [Songs of Cutting a Willow
Branch for Different Months, Thirteen Poems, 8/13],” YFSJ, 3:49.723.
45 Li Bai, “Qiuge 秋歌 [Autumn Song],” from the series “Ziye si shi ge si shou 子夜四時歌四
首 [Ziye Songs for the Four Seasons, Four Poems],” YFSJ, 2:45.653; cf. Watson, trans., The
Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry, 207. No word for worry is explicitly used, but that is the
tenor of the woman’s feeling.
46 “Zhengfu shu zai 征夫數載 [Several Years a Soldier],” Tune: “Feng gui yun 鳳歸雲 [Phoe-
nix Returning to the Clouds],” Dunhuang nos. S. 1441 and P. 2838, DHGC, 1:1.58; cf. transla-
tion in Chang, Evolution of Chinese Tz’u Poetry, Appendix 2, 213. Based on the Dunhuang
manuscripts in which it appears, the poem probably belongs to the Yunyao ji 雲謠集
[Collected Ballads of the Clouds] and if so would date to the High Tang period; Wagner, The
Lotus Boat, 74. For a verse in which the female persona imagines the absent man feeling
melancholy, see “Bian shi rongyi 邊使戎衣 [Sending a Soldier’s Clothes to the Frontier],”
Tune: “Shi’er yue 十二月 [Twelve Months, 10/12],” Dunhuang no. P. 3812, DHGC, 3:5.1263–
64; for a French translation, see Jao and Demiéville, Airs de Touen-houang, 117–18.
47 Zhang Ruoxu 張若虛 (fl. 710–27), “Chunjiang hua yueye 春江花月夜 [Flowers by the
River on a Moonlit Night in Spring],” YFSJ, 2:47.679; cf. translation by David Lattimore in
Classical Chinese Literature: An Anthology of Translations, ed. John Minford and Joseph
S.M. Lau (New York: Columbia University Press; Hong Kong: The Chinese University
Press, 2000), 1:820–23.

via free access
(duanchang 斷腸),48 pain (shang 傷),49 grief (bei 悲),50 or resentment (hen
恨).51 Though the phrase “pounding silk” is a pun for another dao lian 擣戀,
“pounding love,”52 this image most often evoked sorrow.
Tang court painters developed cloth-pounding as a fully realized pictorial
theme, at least according to later painting catalogues. Zhang Xuan’s painting is
joined by a Zhou Fang painting titled Pounding Cloth, which is mentioned in
Ming and Qing catalogues.53 Two Song paintings on this theme survive—of
which Huizong’s scroll is the earlier—and this is somewhat surprising, for in
Northern Song lyrics, pounding cloth and making winter clothing for soldiers
(tropes that share many of the same presumptions) are mentioned primarily
to set a melancholy mood.54 Nevertheless, in the same period, this aspect of
women’s work with cloth continues as an erotic theme in painting, perhaps
because the scenario lends itself so well to visual interpretation. The nature of
the activity provides an excuse for depicting female figures, worn out from
their exertions, in disarray: hair falling down, sleeves pushed up, even perspir-
ing. Their dishevelment would remind a viewer of how they would likely look
after a sexual encounter, increasing their desirability. Although Chinese poets
48 Liu Changqing, “Yuexia ting zhen 月下聽砧 [Listening to Pounding Stones beneath the
Moon],” QTS, 3:148.1524; cf. translation by Dell R. Hales in Liu and Lo, Sunflower Splendor,
117.
49 In a Tang poem by Wang Bo 王勃 (649–76), “Qiuye chang 秋夜長 [Autumn Nights
Long],” a woman is “wounded by longing” (si zi shang 思自傷); YFSJ, 3:76.1071.
50 Tune: “Daoyi sheng 擣衣聲 [The Sound of Pounding Cloth],” Dunhuang no. S. 2607,
DHGC, 1:2.309.
51 “Shu ke liulang 戍客流浪 [Roaming Soldier],” Tune: “Dong xian ge,” Dunhuang no. S. 1441,
DHGC, 1:1.157; this poem may have been part of the High Tang Yunyao ji.
52 Birrell, New Songs from a Jade Terrace, 21.
53 Wang, Shanhuwang, 47.61b, <http://www.kanripo.org/text/KR3h0060/> (accessed 28 July
2016); Bian, Shigutang hua kao, 2.116b, <http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/002334902>
(accessed 30 May 2016); Sun Yuepan, comp., Peiwen zhai shuhuapu, 98.37a; Li Diaoyuan
李調元 (1717–95), Zhujia canghua bu 諸家藏畫簿 [Register of the Zhu Family Painting
Collection], 10 juan, in Hanhai 函海 [Sea of Letters], ed. Li Yucun 李雨村 (1778; reprint,
Taipei: Hongye shuju, 1968), 30:10.5b.
54 Yan Jidao, Tune: “Shaonian you 少年游 [Wandering Youth, 4/5],” QSC, 1:247. The theme
also persisted in tune titles, as in Han Wei 韓維 (1017–98), Tune: “Hu dao lian ling 胡擣練
令 [Song of Nomads Pounding Silk],” QSC, 1:198. Poems that mention soldier’s clothing
include Xia Song 夏竦 (984–1050), Tune: “Zhegu tian 鷓鴣天 [Partridge Sky],” and Li
Zhiyi, Tune: “Lin jiang xian [1/2],” QSC, 1:9, 352. In a few poems, the labor is more thor-
oughly described, as in a lyric wherein a beauty remembers that she has not yet pounded
her soldier’s clothing, so she takes up the mallet as her tears fall; Su Shi, Tune: “Shuilong
yin 水龍吟 [Water Dragon’s Chant, 2/2],” QSC, 1:330.

via free access
172 Chapter 3
might choose imagery for its emotional associations,55 painters needed to con-
sider the pictorial qualities of an image as well. This emphasis on the visual
may help to explain, in Song painting, the decline of mulberry girls and weav-
ers (who had been prominent in early erotic poetry)56 and the increasing
popularity of women expressing their feelings of longing in a session of cloth-
pounding. Mulberry girls and weaving maidens do appear in Song painting—
with baskets in the mulberry grove, or at looms—but perhaps because their
movements are less apt as visual metaphors for love or longing, they tend to
signify as rural laborers.57 A woman beating cloth, however, makes for an espe-
cially evocative visual image, as she typically uses a long pole and must put all
her energy into pounding. In Huizong’s scroll, the beating of the fabric is por-
trayed as one of the most exciting stages in silk production.
Zhang Xuan’s Painting and Huizong’s Copy

It is instructive to read what may be a description of Zhang Xuan’s version of
Pounding Silk, found in the writings of Yuan Haowen. According to this Jin dy-
nasty scholar, Zhang Xuan had painted a set of scrolls depicting the activities
of palace women; Yuan refers to the scrolls with the descriptive title Four
Scenes of Palace Women (Si jing gongnü 四景宮女). His discussion of the paint-
ings includes precise notations on each figure’s clothing and status. The main
activity of the first scroll seems to be musical performance, with women play-
ing flutes and zithers and dancing, but it also shows female scholars writing
and women picking flowers. The second scroll depicts women looking at flow-
ers, and again playing musical instruments: pipa, flute, clapper. The fourth
scroll portrays maidservants holding children.58
55 James J.Y. Liu, The Interlingual Critic: Interpreting Chinese Poetry (Bloomington, Ind.: Indi-
ana University Press, 1982), 47.
56 Mulberry girls and weaving maids appear throughout New Songs from a Jade Terrace. For
more on mulberry girls, see Joseph Roe Allen III, “From Saint to Singing Girl: The
Rewriting of Lo-fu Narrative in Chinese Literati Poetry,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies
48, no. 2 (December 1988): 321–61.
57 “The Seventh Month,” from the Odes of the State of Bin (Shijing Binfeng tujuan 詩經豳風
圖卷), may represent women harvesting mulberry leaves; it is attributed to Ma Hezhi 馬
和之 (fl. ca. 1130–ca. 1170), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1973.121.3) and repro-
duced in Fong, Beyond Representation, pl. 28a. An image of a woman weaving appears in
Sericulture (Can zhi tu 蠶織圖), attributed to Liang Kai 梁楷 (fl. 1201–1204), Cleveland
Museum of Art (77.5), reproduced in Eight Dynasties of Chinese Painting, cat. 61C.
58 Yuan, Yuan Haowen quanji, 1:34.771–73. The Xuanhe Painting Catalogue does not record a
set of scrolls by Zhang Xuan titled Four Scenes of Palace Women. Xuanhe huapu, 5.155–56.

via free access
The third scroll might have been known elsewhere as Pounding Silk. Yuan’s
description of it reads:
One: a large paulownia tree with a well beneath it. Beside the well is a
silver bed. Under the tree are four or five fallen leaves. A palace lady with
her hair pinned up wears a pale yellow garment with half-sleeves colored
bright red and with dark flowers on her patterned skirt. She sits on the
square bed, which has a quilt but no bedskirt. She pounds silk with a pole
at the foot of the bed, and a maidservant holding a pole stands in front of
the bed. Another maidservant facing her beats the silk. The silk bears a
pattern of flowers. According to the [Xuanhe] Painting Catalogue, [Zhang]
Xuan made a painting of the poetic line: “By a golden well, a paulownia
tree’s leaves turn yellow in autumn.” He titled it Lament of Changmen;59
dare I say that this is that painting? The banana leaves have turned
slightly; this cannot be meaningless. Beneath the tree, a palace lady with
a headdress of flowered brocade with a green ground, who wears an
embroidered red skirt, sits on the square bed. In the picture, the even
brocade fills a box, and a maidservant unrolls the red patterned silk to
measure it. Beside them, autumn hibiscus grows lushly. Next to a lake
rock, a young girl waves a fan at glowing coals, preparing them for use in
ironing silk. Two palace ladies sit on the large square bed. One wears a
flowered headdress and faces out toward the viewer. She wears a close-
fitting garment embroidered in red with half-sleeves colored blue, a skirt
patterned with peach blossoms, and a double-red belt with ends dan-
gling. The other, with one knee raised at the foot of the bed, stitches
clothes. She wears a close-fitting garment in peach blossom brocade with
green embroidered trim, and she cuts an embroidered section. Two
maidservants hold the white silk twill, and a maidservant and a wife iron
it. A young girl in white brocade playfully lowers her head beneath the
silk. In the center, two figures, both with sashes about their chests, lan-
guidly tie them, and there is another with a different skirt. The foregoing
constitutes one scroll.
一，大桐樹，下有井，井有銀牀。樹下落葉四五。一内人冠髻，著淡
黃半臂金紅衣，青花綾裙，坐方牀，牀加褥而無裙。一擣練杵倚牀
59 The Xuanhe Painting Catalogue passage describing Lament of Changmen and mentioning
this poetic line appears in Zhang Xuan’s biography, but no painting of that title is listed at
the end of the entry on Zhang Xuan, indicating that it may not have belonged to the impe-
rial collection. Xuanhe huapu, 5.155–59.

via free access
174 Chapter 3
下，一女使植杵立牀前。一女使對立擣練。練有花，今之文綾也。《
畫譜》謂：萱取『金井梧桐秋葉黃』之句為圖。名《長門怨》者，殆
謂此邪？芭蕉葉微變，不為無意。樹下一内人花錦冠，綠背搭，紅繡
為裙，坐方牀。繪，平錦滿箱，一女使展紅纈托量之。此下秋芙蓉滿
叢，湖石旁，一女童持扇熾炭，備熨帛之用。二内人坐大方牀：一戴
花冠，正面，九分紅繡窄衣，藍半臂，桃花裙，雙紅帶下垂尤顯然；
一膝跋牀角以就縫衣之便。一桃花錦窄衣，綠繡櫩，裁繡段。二女使
掙素綺，女使及一内人平熨之。一女童白錦衣，低首熨帛之下以為
戲。中二人雙綬帶胸腹閒繋之，亦有不與裙齊者。此上為一幅。60
In some respects, this could be a description of Huizong’s scroll.61 The copy,

however, lacks the scenes of women measuring and cutting silk that Yuan
Haowen describes. It also omits Zhang Xuan’s detailed setting of an autumnal
garden: the well, the banana tree, the hibiscus, the lake rock, the fallen leaves
of the paulownia tree—whose name in Chinese, wutong 梧桐, is a pun for “we
are together” or “we are the same”—and even the bed, replacing many of these
overtly erotic elements with a background of plain silk. This suggests that the
painter of Huizong’s scroll took liberties in copying the original, which incor-
porated poetic imagery that would signify the longings of lonely women.62
Yuan Haowen’s description of Zhang Xuan’s original painting suggests that
it may have drawn upon two poetic sources, both relating to imperial women
abandoned by their emperors when younger entertainers attracted the emper-
ors’ attention. First, and rather simply, if the title of Zhang Xuan’s painting was
Lament of Changmen, that suggests a connection to the “Rhapsody on the Tall
Gate Palace” (Changmen fu 長門賦), attributed to Sima Xiangru 司馬相如 (ca.
179–117 bce). Written in first-person female voice, it relates the plight of
Empress Chen Jiao 陳嬌; Emperor Wudi of the Former Han 漢武帝 (r. 141–87
bce) sent her to live in the Changmen palace after he met singer Wei Zifu 衛子
夫. A preface of dubious origin claims that the rhapsody allowed the empress
to regain the emperor’s favor.63
60 Yuan, Yuan Haowen quanji, 1:34.772. I am grateful to Shuen-fu Lin for help with this trans-
lation.
61 Wu, Tales from the Land of Dragons, 142.
62 Wu Tung suggests that the members of Huizong’s Imperial Painting Academy sometimes
practiced a form of “selective imitation” in Tales from the Land of Dragons, 143.
63 See the translation and discussion by David Knechtges in Xiao, Selections of Refined Lite
rature, 3:159–67; cf. Sima Zhangqing 司馬長卿 [Sima Xiangru], “Changmen fu,” in Xiao
and Hu, Wen xuan, 16.5b–7b. On the preface, see David R. Knechtges, “Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju’s
‘Tall Gate Palace Rhapsody,’” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 41, no. 1 (June 1981): 49–51.

via free access
Zhang Xuan’s second set of poetic allusions is more complex and involves
the imperial concubine Ban Jieyu 班捷妤 (fl. ca. 48–ca. 6 bce), renowned
for her virtue and rejected by Emperor Chengdi of the Former Han 漢成帝
(r. 32–7 bce) for the younger, lovelier dancer Zhao Feiyan 趙飛燕 and her sis-
ter. Yuan Haowen proposes that Zhang’s painting might have illustrated the
opening line from the first of five poems titled “Autumn Song of Enduring
Trust” (Changxin qiuci 長信秋詞) by Wang Changling;64 poet and painter both
lived in the early eighth century, and Yuan Haowen indicates that the painting
included the imagery of the poem’s first line. Comparing Wang Changling’s
other four poems to the description of Zhang Xuan’s painting reveals some
additional points of correspondence between the poetic and painted compo-
sitions, however: the second poem in the series mentions pounding-stones
(zhen 砧), cutting (cai 裁), and sewing (feng 縫); the third describes a female
figure holding a round fan; and the fifth refers to the sound of pounding cloth
(daoyi sheng).65 This suggests that Zhang Xuan perhaps wished to allude to the
cycle as a whole.66 Significantly, the female persona featured in the poems is
recognizable as Ban Jieyu through the fifth poem’s mention of the Changxin
palace, where she retired to serve the emperor’s mother, as well as through
the third poem’s references to her broom and round fan.67 The Han History
(Hanshu 漢書, first century ce) describes Ban Jieyu as a concubine with an
admirable understanding of Confucian rules of deportment for women: in a
famous incident, she refused to ride with the emperor in his palanquin, noting
that paintings of ineffectual rulers showed them in proximity to their concu-
bines, not their advisers. After the emperor became besotted with Zhao Feiyan,
Ban Jieyu wrote a rhapsody lamenting her fate and, perhaps, another poem
64 I Lo-fen, “Guiyuan yu xiangsi: Mou Yi Dao yi tu de jiedu 閨怨與相思：牟益『擣衣圖』

的解讀 [Melancholy Longings of the Boudoir: A Reading of Mou Yi’s Painting ‘Pounding
Cloth’],” Zhongguo wenzhe yanjiu jikan 中國文哲研究季刊, no. 25 (September 2004): 37.
65 For the Chinese text of all five poems, see Wang Changling, “Changxin qiuci,” QTS,
2:143.1445; they are translated and analyzed in Paula Varsano, “Whose Voice Is It Anyway?
A Rereading of Wang Changling’s ‘Autumn in the Palace of Everlasting Faith: Five Poems,’”
Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture 3, no. 1 (April 2016): 9–18.
66 Varsano cautions that the poems have been understood as a cycle since the Southern
Song but that there is no evidence that they were read that way earlier, in “Whose Voice Is
It Anyway?” 8.
67 Charles Egan, “Recent-Style Shi Poetry: Quatrains (Jueju),” in How to Read Chinese Poetry:
A Guided Anthology, ed. Zong-qi Cai (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 211;
Varsano, “Whose Voice Is It Anyway?” 15.

via free access
176 Chapter 3
(translated in Chapter 4).68 These references to historical figures indicate a

specific variation on the abandoned woman theme, one in which an empress
or a concubine of relatively high rank is exiled to a detached palace: possibly
the subject and setting of Zhang Xuan’s lost painting. Intriguingly, some schol-
ars regard the “Rhapsody on the Tall Gate Palace” and Ban Jieyu’s “Rhapsody of
Self-Commiseration” (Zidao fu 自悼賦) as comparable compositions,69 under-
lining the similarities between Empress Chen and Ban Jieyu.
Certain aspects of both Zhang Xuan’s original painting and Huizong’s copy
should give the viewer pause. The most pressing question concerns the reason
why palace women would be shown working with cloth. This aspect is likely
present in the original, if Yuan Haowen’s description of Zhang Xuan’s painting
can be taken as evidence. Yuan states that, though they have maidservants to
assist them, ladies do the cutting, the sewing, and much of the pounding. In
the Tang dynasty, when poems describe rural women laboring to produce gar-
ments that women of high status treat carelessly, it was probably not the norm
for palace women to make clothes: in Wang Changling’s eighth-century poem
cycle, for example, the persona of Ban Jieyu can be read as an observer or lis-
tener rather than a participant. Nor was it usual practice for the majority of
imperial concubines in the Northern Song, when Huizong or one of his court
painters copied Zhang Xuan’s scroll—although certain figures in the service
organization of palace women were indeed responsible for the production of
palace clothing, and eighteen of Huizong’s nineteen wives had been effectively
promoted from this organization.70
One interpretation is that Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk repre-
sents a ritual activity known as “palace sericulture” (gongcan 宮蠶).71 In this
practice, the empress and her palace women gathered mulberry leaves, reeled
68 Ban Jieyu and the passage from the Hanshu are discussed and her rhapsody translated in
Idema and Grant, The Red Brush, 77–82. For more on Ban Jieyu, see David R. Knechtges,
“The Poetry of an Imperial Concubine: The Favorite Beauty Ban,” Oriens Extremus 36, no.
2 (1993): 127–44; and Knechtges’s discussion and translations in Chang and Saussy, Women
Writers of Traditional China, 17–21. The episode in which she refused to ride with the
emperor is illustrated in the painting Admonitions of the Court Instructress to the Palace
Ladies and discussed in Murray, “Who Was Zhang Hua’s ‘Instructress’?” 105–106. It also is
illustrated in a scene from a lacquer-painted wooden screen found in the tomb of Sima
Jinlong 司馬金龍 (d. 484), Northern Wei dynasty, 484, Shijiazhai, Datong, Shanxi prov-
ince; a reproduction of the scene appears in McCausland, Gu Kaizhi and the Admonitions
Scroll, pl. 19.
69 Knechtges, “The Poetry of an Imperial Concubine,” 141–42.
70 Ching Chung, Palace Women in the Northern Sung, 10, 91–102.
71 Wu Tung discusses this possibility in Tales from the Land of Dragons, 142.

via free access
silk from cocoons, and made clothing, either for sacrificial purposes or to be
worn by the ruler. Accounts of palace sericulture in early historical texts reveal
that the practice might have begun as early as 167 bce; they invariably describe
the ceremony as beginning in springtime.72 Scenes depicting this imperial rite
may have codified the symbolic role of a palace lady.73 In Huizong’s scroll,
where the painter has omitted many components of Zhang Xuan’s setting that
would connote loneliness—including bed, paulownia, banana tree, and all in-
dications of autumn—this is a plausible interpretation. But it is not wholly
satisfactory, for the painting flouts the conventions of palace sericulture in an-
other way: the Monthly Ordinances (Yueling 月令, before 240 bce) specifically
notes that women participating in the rite are commanded “not to adorn
themselves in finery.”74 In this respect, palace sericulture does not fully explain
the events portrayed in Huizong’s painting, although the women in Huizong’s
scroll may be adorned in finery because this is the most efficient way of visu-
ally conveying their status as palace women.
If Huizong’s scroll does represent the solemn rite of palace sericulture, why
does it focus on only three steps of the process, and why these three (pounding
silk, sewing, and ironing) in particular? The Northern Song painter did not re-
produce every activity depicted in Zhang Xuan’s original painting, suggesting
that those chosen for illustration were directly pertinent to the meaning he
wished to convey. It seems likely that these steps were selected for their un-
abashedly erotic connotations. The innuendo inherent in an image of women
pounding silk makes this the perfect opening for this scroll, if the painter pri-
marily wishes to show the palace women’s desire for the emperor. This inter-
pretation also accords greater significance to the Chinese title of Huizong’s
scroll, Dao lian tu. Undoubtedly there was a reason for beginning with such a
suggestive activity and then titling the painting after it. The next scene, which
shows women working with thread, similarly accommodates the language of
desire. The word for thread (si 絲) is a homophone for longing (si 思), and if the
sewing woman is making clothing for the emperor, then the inclusion of this
72 Derk Bodde, Festivals in Classical China: New Year and Other Annual Observances during
the Han Dynasty, 206 b.c.–a.d. 220 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 263–72.
According to Bodde, the texts include Monthly Ordinances [Yueling 月令, before 240 bce],
The Book of Rites [Liji 禮記, dating to the Zhou and Han dynasties], The Rites of Zhou
[Zhouli 周禮, dating to the late Zhou or early Han dynasty], Han History, Comprehensive
Discussions in the White Tiger Hall [Baihu tongyi 白虎通義, 1st cent. ce], Han Old Obser-
vances [Han jiuyi 漢舊儀, ca. 25–27 ce], Han Observances [Hanyi 漢儀, ca. 251 ce], Sui
History [Suishu 隋書, 6th–7th cent.] and Jin History [Jinshu, 6th–7th cent.].
73 Wu Hung, “The Origins of Chinese Painting,” 76.
74 Bodde, Festivals in Classical China, 264.

via free access
178 Chapter 3
scene reiterates her vivid recall of the contours of his body. Finally, in the im-
age of women ironing—a much less common trope in erotic poetry—the use
of hot coals may be significant. A Northern Song lyric by Zhou Bangyan 周邦彥
(1056–1121) suggests that coals and ashes can be metaphors for feelings:
She must see the old, dying coals within the gold censer.
She won’t willingly let her fond feelings
become like those cold ashes.
金爐應見舊殘煤。莫使恩情容易，似寒灰。75
The heat of the coals in Huizong’s scroll indicates the burning passion that
these women must feel for their absent object of desire.
If one follows poetic cues and reads Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk
as representing the women’s desire, then the women shown here evoke arche-
typal figures of erotic poetry. In New Songs from a Jade Terrace, for example,
poets commonly construed figures working with cloth as palace women wear-
ing fine garments, hair ornaments, and cosmetics. One of several poems titled
“Pounding Cloth” from this collection is especially helpful in interpreting the
images in Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk. Written by Emperor Wudi
of the Liang dynasty 梁武帝 (r. 502–49), it is set in a palace:
They say he rode north of the Yi waters.

I said goodbye north of the river.
Deep in longing—the bit cruel in the horse’s mouth—
I weave a dream in an empty bed.
Waking suddenly, colors swim before my eyes,
and I begin to be pained by fine white silk.
In Zhongzhou leaves fall from the trees,
and at the barriers frost must have come early.
Insects hide as the weather grows severe,
and grass in the courtyard turns yellow again.
A golden wind on the only clear night,
the bright moon suspended above inner chambers—
slender and delicate, girls from this palace
assist me in preparing garments.
Irregular rhythm of the poles at night,
75 Zhou Bangyan, Tune: “Yu meiren 虞美人 [The Beautiful Lady Yu, 1/3],” QSC, 2:618; the
complete lyric is translated by Irving Y. Lo in Liu and Lo, Sunflower Splendor, 363.

via free access
sorrowful laments stirred by autumn stones.

Light gauze flying on jade wrists,
faint emerald on a base of red rouge,
in vermilion cheeks color already rising,
sidelong glances making eyes brighter.
Pounding with all our “not-a-stone”
a pattern of paired mandarin ducks;
gripping a golden knife for the cutting,
burning incense that smells of orchids.
Our reunion is long in coming,
so I’ll keep this to send to your cold country.
Who is there to see my makeup?
Longing for you makes one’s heart bitter.
駕言易水北，送別河之陽。沈思慘行鑣，結夢在空牀。既寤丹綠謬，
始知紈素傷。中州木葉下，邊城應早霜。陰蟲日慘烈，庭草復云
黃。金風但清夜，明月懸洞房。嫋嫋同宮女，助我理衣裳。參差夕
杵引，哀怨秋砧揚。輕羅飛玉腕，弱翠低紅妝。朱顏色已興，眄睇
目增光。擣以一匪石，文成雙鴛鴦。制握斷金刀，薰用如蘭芳。佳
期久不歸，持此寄寒鄉。妾身誰為容，思君苦人腸。76
This poem describes lonely palace women intricately made up, pounding and
cutting cloth, with a brazier burning in the background. All of the labor is com-
pressed into a single night, a poetic construct that does not accurately reflect
the time necessary for completion of each task. In these respects, the poem is
rather similar to Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk: both works share a
reliance on conventional themes to convey feelings. In Wudi’s poem, the em-
phasis is on pounding cloth, an activity that the women carry out full of reso-
lute feeling—“not-a-stone” acting as a kenning for the stalwart heart and
alluding to the poem from the Book of Songs in which the metaphor first ap-
peared.77 Wudi’s poem is explicit about the protagonist’s unhappiness, men-
tioning longing, pain, bitterness, and how she hears “mournful laments” in the
76 Xiao Yan 蕭衍 (464–549) [Emperor Wudi of the Liang 梁武帝, r. 502–49], “Dao yi [Pound-
ing Cloth],” YTXY, 7.1a–b; cf. translation in Birrell, New Songs from a Jade Terrace, 182. I am
grateful to Shuen-fu Lin for help with this translation.
77 Birrell, New Songs from a Jade Terrace, 321. The poem is “Bo zhou 柏舟 [Cypress Boat],”
and the relevant couplet reads, “My heart is not a stone—you cannot turn it.” (我心匪
石，不可轉也。) Zhu Xi, ed., Shijing jizhu 詩經集注 [Collected Annotations to the “Book
of Poetry”] (reprint; Taipei: Wanjuan lou tushu, 1996), 2.13; cf. translation in Waley, The
Book of Songs, 71.

via free access
180 Chapter 3
sound of poles striking stones. It also contains indirect cues of melancholy,

through mentions of both autumn and moonlight, which makes for an espe-
cially poignant image in poetry about separated lovers.78 In addition, the fe-
male persona’s failure to recognize her own face suggests that sorrow is
adversely affecting her appearance. The textile pattern of paired mandarin
ducks in the poem is an ironic image given the lovers’ separation, yet it repre-
sents the woman’s hope that their love will last. Despite the participation of a
group of women, the poem clarifies that the work is done for the benefit of one
man, the protagonist’s beloved. For court ladies, making clothes for a beloved
traveler is an exceptional gesture. Because a woman of high rank does not need
to undertake such toil herself, it becomes more meaningful if she personally
handles these intimate tasks. And it is, of course, fitting that these are court
ladies, considering that the imperial author might imagine himself as the
recipient.
Similarly, in Emperor Huizong’s painting, the identification of the figures
as palace women reiterates that this is labor born of love or longing, not of
necessity. The viewer first sees four women pounding silk. Judging from their
hairstyles, none is a maid (contradicting Yuan Haowen’s description of the
corresponding section of Zhang Xuan’s lost painting). Although these ladies
could easily have maids do the work for them, it is important to the conceit
that they process the cloth themselves. The painter emphasizes this through
the placement of their slender white hands, which correlate with the self and
simultaneously invite contrast with the substantial wooden poles they hold.
A similar emphasis on hands is seen in the next section, showing two ladies
working with thread. Here the graceful movement of their hands helps to iden-
tify their work, for the fine thread is not readily visible. In the scene of women
ironing, we do see the assistance of maids: one helping to hold up the length
of cloth, and a second fanning coals in the brazier. But ladies hold either end
of the roll of white silk, and another passes a pan of coals over the cloth. The
little girl playing beneath it adds a sense of whimsy to the painting, but more
importantly serves as a foil for the uncharacteristic labor of the palace women.
78 The moon as metaphor for love had complex associations, with connotations of both
unity and wavering. In one poem, a woman and a man, each married to someone else,
take advantage of the moonlight to steal out for a tryst. The moon, slipping in and out of
the clouds, seems to be a metaphor for marital infidelity, but it also helps to bring this
couple together, by lighting their way. Xie Lingyun 謝靈運 (385–433), “Dongyang xi
zhong zengda er shou 東陽谿中贈答二首 [An Exchange of Poems by Dongyang
Stream],” YTXY, 10.3a; cf. translations in Birrell, New Songs from a Jade Terrace, 267; and
Watson, The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry, 174. See also Du Fu’s “Yueye,” QTS, 4:224.2403;
cf. translation in Watson, The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry, 224.

via free access
Other details reinforce this reading. The combs that most of the ladies wear
are made of spotted bamboo, a material that alludes to the longing of Emperor
Shun’s two wives, the Xiang River goddesses, for their lost husband; they shed
tears of blood that permanently stained the bamboo growing by the river.79
Here the subtle detail of spotted bamboo for the women’s combs is especially
appropriate if they are consorts waiting for an imperial summons. The round
fan held by the maid tending coals bears a painted scene of ducks by a snowy
riverbank with reeds growing in the water. Significantly, ducks are metaphors
for lasting love, and both the season and the river setting may represent the
passage of time. Finally, one of the figures near the beginning of the scroll pro-
vides a gestural cue that indicates her desire. The fourth figure from the right
meets the viewer’s eye as she pulls up her sleeve, revealing her pale forearm.
Her action recalls a couplet from a poem by Wang Jian, titled “Song of Pounding
Cloth” (Dao yi qu 擣衣曲):
Women and girls face each other and begin to work.

As they bare their white wrists, the mallets sing.
婦姑相對初力生，雙揎白腕調杵聲。80
As mentioned above, Wang Jian is known for writing a set of one hundred pal-
ace poems during the reign of Tang emperor Jingzong 敬宗 (r. 825–26); these
poems claim secondhand knowledge of the activities of the palace women’s
quarters.81 In exposing her plump arm, the woman not only opens a usually
covered part of her body to the viewer’s gaze, but also discloses her status. Her
skin is not coarsened by work and weathered by the sun, but soft and white—
the skin of a pampered court lady. One could read her gesture as knowing and
seductive or as unwittingly vulnerable. This single figure clarifies the painter’s
awareness of the erotic subtext of the pictorial theme.
Now: what are the references to eroticism found in Court Ladies Preparing
Newly Woven Silk meant to convey? Let us return again to the problem of the
status of the palace women. Certainly it derives from poetic tradition and
79 An early reference to this myth is found in Zhang Hua 張華 (232–300), Bowu zhi 博物志
[A Treatise on the Investigation of Things], ed. Zhou Riyong 周日用 (reprint, Taipei: Yiwen
yinshuguan, ca. 1950), 10.2a.
80 Wang Jian, “Dao yi qu 擣衣曲 [Song of Pounding Cloth],” YFSJ, 4:94.1317.
81 For more on Wang Jian’s palace poems, see Egan, “Huizong’s Palace Poems,” 362–63. For
the Chinese text of his palace poems, see QTS, 6:302.3439–46; nine of the series are trans-
lated by William H. Nienhauser in Liu and Lo, Sunflower Splendor, 193–95.

via free access
182 Chapter 3
makes the unlikely labor of these women even more meaningful. However,
their identification as palace women may be important for another reason.
Because this scroll was produced directly for the emperor (if not literally by
him), and because it represents imperial ladies, the focal point of their longing
would appear to be Huizong himself. Perhaps Huizong projected himself as
the object of their desire. One can imagine what an appealing image this must
have been on a personal level, with implications for the emperor’s virility, but
it potentially has political applications as well. One can, again, interpret this
painting of women desiring the emperor as concerned with the allegory of the
loyalty of the subject to the ruler. Huizong could have commissioned this copy
of Zhang Xuan’s scroll with just this interpretation in mind: many of the paint-
ings that emerged from Huizong’s court record auspicious events, which fulfill
the distinctly political function of affirming the correctness of Huizong’s
reign.82 In keeping with (but perhaps subtler than) images of auspicious
omens, which represent Huizong’s possession of the mandate of heaven and
which were likely displayed at court,83 Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven
Silk serves as an implicit display of Huizong’s ability to command his subjects’
devotion and loyalty, even though one cannot assume that this painting served
as a public image.
Huizong’s work in another field provides some assurances that Court Ladies
Preparing Newly Woven Silk encodes both an erotic and an allegorical meaning.
The emperor’s palace poems represent a significant departure from earlier col-
lections. Those written by Wang Jian and Lady Huarui 花蕊夫人 (consort of
Meng Chang 孟昶, r. 934–65, of the Latter Shu kingdom) tended to focus on
palace ladies, while Huizong’s take up topics that cast aspects of his gover-
nance in a favorable light. The fact that Huizong nevertheless continues to
write about palace ladies indicates that they too can embody confirmations of
his fitness to rule, particularly because his poems insist upon the virtue of his
ladies.84
Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk has a dual meaning. The reference
to palace sericulture—which cannot be overlooked—allows the viewer to un-
derstand the women as virtuous. At the same time, the choice of the most
erotic aspects of the rite, and the seemingly incongruous emphasis on the
women’s artificially heightened beauty, deepens the allegorical reading by
82 Bickford, “Emperor Huizong and the Aesthetic of Agency,” 72–73, 89; Peter C. Sturman,
“Cranes above Kaifeng: The Auspicious Image at the Court of Huizong,” Ars Orientalis 20
(1990): 35, 36, 41.
83 Bickford, “Huizong’s Paintings,” 485.
84 Egan, “Huizong’s Palace Poems,” 382–83, 387–88.

via free access
opening up the possibility of representing the women’s desires. The absence

from the painting of any male figure to represent the object of their desire en-
courages a male viewer to project himself as that object. Because these women
in Huizong’s scroll must be understood as imperial concubines, the male
viewer implicated is Huizong himself. The references to emotion in Court
Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk suggest that it must have been a relatively
private painting, but still one that veils its eroticism with a veneer of
decorum.
Thus, Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk is a painting of striking sub-
tlety. Its references to palace sericulture allow a viewer who so chooses to focus
on the virtuous qualities of Huizong’s imperial concubines, tempering the
erotic connotations of the theme. But those erotic connotations cannot be
wholly suppressed, so well do they correspond to the tropes developed in pal-
ace-style poetry, Music Bureau poetry, and song lyric—in some cases even
seeming to cite certain poetic lines. This allows the viewer to read this painting
as a representation of the desire of the concubines for the emperor, calling to
mind the allegorical interpretations of such poetic themes. As such, Huizong’s
scroll stands as a double-edged comment on his fitness to rule, one that takes
a Tang image of palace women’s longing and bends it to the will of the Northern
Song emperor. This is most likely an allegorical painting—but the allegory can
only be completed through the projection of the emperor as the absent male
object of the women’s desire.
Mou Yi’s Pounding Cloth
A painting that more fully explores the sorrowful aspects of the theme of
women making clothes for absent men appears over a century later, in the
Southern Song. In 1240, the painter Mou Yi completed his second version of a
handscroll titled Pounding Cloth (figs. 12.1–12.8).85 It is significantly different
from Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk, despite the similarity of the
theme: Mou Yi did not create this painting at court, and his painting seems a
much more private endeavor than Huizong’s.86
85 Pounding Cloth is on the list of the seventy most restricted works of art in the former
imperial collection. Guoli Gugong Bowuyuan, Gugong shuhua jinghua teji 故宮書畫菁
華特輯 [Catalogue to the Treasured Paintings and Calligraphic Works in the National Pal-
ace Museum], trans. Donald E. Brix (Taipei: Guoli Gugong Bowuyuan, 1996), 126–31.
86 My argument about Mou Yi’s status as a professional or amateur painter has been pub-
lished in slightly different form in Lara C.W. Blanchard, “Mou Yi’s Pounding Cloth: Paint-

via free access
184 Chapter 3
We know little about Mou Yi’s status: he seems to embody aspects of both
court and literati painters.87 I have only found three texts that give any infor-
mation about him, suggesting that he was a relatively unknown figure. Of
these, the most illuminating source is his own two-part colophon for Pounding
Cloth. The first part, which he wrote upon completing the painting, refers to his
sources of inspiration. The second part, which he wrote when he decided to
present the painting as a gift, explains his history of giving away handscrolls on
this theme. The colophon reveals that he came from Shu (present-day Sichuan
province) and suggests that between 1238 and 1240, he was moving about
Jiangxi province in southeast China. Tellingly, it betrays the rhetoric of a schol-
ar.88 Another testament to his literati sensibilities can be found in the Record of
Calligraphy in the Imperial Song (Huang Song shulu 皇宋書錄), written by the
connoisseur Dong Shi (the recipient of Mou Yi’s second Pounding Cloth paint-
ing) around the year 1242; it alludes to the painter as a late friend and mentions
his interest in archaic calligraphic scripts.89 Finally, a very short account in Xia
ing, Play, Reference, and Discourse in Song China,” Artibus Asiae 73, no. 2 (2013): 295–98.
87 Although later Chinese critics seem to suggest a strict dichotomy between court painters
and the literati in this period—see, for example, Dong Qichang’s formulation of the
Northern and Southern Schools of painters—recent research indicates that in the tenth
to thirteenth centuries there was a good deal of overlap between the two spheres. For
more on the Northern and Southern Schools, see Bush, The Chinese Literati on Painting,
158–72. On the literati, see Robert E. Harrist Jr., “I Don’t Believe in the Literati but I Miss
Them: A Postscript,” Ars Orientalis 37 (2007): 214; Deborah Del Gais Muller, “Hsia Wen-yen
and His T’u-Hui Pao-Chien (Precious Mirror of Painting),” Ars Orientalis 18 (1988): 139; cited
in Jerome Silbergeld, “The Yuan ‘Revolutionary’ Picnic: Feasting on the Fruits of Song (A
Historiographic Menu),” Ars Orientalis 37 (2007): 21.
88 His inscription hints that the act of sharing the painting with others was ultimately more
important than the painting itself, an idea reinforced by the inscriptions of the recipient
and later viewers; in a sense, this makes the handscroll more event than object, which
could be interpreted as more in keeping with a scholar’s attitude toward art. Vinograd,
“Situation and Response,” 365–74. Mou Yi’s presentation of his Pounding Cloth paintings
to friends and acquaintances as a means of discharging obligations could also suggest
literati practice; explorations of the topic can be found in James Cahill, The Painter’s Prac-
tice: How Artists Lived and Worked in Traditional China (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1994), 59–67; James Cahill, “Types of Artist-Patron Transactions in Chinese Paint-
ing,” in Li, Artists and Patrons, 9, 13, 15–17; and Michael Sullivan, “Some Notes on the Social
History of Chinese Art,” in Proceedings of the International Conference on Sinology: Section
of History of Arts [Zhongyang Yanjiuyuan Guoji Hanxue huiyi lunwenji 中央研究院國際
漢學會議論文集] (Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1981), Vol. 7, Section of the History of Arts
[Yishushi zu 藝術史組], 159–70.
89 Dong Shi, Huang Song shulu 皇宋書錄 [Record of Calligraphy of the Imperial Song] (ca.
1242; reprint, Taipei: Yiwen yinshuguan, 1966), 3.9a; for a translation, see Blanchard, “Mou

via free access
Wenyan’s Treasured Mirror of Painting describes the artist as a court painter of

the competent class during the reigns of emperors Lizong 理宗 (r. 1225–64)
and Duzong 度宗 (r. 1265–74).90 Xia Wenyan was writing over a century later,
which may account for his apparent mistake about the painter’s life dates, but
his identification of Mou Yi as a court painter is perhaps affirmed by the con-
tent of Pounding Cloth itself. The literary source of the painting is a palace-style
poem of the same title by Xie Huilian 謝惠連 (407–33),91 and paintings on such
themes were disdained by Northern Song literati.92 While it is difficult to rec-
oncile Mou Yi’s scholarly leanings with the textual and pictorial evidence of
courtly associations, it is possible that he was a professional court painter with
the attitude of an amateur.93 Mou Yi’s status is relevant because it suggests a
broadening audience for shinü hua in the Southern Song.
The handscroll begins with three important texts: Mou Yi’s painting; a copy
of Xie Huilian’s poem; and Mou Yi’s two-part colophon detailing his artistic
process. It is necessary to read all three together to understand what the painter
accomplished in this scroll, which may be read as a projection of a man’s feel-
ings onto female figures. He depicts a household of distraught women rising in
the dead of an autumn night to make winter clothes for husbands long gone to
the frontier: the subject of Xie’s poem.
Visualizing a Palace-Style Poem

The first thing Mou Yi’s colophon tells readers is that he took Xie Huilian’s
poem as his inspiration.94 Selected for inclusion in New Songs from a Jade
Terrace, this poem was a classic of the palace-style genre. It includes all the
Yi’s Pounding Cloth,” 295–96.

90 Xia, Tuhui baojian, 4.19b.
91 Xie Huilian’s life dates have elsewhere been given as 397–433, but David Knechtges offers
these revised dates in his biographical sketch of the poet in Xiao, Selections of Refined
Literature, 3: 392. Nicholas Morrow Williams explains the argument for these dates in “A
Conversation in Poems: Xie Lingyun, Xie Huilian, and Jiang Yan,” Journal of the American
Oriental Society 127, no. 4 (October 1, 2007): 491 n. 1.
92 Mi Fu’s Painting History assesses such works as follows: “As for [paintings of] ladies and
feathers-and-fur, those of high rank seek pleasure as they playfully examine them, but
they do not come up to the class of pure objects of amusement.” (至於士女翎毛，貴游
戯閱，不如清玩。) Mi, Huashi, 52.
93 Valérie Malenfer Ortiz, Dreaming the Southern Song Landscape: The Power of Illusion in
Chinese Painting (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 4, 54.
94 My subsequent argument about the correspondence between Mou Yi’s painting and Xie
Huilian’s poem as well as allusions to earlier painting styles has been published in slightly
different form in Blanchard, “Mou Yi’s Pounding Cloth,” 305–306, 308–16, 329–30.

via free access
186
Figure 12.1 Pounding Cloth. Mou Yi (ca. 1178–ca. 1242), Southern Song dynasty, 1240; handscroll, ink on paper, 27.1 × 466.4 cm. The Collection of
National Palace Museum (SH23), Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C.
Chapter 3
via free access

187
via free access

188
Chapter 3
via free access

189
via free access

190
Chapter 3
via free access

191
via free access

192
Chapter 3
via free access

193
via free access

194 Chapter 3
hallmarks of the theme of women pounding cloth: autumnal setting, women

taking care with their dress as if to meet their lovers, work intensifying their
feelings of sorrow. Xie’s poem can be roughly divided into four sections.
Xie Huilian begins his poem with attention to time and setting, in lines 1–6:
The Big Dipper does not linger in one place;

the sundial moves quickly, as if pressed.
White dew soaks the garden chrysanthemums,
and autumn winds lay bare a locust tree in the courtyard.
Susu, buzz katydid wings.
Lielie, the cicadas cry.
衡紀無淹度，晷運焂如摧。白露滋園菊，秋風落庭槐。肅肅莎雞羽，
烈烈寒螿啼。95
Here Xie considers the movement of a constellation96 and the rapid progress
of a sundial, referring to the passage of seasons and ever-shorter days. Then the
poet turns his attention to a garden, with two couplets full of images indicating
the season: “white dew,” one of twenty-four periods of the year, beginning
September 8;97 chrysanthemums that bloom in autumn; autumn winds that
cause leaves to fall. Even the mournful “crying” of katydids and cicadas is sig-
nificant: although a casual reader might assume that the characters used to
represent their sounds are merely onomatopoeic, susu suggests a desolate
mood, and lielie implies a chilly feeling.98 The opening section provides the
first hint that this work concerns the sorrow of separation.
Lines 7–12 introduce the poem’s protagonists, who dress and adorn them-
selves as if preparing for a nocturnal rendezvous with their lovers, but only call
to each other.
In the darkness of night, the empty blinds are tied up,

and the moonlit sky brightens the inner apartments.
95 Xie Huilian, “Dao yi,” YTXY, 3.16a–b. My translation of this and succeeding sections of the
poem is especially indebted to Burton Watson’s in The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry,
176. I published earlier versions of this translation in Blanchard, “Mou Yi’s Pounding
Cloth,” 308–309, and in idem., “Lonely Women and the Absent Man,” 36–37.
96 The Chinese star referred to here, Hengji 衡紀, is identified as the fifth star of the Big Dip-
per in Luo, Hanyu da cidian, s.v. Hengji and Yuheng 玉衡.
97 Mathews’ Chinese-English Dictionary, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1956), 1178.
98 I am grateful to Wen-chien Cheng for this observation.

via free access
Beautiful women fasten their garments.

Neatly adorned, they summon each other:
jade hairpins emerge from northern rooms,
tinkling gold walks through southern halls.
夕陰結空幕，霄月皓中閨。美人戒裳服，端飭相招攜。簪玉出北房，
鳴金步南階。
These lines imply that the women so miss their lovers in the lengthening au-
tumn nights that, sleepless, they are compelled to rise. Xie Huilian begins this
section with a couplet that establishes the setting as the women’s quarters in
the middle of the night. While the tied blinds may be a metaphor for their con-
straint, more importantly they show that all may be revealed. They permit the
reader a voyeuristic glimpse into the apartments, and also allow light, which as
a yang element is gendered masculine, to penetrate into feminine space. Then
Xie describes them getting dressed, an activity generally carried out behind
closed doors. He uses metonymy to reduce the women to their ornaments,
which indicate their precious and protected status and, by “tinkling,” also re-
veal the delicacy and grace of their movement. These women are overwhelm-
ingly feminine. At the end of this section, the women move out of feminine
space,99 a crossing that helps to imply their loneliness, because it reiterates
that there are no men about. Their transgression of the boundary between
feminine and masculine space, in addition, may have been titillating for male
readers.
In the third section of the poem, lines 13–16, Xie turns to the women’s activ-
ity on this night: they use poles to pound cloth against stones.
Beneath high eaves the flat stones resonate,

and by tall columns, the pounding poles sound sad.
Subtle fragrance rises from pairs of sleeves,
while light sweat smudges pairs of brows.
櫩高砧響發，楹長杵聲哀。微芳起兩袖，輕汗染雙題。
99 “Northern rooms” is one way to refer to the inner quarters in the Southern Dynasties,
when the women’s living space was situated in the north of a wealthy household. Birrell,
New Songs from a Jade Terrace, 321, s.v. “north.” I discussed this idea in Blanchard, “Lonely
Women and the Absent Man,” 37.

via free access
196 Chapter 3
The poet firmly establishes their desirability: they seem too well-dressed for
the labor-intensive activity of pounding cloth, and even the bodily marks of
their exertion seem beautiful, for they emit fragrance and only perspire lightly,
causing their makeup to fade. Their slight disarray might heighten their attrac-
tiveness to men, ironic considering the absence of their husbands from the
fictive space of the poem, but completely in keeping with the expectations of
the reader. Also in this section, for the second time, Xie mentions sadness in
conjunction with a sound, here the beat of pounding poles. This parallels the
melancholy sound of calling cicadas and emphasizes the poignancy of the mo-
ment. Indeed, the descriptions of high eaves and long columns serve mainly to
suggest a large space completely filled by their unhappiness.
The conclusion of the poem, in lines 17–24, focuses on one woman, who
speaks her feelings in a soliloquy.
“The fine white silk is already made,

but my traveling husband has not yet returned.
Cut it with the scissors from my bamboo box,
then sew a robe to last ten thousand miles.
The chest I fill with my own hands,
and all alone I shut it, to await your opening.
The belt for your waist I made as in the past,
but I don’t know if it will still fit.”
紈素既已成，君子行未歸。裁用笥中刀，縫為萬里衣。盈篋自予手，
幽緘侯君開。腰帶准疇昔，不知今是非。
The speaker first muses aloud about her own involvement in the task at hand—
the particulars of preparing and sending the clothing—and appears to give
directions to a servant. But in line 21, she begins to address her husband di-
rectly. This line also marks the sudden appearance of the personal pronoun yu,
making an emphatic contrast with the woman’s delegation of other duties. It is
possibly relevant that the character Xie Huilian uses for the chest that she fills,
qie 篋, is identical to the one he uses in another poem for a “longing-for-each-
other box” (xiangsi qie 相思篋) that holds cloth.100 This final passage decisively
identifies the reason for the woman’s sadness as her separation from her hus-
band, only hinted at previously. In the last couplet, wondering whether his belt
will fit as before, she betrays a fear that things will never be the same: he could
100 Xie Huilian, “Dai gu 代古 [After a Classic],” YTXY, 3.16b–17a; cf. translation by Birrell, New
Songs from a Jade Terrace, 106.

via free access
be starving or dead, or he might never return. The mention of his waist is the
only reference to his physiognomy in the poem, contrasting with the many
details of the woman’s body: her hands, her brow, her sweat, her sleeves, her
movement through the apartments, the act of getting dressed. Xie effectively
contrasts her corporeality with her husband’s more uncertain existence.
Mou Yi’s visual adaptation of this poem follows the narrative, but of neces-
sity he emphasizes certain aspects, downplays others, and introduces new ele-
ments. While he employs much of Xie’s imagery in his painting, he also draws
upon visual sources that enhance the emotional quality of the theme. In fact,
most of Mou Yi’s changes relate to the difficulties of representing feelings visu-
ally. This is suggested in the first part of his colophon, which begins:
The poem on the right is Pounding Cloth by Xie Huilian (five characters
per line, twelve rhymes). This work [the poem] details the attitudes,
activities, and expressions of the gentle women of the inner quarters.
There are countless concepts and tones within it, and subtleties that
lodge outside of words. I continually sigh in admiration of it. Accordingly,
I selected Zhou Fang’s beautiful women, in their tranquil positions, and
painted them to make a handscroll [on this theme]. My thoughts were
shallow and my brush awkward. Although [my painting] is not sufficient
to fully describe the implied parts of Xie’s poem, one may say that it is a
literal interpretation, and thus it naturally can be called similar.
右謝惠連擣衣詩五言十二韻。曲盡閨闈婉嫡動息矉伸之態。意韻萬
千。妙在言外。詠歎不已。因取周昉美人。稍加位置。畫為橫卷。思
短筆拙。雖不足以形容謝詩妙處。若曰模章寫句。亦自謂得其彷彿。101
This passage brings up several important points. Mou Yi, with possibly ironic
humility, claims that his painting is only a literal interpretation of Xie’s poem,
unable to capture the underlying implications of the theme. At the same time,
his writing reveals his admiration for Xie’s depiction of the “attitudes, activi-
ties, and expressions of the gentle women of the inner quarters.” He praises the
poem for its subtlety and intimates that his own work cannot equal it in the
101 Guoli Gugong Bowuyuan, Gugong shuhua lu 2:4.64–65. My translation of it here and
below is first indebted to Richard Edwards’s published translation in “Mou I’s Colophon
to His Pictorial Interpretation of ‘Beating the Clothes,’” Archives of the Chinese Art Society
of America 18 (1964): 7–12; I am also grateful for the comments of Martin J. Powers and his
students in the spring of 1996. A full translation of the colophon appears in Blanchard,
“Mou Yi’s Pounding Cloth,” 298–99.

via free access
198 Chapter 3
expression of emotion, what he refers to as “the implied parts of Xie’s poem.”

This modesty should not be accepted at face value; considering Mou Yi’s re-
spect for what Xie has accomplished, it stands to reason that he would attempt
to create an equally nuanced painting.
Mou Yi’s painting is comprised of six scenes, based on his use of composi-
tional dividers such as trees and the grouping of figures. The opening scene
(figs. 12.1–12.2) depicts an autumnal garden, corresponding to lines 1–6 of Xie
Huilian’s poem. It presents a view of a courtyard in which chrysanthemums
bloom. Katydids, recognizable from their long antennae and bent legs, perch
on two of the plants. In the air, to the left of a much later inscription,102 a ci-
cada flies, its wings a blur; another crawls on the trunk of a tree as leaves fall.
Mou Yi takes the courtyard, chrysanthemums, tree with falling leaves, katy-
dids, and cicada directly from the poem. He omits the sundial, the stars, and
the dew—the last, at least, might be difficult to paint—but the images he se-
lects from Xie’s poem are more than sufficient to establish the season as au-
tumn and set a melancholic mood.
The rhetorical strategy of penetration is especially evident in the painting’s
second scene, which introduces the protagonists (figs. 12.2–12.3). In this scene,
six ladies put the finishing touches on their appearances while standing on a
sheltered porch. This scene corresponds to lines 7–10 of Xie’s poem, and as in
the text, Mou Yi depicts lovely women dressing: the first one from the right ties
her sash, the second fingers her scarf, the third opens a jar, and the fourth fas-
tens an earring.103 They all dress alike, in V-necked garments with long skirts
and ornately patterned scarves wrapped around their shoulders, and the four
at the left all wear combs in their hair. These details of their dress indicate that
these women are of high status within the household, and the fact that the first
ties her sash may signify that they are married women: it recalls the sash-bind-
ing ceremony (jieli 結縭) performed at the time of marriage, a material repre-
sentation of a woman’s connection to her husband and his family.104 The
women are arranged in pairs, sharing a quiet sympathy. Mou Yi frames them
with rolled-up blinds above, trees at right and left, and a railing below. They
are, in essence, surrounded by barriers. The necessity of penetrating the space
to pry into a usually private activity contributes to the sense of voyeurism,
102 The inscription, dated 1748, is by Qing emperor Qianlong.

103 The fifth woman makes a gesture that is difficult to interpret: with hands crossed, she
points to her right eye.
104 Ban Jieyu reflects on this in her “Rhapsody on Self-Commiseration,” as discussed in
Knechtges, “The Poetry of an Imperial Concubine,” 138.

via free access
present in the poem also but much more tangible here. The process of probing
beneath the surface to better expose their feelings has begun. The moonlight,
an important element in the second section of the poem, suffuses the entire
scroll but is especially evident in this and the previous scene, where Mou Yi
paints luminous tree trunks and leaves.
In this scene, Mou Yi’s allusion to Zhou Fang is clear, yet the figures are ex-
ecuted in a style that is quite different. For example, the figures in Ladies
Adorning Their Hair with Flowers (fig. 17), attributed to Zhou Fang, are painted
in a naturalistic style meant to display the court painter’s skill. Look at the sec-
ond woman from the right: the artist not only uses rich color but also models
the lady’s right arm to show the roundness of the form. The way the pattern of
her skirt undulates suggests the body underneath, and the sheer fabric of her
scarf is carefully rendered. Mou Yi, however, draws his figures in simple, lightly
modulated outlines. His use of patterning is sparser and does little to suggest
depth, and generally he seems less concerned with material details. Mou Yi’s
ladies are less elegant than Zhou Fang’s, their faces less delicate, their clothing
less opulent. But the two sets of figures are still strangely alike. They share the
same quiet demeanor, the same manner of tilting their heads to one side, even
the same dainty finger movements. Throughout Pounding Cloth, Mou Yi’s
women exhibit restraint.
Moving through the scroll to the third scene, the viewer next finds two
groups of four figures making their way through a courtyard (presumably one
that is not reserved for their use) toward another porch and a suite of rooms, as
in lines 11–12 of the poem (figs. 12.4–12.5). They are a combination of ladies and
maids; Mou Yi signals their status through size, hairstyles, and subtle details of
clothing, especially distinctions between ornate and simple patterns on
scarves. But the faces of all are somber. The two in the lead are maids (as is evi-
dent from their short stature, bound hair, and spotted scarves); they carry can-
dlesticks, useful in indicating the nighttime setting. Behind them stroll two
ladies (in more intricately patterned scarves), whose serene demeanor is be-
lied by the way they stand close together, as if seeking comfort from each other.
The one on the right wears an ornament with three columns of hanging bau-
bles on her belt: the tinkling gold ornaments described in the poem. Following
them come two ladies adjusting their hairpins, and two maids (wearing plain
scarves) who carry bolts of cloth. Mou Yi captures both their beauty and the
restlessness that causes them to rise at such a late hour, and also provides an
early hint of how the women will pass the night.
They approach a covered pavilion, where the night’s work begins (fig. 12.6);
this is the fourth scene. The simple structure is delineated by posts at each

via free access
200 Chapter 3
corner105 and raised blinds hanging from eaves too high to be seen. At the right,
a maid kneels on the floor, spreading cloth on a low table with carved legs. In
the center, two ladies hold a single pole and beat cloth against a block. In uni-
son, they reach up to wipe the sweat away from their temples, mirroring each
other. A third lady supervises the labor from a chair, gripping the armrests. A
second maid, holding a bowl in one hand and with a towel draped over her
shoulder, waits on her. The weary gestures of the two ladies who do the pound-
ing and the tension of the seated lady reveal how much they have invested,
both physically and emotionally, in this work. As in the second scene, Mou Yi
frames the tableau so that the viewer seems to peep in at them.
In this climactic scene, which corresponds to lines 13–16 of Xie Huilian’s
poem, Mou Yi first starts to embellish upon the text. He keeps the poet’s high
eaves and tall columns, as well as the women working and perspiring. What he
adds are rolled-up blinds—here, made of spotted bamboo, and referring to the
sorrow of women separated from their husbands—and a screen painting in-
fused with the anxiety of separation. It depicts a river with misty hills in the
background, painted in the style of a twelfth-century river landscape, Dream
Journey over the Xiao and Xiang Rivers (Xiao Xiang woyou tu 瀟湘臥遊圖), by
Master Li of Shucheng 舒城李生.106 Mist refers to impermanence by its tran-
sient nature, and rivers to the passage of time in their continuous flowing, so
together they can represent the uncertainty effected by a long separation. But
even more appropriately, travelers frequently people scenes of rivers wending
their way past mountains.107 Erotic poetry gives the impression that ladies
105 In the right front corner, where a post should be, there is none; but a paper seam here and
a strangely truncated cut-out in the railing in the background indicate that a short section
of the painting has been removed, probably during remounting.
106 Master Li of Shucheng, Dream Journey over the Xiao and Xiang Rivers, ca. 1170, Tokyo
National Museum. Valérie Malenfer Ortiz mentions the connections between Master Li’s
painting and the first landscape represented in Mou Yi’s painting, and she notes that
while Master Li may have been a relative or descendant of Li Gonglin, it is impossible to
be certain; Ortiz, Dreaming the Southern Song Landscape, 44–46, 54, 108; the painting is
reproduced in her pl. 1.
107 This is the case in several Song landscape paintings. See, for example, Li Tang 李唐 (ca.
1050–after 1130), Mountains by the River (Jiangshan xiaojing 江山小景), National Palace
Museum, Taipei, reproduced in Guoli Gugong Bowuyuan, Gugong shuhua jinghua teji 故
宮書畫菁華特輯, cat. no. 36; Xia Gui 夏珪 (fl. ca. 1180–1224), Twelve Views of Landscape
(Shanshui shi’er jing 山水十二景), Southern Song, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas
City, Mo. (32-159/2), reproduced in Eight Dynasties of Chinese Painting, cat. no. 58; Xia
Sheng 夏森, Full Sail on the Misty River (Yanjiang fanying tu 煙江帆影圖), 13th cent.,
Southern Song, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Oh. (former Collection of Mr. and
Mrs. A. Dean Perry), reproduced in Eight Dynasties of Chinese Painting, cat. no. 60.

via free access
never emerged from the inner quarters of their houses; at most, they might
venture into a secluded garden. This makes a striking contrast with the men in
their lives (merchants, conscripts, officials), who were often required to travel
and thus are generally absent in these poems. In such scenarios, the women
remain at home, waiting with growing distress for their men to return. Because
travelers who moved through mountainous landscapes were typically men, it
follows that a woman left behind might look at such a painting and visualize
her absent lover. The screen painting thus suggests the cause of the women’s
anxiety: not merely their husbands’ journey, but also their husbands’ absence.108
The screen neatly frames the heads of the three principal figures of this scene,
hinting that this painting-within-painting represents their interiority; it thus
can be read as a pictorial example of the poetic concept of the melding of feel-
ing and scene.
After the cloth has been pounded, three women bring it over to a raised
platform where two women measure and cut a gleaming length of it and a
third stitches clothes; this is the fifth scene (figs. 12.7–12.8).109 Three more
women simply look on. In this scene, the faces and postures of the women
become even more telling of their sorrow. One woman who carries the finished
cloth, for example, frowns at the material in her hands, her face contracting as
if she might burst into sobs. The others seem unable to tear themselves away
from the scene. Two of the women watching stand close together, and one rests
her arms on the other’s shoulders—perhaps companionably, perhaps in need
of support. In depicting these emotional figures, Mou Yi deviates again from
the poem. Lines 17–20 of Xie’s poem feature a distraught wife talking mostly to
herself, but in the painted scene the presence of a large group of sympathetic
women means that no single figure suffers alone.
However, a landscape screen that Mou Yi has inserted into this tableau sug-
gests that it is actually the three figures cutting and sewing cloth that are most
affected by the men’s absence. The screen, painted in the style of Zhao Lingrang
趙令穰 (nicknamed Danian 大年, fl. ca. 1080–ca. 1100), depicts a river with wil-
low trees faintly visible through the mist on the far bank and short, dark clumps
of bamboo prominent at right. (See figs. 21.1–21.4 for an example of Zhao
Lingrang’s painting, similar to Mou Yi’s painting-within-painting in its low em-
bankments, depicted with horizontal strokes, and in the trunks of trees, ren-
dered in emphatic strokes of a wet brush.) The addition of willow trees
heightens the effect of this screen: they refer to the separation of friends or lov-
ers in two ways. In the Han dynasty, willow branches were a memento given at
108 I discuss these ideas in Blanchard, “Lonely Women and the Absent Man,” 38.
109 Another inscription by Emperor Qianlong, dated 1754, appears in this scene.

via free access
202 Chapter 3
the time of parting: sometimes the traveler would take the branch with him on
his journey, but if kept by the one who stayed behind, the branch might some-
times be sent to the traveler to bring him home again.110 Secondly, the Chinese
word for willow, liu 柳, is a homophone for another liu 留, “to stay” or “to re-
main behind.”111 This landscape is thus permeated with the sorrow of parting.
In his tacit reference to the distance between lovers, Mou Yi may have meant
to provide a pictorial counterpart to Xie Huilian’s words: “a robe to last ten
thousand miles.” “Ten thousand miles” in some ways recalls long landscape
handscrolls, which could bear titles such as A Thousand Miles of Rivers and
Mountains,112 although the type of painting that this referred to is more similar
to the landscape screen that appeared in the previous scene, not this more in-
timate view of a riverbank. As in the preceding scene, the screen frames the
heads of the three women laboring, suggesting that they have turned to work
to give full voice to their feelings.
In the sixth and final scene, Mou Yi returns to a more literal interpretation
of the poem, closely adhering to the images of its final four lines. He depicts a
group of women packing garments into a trunk (fig. 12.8). A maid stands by
with an armful of clothing, while the hands of an older lady—her age apparent
from the wrinkles around her mouth—are busy at the trunk’s lid. A third
woman simply sits: the terrible expression on her face and her dejected pos-
ture suggest that she is overcome with grief. She and the others are transfixed
by a belt held in the fourth woman’s hands. The most salient aspect of this
scene is their apparent bereavement. The figures in the scroll gradually be-
come more and more expressive, moving from the stoic faces of the second
scene to the somber faces and gesture of comfort in the third, from the tension
of the fourth scene to the frowns and supportive gestures of the fifth. In this
last scene, the viewer finds the most mournful faces in the scroll. The lady who
holds the belt, for example, looks at it with grief-stricken eyes. Her face even
seems swollen, as if she has been crying.
Throughout the scroll, Mou Yi pays careful attention to what he calls “the
attitudes, activities, and expressions of the gentle women of the inner quar-
ters.” As a result, their feelings are suggested by their labor and made explicit in
110 Frankel, The Flowering Plum and the Palace Lady, 96.
111 On associations between willows and parting, see Jerome Silbergeld, “Kung Hsien’s Self-
Portrait in Willows, with Notes on the Willow in Chinese Painting and Literature,” Artibus
Asiae 42, no. 1 (1980): 26. I discuss these ideas in Blanchard, “Lonely Women and the
Absent Man,” 41.
112 For an example from the Northern Song, see Wang Ximeng 王希孟 (1096–1119), A Thou-
sand Miles of Rivers and Mountains (Wanli jiangshan 萬里江山), ca. 1113, Palace Museum,
Beijing, reproduced in Gugong Bowuyuan, Gugong Bowuyuan canghua ji 2:94–132.

via free access
their faces, postures, and gestures. A sense of melancholy suffuses this hand-
scroll. At the same time, and proving his own words too humble, Mou Yi finds
a way to match “the implied parts of Xie’s poem,” achieving the “subtleties that
lodge outside of words” that he admired in the earlier text. He does this chiefly
through the rhetorical use of landscape screens in the fourth and fifth scenes.
Mou Yi’s painting, with its complex pictorial rendering of longing and sorrow,
surpasses most extant examples of shinü hua in its representation of women’s
emotional attachments. Far from stopping with the deployment of a type of
labor that was traditionally coded as representing love or longing, the painter
avails himself of the expressive potential of the body and uniquely visual ele-
ments such as paintings-within-a-painting. His conception of space, too, is sig-
nificant: Pounding Cloth begins with a representation of a garden, and the
movements of the figures, from a porch to a courtyard to another porch and
finally to a suite of rooms, give the viewer the impression of being led inexora-
bly inward (even as the poem suggests that the women are gradually moving
out of the inner quarters). The scenes of women sewing clothes and packing
the trunk occur against a blank background, meant to hint that the setting is an
interior room. The painting’s structure reveals a steady progression from outer
to inner. And moving through the scroll, the viewer finds that the gestures and
faces of the lonely women become increasingly expressive. For all of these rea-
sons, this handscroll represents a masterful translation of a poetic theme into
a pictorial format. At the same time, the colophon provides evidence that we
should read the handscroll Pounding Cloth as simultaneously an implicit ex-
pression of the male artist’s feelings and a site for the projection of viewers’
feelings.
Text and Interpretation

The biographical details mentioned in Mou Yi’s colophon hint that this paint-
ing expresses his own feelings of longing or homesickness. According to the
colophon, by the year 1238, he had made the long journey from his native
place to present-day Jiangxi province. In the spring of that year, he stayed in
a monastery in Poyang 鄱陽, and while he was there he began his first hand-
scroll based on the poem “Pounding Cloth,” a painting he would work on for
months. Two years later, in 1240, he packed the scroll and moved to Yuzhang
豫章, and shortly thereafter he gave his painting away. In the autumn, Mou Yi
spent some time at the home of Dong Shi in Donghu 東湖, where he began a
second version of the painting. In the process of reworking it, he changed the
composition, adding ten more women; soon after he completed it, he gave it
to Dong Shi. (It is the second version that survives, bearing Dong’s seals and

via free access
204 Chapter 3
half-seals.113) It is plausible that with his repeated representation of such a poi-

gnant domestic scene he meant to address his own feelings of homesickness.
For a traveler, the concept of home would be invested with nostalgia, and his
choice of poem may be significant as well: Xie Huilian’s poem is about a man
gone to the frontier, and the home is especially significant in such poetry.114
The colophon tells nothing about Mou Yi’s home life, and it is imprudent to
assume that because he painted a household of women longing for an absent
man that that is what he had actually left behind in Shu. His manipulation, for
example, of the number of women depicted in the second painting indicates
that he is unlikely to be making a faithful rendering of real family members
back home. Yet Xie Huilian’s poem may have been especially meaningful for
Mou Yi because he was traveling and, perhaps, because he missed someone
waiting for him. The increased number of lonely women in the second paint-
ing may signify his increasing longing to return home. In farewell poetry and
painting, the location of parting is imbued with emotional significance;115 per-
haps this artist’s repeated renderings of women waiting at home reveals his
own preoccupation with what he left behind. There is another intriguing pos-
sibility, suggested by Mou Yi’s own words: that his representation of women’s
attachment to men might evoke his own affection for male friends.116 He ex-
plains his presentation of the second painting to his friend as an expression of
their bond, writing, “Between friends, what difficulty could there be?” (於朋友
又何難。) Earlier, he writes of the first scroll, “I did not recklessly bring it out,
but only showed it to those who could appreciate it” (非知音不妄出); the word
he uses for “those who could appreciate it,” zhiyin, in another context would be
translated as “sympathetic listeners,” meaning close friends.
113 Dong Shi’s seals appear intact in several places on the scroll, but most prominently after
his copy of the poem and after a second inscription by him; several of his half-seals appear
at the right edge of the section with Mou Yi’s colophon. National Palace Museum and
National Central Museum, Signatures and Seals on Painting and Calligraphy: The Signa-
tures and Seals of Artists, Connoisseurs and Collectors on Painting and Calligraphy since
Tsin Dynasty [Jin Tang yilai shuhuajia jiancangjia kuanyinpu 金唐以來書畫家鑑藏家款
印普], 5 vols. (Kowloon, Hong Kong: Arts & Literature Press, 1964), 1:138.
114 Miao, “T’ang Frontier Poetry,” 120.
115 Brotherton, “Two Farewell Handscrolls of the Late Northern Song,” 48.
116 A similar phenomenon appears in poetic compositions of the Northern Song, including a
poem about entertainers written by Mei Yaochen 梅堯臣 (1002–60) and addressed to
Ouyang Xiu; Hawes, The Social Circulation of Poetry in the Mid-Northern Song, 53, 55–56.
This aspect of my argument has been published in slightly different form in Blanchard,
“Mou Yi’s Pounding Cloth,” 333.

via free access
Nevertheless, other interpretations of Mou Yi’s Pounding Cloth are possible.

Again, an allegorical interpretation cannot be excluded, particularly when one
considers Mou Yi’s status as an educated professional and/or court painter. The
theme of lonely women in this painting could be framed as Mou Yi’s loyalty to
a government indifferent to him. Unfortunately, not enough is known of the
circumstances of his life and career at court to make this claim with any confi-
dence. Alternatively, the handscroll may comment on the mobilization of nu-
merous soldiers to defend the Southern Song territory.117 This is a return to a
literal reading of the theme of women making clothes for husbands away at
the frontier, plausible given the historical context.
Mou Yi seems to have intended Pounding Cloth for an educated audience.118
It is significant that, with the exception of the “tranquil positions” of the ladies,
which Mou Yi claims to have derived from Zhou Fang, he draws from scholarly
painting styles in making his handscroll. Much of the painting is executed in Li
Gonglin’s “plain outline” style. Even his paintings-within-paintings are done in
the styles of artists who were affiliated with prominent scholars.119 The choice
of both court and scholarly painters as sources may reflect Mou Yi’s participa-
tion in both realms, but at the same time his colophon includes several hints
on how he expects his painting to be received. He concludes the first part of his
colophon with this meditation:
As for those who consider whether this painting is good or not, in the end
I don’t know whether or not they will enjoy it. Where is the pleasure in
obtaining it? Those who would examine this [painting] closely should
together discuss the skill or awkwardness of brush and ink, and examine
and consider this as well.
思慮善否者。其為樂果何如。得之果惡乎在。寓目者毋徒議筆墨之工
拙。試與共商榷之。
117 Kao, “Shiren hua de qingchou yu yaxing,” 78; I Lo-fen, “Guiyuan yu xiangsi,” 35.
118 This aspect of my argument has been published in slightly different form in Blanchard,
“Mou Yi’s Pounding Cloth,” 334.
119 Li Gonglin and Zhao Lingrang were part of a loosely connected circle of scholars that
centered on the figure of Su Shi. For discussions of their relationship with Su Shi, see
Bush, The Chinese Literati on Painting, 4–5, 8–11, 30–31, 81, 96–97, 97 n. 25; and Powers,
“Discourses of Representation,” 88–127. A third member of the circle, Song Di 宋迪 (ca.
1015–80), is credited with creating the pictorial theme of the Eight Views of the Xiao and
Xiang Rivers, and Mi Fu, a fourth member, was known for his paintings of the Xiao-Xiang
region; Murck, Poetry and Painting in Song China, 28, 30–32, 37–39.

via free access
206 Chapter 3
Mou Yi seems to anticipate that his handscroll might be viewed in the context
of a gathering of scholars. He acknowledges that the enjoyment of a painting
in such a situation usually arises from the opportunity for connoisseurs to offer
critiques of the work, and the quantity of the styles that he cites suggests that
he expected critics of his painting to play the game of identifying the referenc-
es.120 Yet he hints that they should enjoy the painting for another reason, in the
second part of his colophon. Mou Yi’s assertion that he would only share his
scroll with those who could appreciate it suggests that he viewed the theme of
women’s longings as one for private perusal. Certainly this fits with the inti-
mate nature of the painting: although scholars did create works that dealt with
the erotic theme of lonely women, they generally did not admit that these
works were intended for public appreciation.121 Mou Yi’s painting was likely
intended for small gatherings of scholars, where “the pleasure in obtaining it”
would be derived in part from the sense of closeness created among those who
viewed the painting together, perhaps even seeing the female companions rep-
resented as a reflection of themselves.122 At the same time, nothing would pre-
clude a male viewer from projecting himself as the absent man that these
women long for.
…
Song examples of shinü hua, preoccupied as they seem to be with themes of
desire and longing, reveal much about constructions of gender in the context
of heteroerotic relationships. Superficially, these works purport to convey
women’s feelings and tend to show women within feminine space, and yet, as
objects of male authorship and patronage, they are better read as male self-
representations. Huizong’s Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk and Mou
Yi’s Pounding Cloth serve as ideal points of inquiry because we can reconstruct
the circumstances under which they were created: most other examples of
shinü hua cannot be securely associated with a named artist, while enough is
known about Huizong’s patronage of the arts and of Mou Yi’s intentions to sug-
gest the functions of these two paintings. Both are extraordinarily complex. If
120 The Northern Song literati enjoyed a variety of games centering on poetic composition, as
described in Hawes, The Social Circulation of Poetry in the Mid-Northern Song, 31–50. Li
Qingzhao wrote of playing a game of identifying textual references with her husband
Zhao Mingcheng; see the translation in Egan, The Burden of Female Talent, 194–95.
121 Ronald Egan has considered this problem in regard to Northern Song song lyrics in “The
Problem of the Repute of Tz’u,” 191–225.
122 A male viewer could identify directly with a female figure; Samei, Gendered Persona and
Poetic Voice, 15.

via free access
both paintings are vehicles for the authors’ own feelings (rather than merely
demonstrating a compelling interest in erotic poetry), the simplest interpreta-
tion is that the paintings express men’s desires: Huizong’s for his concubines,
Mou Yi’s for a woman (or women) left at home. Because men’s expressions of
erotic desire were circumscribed by constructions of Chinese masculinity,
which apparently precluded explicit pictorial displays of men’s longings, the
portrayals of men wishing to return to lovers were subtle by necessity, pro-
jected onto the figures of women. But other shades of meaning beyond this
most obvious one are plausible as well. The imagery of Huizong’s desirous yet
virtuous concubines suggests loyal advisers, with Huizong as the ruler to whom
both profess devotion. The imagery of lonely women in Mou Yi’s painting may
suggest the artist’s own homesickness, his loyalty to an indifferent court (again
through the allegorical interpretation of women’s longings), or—less person-
ally—a comment on the political situation in the mid-thirteenth century. Male
viewers of later periods might similarly read their own circumstances into
these paintings: the Qianlong emperor’s third inscription to Mou Yi’s painting,
dated to 1754, for example, refers to his longing for the late Xiaoxian 孝賢 em-
press (1712–48).123
These works disclose how the figure of the desiring woman could stand for
a man’s unrealized hope. At the beginning of this chapter, I asked, “Where are
the paintings of men yearning for absent women?” I propose that, in effect,
these images of women’s longings can themselves serve as paintings of men’s
longings, but not only for women.
123 I Lo-fen, “Guiyuan yu xiangsi,” 40–43.

via free access
208 Chapter 4
Chapter 4
The Female Audience: Modeling Idealized

Femininity
All of the paintings discussed thus far seem to have been collected and viewed
primarily by men, judging from the evidence of seals and inscriptions. An indi-
vidual man might have projected himself as a participant in the pictured nar-
rative of heteroerotic desire, comparing his own situation to the story. But
what would happen if a woman viewed these paintings? Was she meant to
identify with one of the women depicted as expressing longing or desire (as
Mary Ann Doane proposes in her analysis of a different visual art form and a
much later culture)?1 Analysis of a sixth-century palace-style poem in which a
court lady contemplates a visual image of a beautiful woman suggests that
Chinese women, at least at that time, were also expected to identify with mod-
els of idealized femininity.2 Men used Song examples of shinü hua as vehicles
for expressing opinions on a range of topics; I propose that women could do
the same.
Although the most obvious function of those examples of shinü hua that
depict themes of longing and desire was to please the male viewer, this does
not mean that women could not appreciate such paintings. Other Song paint-
ings of women did find a female audience, and one of their functions was to
model a particular vision of femininity: for example, the different versions of
the Classic of Filial Piety for Girls likely served as important components of a
courtly woman’s Confucian education, following in the tradition of earlier
paintings such as Admonitions of the Court Instructress to the Palace Ladies and
Exemplary Women.3 In addition, women did demonstrate interest in themes of
1 Mary Ann Doane, “Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator,” Screen 23, no.
3/4 (September/October 1982): 78.
2 Paul Rouzer’s translation and analysis of Yu Jianwu 庾肩吾 (487–550), “Yong meiren zi kan
hua yingling 詠美人自看畫應令 [A Beauty Sees Herself in a Painting],” YTXY, 8.7b, is infor-
mative, though elsewhere he writes that erotic subjects were likely not intended for women;
Rouzer, Articulated Ladies, 151, 289.
3 Murray, “Didactic Art for Women,” 27–28. Hui-shu Lee speculates that the Beijing Palace
Museum version of the Classic of Filial Piety for Girls (Nü xiaojing tu 女孝經圖, handscroll,
light color on silk, 43.8 × 823.7 cm) may have been associated with Empress Wu, the consort
of Emperor Gaozong of the Southern Song; Lee, “The Emperor’s Lady Ghostwriters,” 73–74.
The Beijing paintings are reproduced in Zhejiang Daxue Zhongguo gudai shuhua yanjiu
zhongxin 浙江大學中國古代書畫研究中心, Song hua quanji 宋畫全集 [Complete

via free access
The Female Audience 209
desire. At the Southern Song court, the empress Yang Meizi 楊妹子 (1162–1232)
collaborated with court painter Ma Yuan 馬遠 (fl. ca. 1194–ca. 1222)4 to create
compositions designed to strengthen her relationship with her husband,
Emperor Ningzong 寧宗 (r. 1194–1224), writing poetry for their paintings of
flowering branches. In one instance, she inscribed Ma Yuan’s painting of apri-
cot blossoms with a couplet comprised of highly suggestive imagery:
Receiving the wind, she presents her unsurpassed beauty,

Moistened with dew, she reveals her red charms.
迎風呈巧媚，浥露逞紅妍。
The composition functions as an intimate message for Ningzong;5 given

Empress Yang’s use of such images to fortify her own position, though, one
must understand this pairing of painting and poetry as exceeding the simple
expression of her feelings. With paintings such as this in mind, it seems en-
tirely possible that by the Southern Song, women too appreciated paintings
that represented their longings and desires through female figures.
Although it is difficult to recover evidence of women’s encounters with
shinü hua, in this chapter I turn to paintings that may well have been primarily
enjoyed by women. None has documentation that connects it to a female
viewer, but the format and content of each allow for some speculation on this
point. The first three paintings that I discuss are fans that depict pensive
women in secluded gardens. The theme of each clearly derives from erotic po-
etry and effectively represents a woman’s longing for an absent man. The
fourth painting shows multiple women, again in a garden setting, and was
once mounted as a screen. This painting appears to represent a story of the
Collection of Song Painting], 8 vols. (Hangzhou: Zhejiang Daxue chubanshe, 2008–10) 1, part
5: 186–215. Hui-shu Lee notes that the Admonitions scroll bears Empress Wu’s seal in Empresses,
Art, and Agency, 128.
4 Dates for Ma Yuan’s period of activity were not recorded. I propose ca. 1194 for the beginning
of Ma Yuan’s activity as a painter—corresponding to the beginning of Ningzong’s reign—and
an end date of approximately 1222, based on the date of his Twelve Views of Water. For discus-
sions of his dates and reproductions of Twelve Views of Water, see Richard Edwards, The Heart
of Ma Yuan: The Search for a Southern Song Aesthetic (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press,
2011), 2–3, pls. 22a-l.
5 Lee, Empresses, Art, and Agency, 170 (her translation), 196–97; the painting is Ma Yuan, Apricot
Blossoms, National Palace Museum, Taipei, and Lee reproduces it in fig. 4.2. For more on
Empress Yang, see idem., “The Domain of Empress Yang (1162–1233): Art, Gender and Politics
at the Southern Song Court” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1994).

via free access
210 Chapter 4
Tang court, but again the representation of the women’s desire for an unpic-
tured man is unmistakable.
It is plausible that women actually possessed the fans, and painted screens
could function to divide space in the women’s quarters or a brothel. Courtesans
who performed songs on themes of longing and desire might have acquired
images such as these as part of the construction of their seductive personae.
Wives might have appreciated such paintings because they provide insight
into what men found appealing. Competition among wives and courtesan-like
concubines led to strategies designed to increase their attractiveness to men;6
this helps to explain why women who were not courtesans might have sus-
tained an interest in studying narratives of longing and desire. Although ar-
ranged marriages in the Song dynasty did not typically prioritize loving feelings
between husband and wife,7 wives still vied with courtesans for their hus-
bands’ attentions, and relationships with courtesans were based on male het-
eroerotic desires. The image of a woman faithful to her lover, pining for him in
the solitude of the inner quarters, held great appeal for men, and a woman
who cultivated this image herself would likely have been perceived as embody-
ing the height of femininity.
Women and Fan Paintings
Three Southern Song fan paintings exemplify the shinü hua genre. These are
A Lady at Her Dressing Table (fig. 13; a more literal translation of the Chinese
title is A Lady at Her Makeup Table), attributed to Su Hanchen, in the collection
of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Embroidered Cage, Morning Mirror (fig.
14), attributed to Wang Shen 王詵 (1036–89), in the collection of the National
Palace Museum, Taipei; and A Lady Watching a Maid with a Parrot (fig. 15),
also in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts. All focus on the unhappy
connotations of the woman at her makeup mirror, a theme found through-
out collections of erotic poetry, from palace-style poetry to song lyrics. Each
painting centers upon a lady at her makeup stand in a deserted corner of a
garden. Although none of the figures is alone—a servant is present in each
case, as well as a younger lady in one instance—the audience is encouraged to
view each one as lonely, as her possessions and her surroundings speak to her
6 Ebrey, The Inner Quarters, 42. Beverly Bossler discusses this competition as being rooted in a
wife’s anxiety about her place in the household in Courtesans, Concubines, and the Cult of
Female Fidelity, 106–107.

via free access
preoccupation with an absent male object of desire. The connotations of the

theme of the mirror indicate that male lovers have left these women behind.
The choice of the fan format may suggest that too: by the Song dynasty, the
round fan in poetry could connote abandonment, through associations with a
poem attributed to imperial concubine Ban Jieyu, to be discussed below.8
Each of the paintings presents a slightly different scenario. In A Lady at Her
Dressing Table, a woman sitting on an ornate bench in a garden solemnly re-
gards her face in a round bronze mirror set upon a stand, as a young maid hov-
ers attentively nearby. Upon the table, someone has laid a stack of cosmetic
boxes, a red tray with a jar and a bowl, a vase of blooming narcissus set upon a
wooden stand, a hill censer, and, draped over the edge of the table, a length of
cloth. Behind the table is a large screen painting of billowing waves. The gar-
den contains a gnarled plum tree just beginning to bloom, a scholar’s rock,
bamboo, and two potted plants set on a bench. The potted plants may be a
metaphor for not only cultivation but also confinement and enclosure.
Although the sparsely budding plum tree establishes the season as late winter
or early spring, it is less important as a temporal element than as a metaphor
for the hardiness of a scholar. The rock and the bamboo stand adjacent to the
tree, and these also serve as metaphors for scholars. These elements on their
own seem to indicate an absent man, but the presence of both narcissus and
mirror suggests a more precise reading: narcissus can refer to a married
couple,9 whereas the Chinese word for bronze (tong 銅) is a homophone for
the word “together” (tong 同), and the roundness of the mirror can suggest
unbroken marital happiness.10 In this instance, the woman may be a wife sepa-
rated from her husband.
Embroidered Cage, Morning Mirror, similarly, focuses upon a lady standing
at a makeup table, transfixed by her own reflected image. In addition to the
flower-shaped mirror on its stand, the table bears several gold lacquer trays
and black cosmetic boxes. Behind the lady is a couch with a screen painting of
mountains and rivers adjacent to it. Beyond the couch, a length of blue silk
gauze stretches over a frame. In the foreground are two more figures: a younger
lady and a maid, the former eagerly inspecting the trays of cosmetics that the
latter holds. Flowers—possibly jasmine—and a blossoming tree with profuse
leaves together suggest fertility and invite comparison with the visibly aged
lady.
8 Samei, Gendered Persona and Poetic Voice, 53–55, 62.

9 Wolfram Eberhard, Dictionary of Chinese Symbols: Hidden Symbols in Chinese Life and
Thought (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), 249.
10 I am grateful to Ellen Johnston Laing for these observations.

via free access
212 Chapter 4
Figure 13 A Lady at Her Dressing Table. Su Hanchen ( fl. ca. 1120s–60s), Southern Song
dynasty, mid-12th century; fan, ink, color, and gold on silk, 25.2 × 26.7 cm. Museum of
Fine Arts, Boston, Denman Waldo Ross Collection (29.960).
Photograph © 2017 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

via free access
The Female Audience
Figure 14 Embroidered Cage, Morning Mirror. Attributed to Wang Shen (1036–89), Southern Song dynasty; fan, ink and color on silk, 24.2 × 25.0 cm.
213
The Collection of National Palace Museum (VA15h), Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C.
via free access

214 Chapter 4
A Lady Watching a Maid with a Parrot, by contrast, presents a woman sitting

on a couch, a book and a scroll next to her. She leans on a table piled with more
books, writing implements, antiquities (including a flower-shaped bronze mir-
ror on a stand) and a tall stack of cosmetic boxes, again in a garden. She turns
her head toward her servant, who holds a parrot. Natural and material ele-
ments within the painting reiterate the painting’s probable theme. Behind the
screen, a blooming plum tree is visible, and the books, writing tools, and antiq-
uities indicate the woman’s high level of education. In certain contexts, parrots
could stand for either courtesans or, less specifically, for lonely women,11 but in
this case the combination of parrot, plum tree, and books has led scholars to
interpret this as an image of Meifei, Yang Guifei’s reputed rival. According to
her so-called biography, circulated in the Southern Song, she was a renowned
poet and a favorite concubine of Tang emperor Xuanzong before the ascen-
dance of Yang Guifei. The white parrot belonged to Yang Guifei and was called
Xueyi Nü 雪衣女, Snow-Clad Maiden.12
In all likelihood, A Lady at Her Dressing Table and Embroidered Cage, Mor
ning Mirror were court paintings, and both are attributed to men associated
with the Song court. Su Hanchen was a painter-in-attendance in Emperor
Huizong’s Academy of Painting and continued to serve as a court painter after
the court moved south; the attribution to him is credible.13 Wang Shen, a
member of Su Shi’s prominent circle of intellectuals, was the son-in-law of
Emperor Yingzong 英宗 (r. 1064–67). Although scholars now dispute the au-
thorship and date of Embroidered Cage, Morning Mirror, placing it in the
Southern Song rather than the Northern Song,14 the traditional attribution
indicates that connoisseurs long believed it to be a product of the court, and by
the early nineteenth century, it had (once again?) entered the imperial collec-
tion as part of an album, Famous Paintings of the Song and Yuan Dynasties
11 For a comparison of a parrot to courtesans, see Bai Juyi, “Yingwu,” QTS 7.447.5035; cf.
translation by Alley, Bai Juyi, 199. For a song lyric that juxtaposes a woman in an enclosed
garden who misses her lover with a caged parrot, see Liu Yong, Tune: “Gan caozi 甘草子
[Sweet Grass, 1/2],” QSC, 1:14–15; cf. translation by Hightower in “The Songwriter Liu Yung:
Part II,” 10.
12 Maggie Bickford, Ink Plum: The Making of a Chinese Scholar-Painter Genre (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), 55–59; Lee, Empresses, Art, and Agency, 101–104.
14 Wu Hung, in The Double Screen, 246 n. 183, assesses the painting-within-painting in
Embroidered Cage, Morning Mirror as in the style of Mi Youren 米友仁 (1086–1165) and
assigns the painting a Southern Song date. Ellen Johnston Laing suggests a twelfth- to
thirteenth-century date in “Chinese Palace-Style Poetry,” 286.

via free access
Figure 15 A Lady Watching a Maid with a Parrot. Formerly attributed to Wang Juzheng
( fl. early 11th cent.), Southern Song dynasty, early 13th century; fan-shaped album
leaf, ink and color on silk, 23.4 × 24.2 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Harriet Otis
Cruft Fund (37.302). Photograph © 2017 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

via free access
216 Chapter 4
(Song Yuan ming hui 宋元名繪).15 The costly medium of both paintings is color
on silk, and the painter of A Lady at Her Dressing Table used gold as well.
The authorship of and audience for A Lady Watching a Maid with a Parrot,
however, are more difficult to determine. It was formerly attributed to Wang
Juzheng 王居正 (fl. eleventh century), about whom little is known save that he
specialized in painting women;16 scholars now assess the painting as dating
to the Southern Song.17 Similar in media and format to the other two paint-
ings, it too could have been a court painting, although one could also imagine
an accomplished professional painter as its author.18
Although each of these paintings renders its theme of a lonely woman in a
slightly different way, they share the format of the round fan, the setting of an
enclosed garden, and the proximity of mirrors and makeup to the central fig-
ures. These elements play upon the tension between interiority and surface in
different ways. Fans had certain public functions, reflecting some aspect of the
bearer’s inner persona and presenting it to the world. Similarly, both the set-
ting of the bounded garden and the trope of the makeup mirror stress precisely
this convergence of inner and outer. Because it is conceivable that these paint-
ings were used by women, the multiple ways that these paintings seem to
speak to these two opposing principles suggest that negotiating the duality of
inner and outer may have been necessary for the construction of an appropri-
ately feminine image. This group of paintings, indeed, is much more compli-
cated than might be realized at first glance.
Acquiring Fans Painted with Lonely Women

Sometimes the format of a painting provides clues to its social context. A fan
painting might be enjoyed purely as an art object. But as a smaller painting
with less detail, such an item might also be less expensive, and therefore a
broader sector of society would have the means to acquire such a painting. The
growth of commerce in the Northern Song meant that merchants and other
wealthy figures began to value and collect painting. Beginning at this time,
15 Hu Jing 胡敬 et al., comp., Bidian zhulin/ Shiqu baoji sanbian 秘殿珠林石渠寶笈三編

[Beaded Grove of the Secret Hall/ Precious Bookcase of the Stone Channel, Third Compi
lation], 10 vols. (1816; reprint, Taipei: Guoli Gugong Bowuyuan, 1969), 8:4002. This is also
mentioned in Guoli Gugong Bowuyuan, Gugong shuhua lu 4:6.208–10.
17 Lee, Empresses, Art, and Agency, 101.
18 James Cahill, in Pictures for Use and Pleasure, 3, 16, 19–20, suggests that in later periods of
Chinese history such works might be understood as vernacular paintings by urban studio
artists.

via free access
merchants often worked as itinerant art dealers, giving rise to a vibrant art
market.19
Several sources reveal the Song market for fans. They were given as lottery
prizes at the festival celebrating the Buddha’s Birthday at the Baoguo and
Wansui Monasteries in Fuzhou, beginning in 1082, and paintings (presumably
including fans) were sold at the Lantern Fair at the Kaiyuan Monastery in
Shaoxing, as well as at the Xiangguo Monastery in Kaifeng.20 Deng Chun’s 鄧椿
1167 account of painting practice, More on Painting (Huaji 畫繼), includes an
entry on the art of Liu Zongdao 劉宗道 (fl. 1111–17), which indicates a popular
audience for paintings in this format even in the Northern Song:
Each time he designed a fan, he painted several hundred of the same and
only then would put them on sale; then they would be all over the city
within a few days. The reason was that he feared someone else would
start copying it first.
每作一扇。必畫數百本。然後出貨。即日流布。實恐他人傳模之先
也。21
More on Painting also mentions that Chinese fans competed in the market-
place with painted folding fans imported from Korea and Japan. The Korean
examples sometimes featured subjects explicitly described as shinü:
Many of those [fans] that are painted bear images of ladies riding in car-
riages, astride horses, enjoying spring outings, and gathering grasses.
所畫多作士女乘車，跨馬，踏青，拾翠之狀。22
19 Heping Liu, “Painting and Commerce in Northern Song Dynasty China, 960–1126” (Ph.D.
diss., Yale University, 1997), 14, 19–22.
20 Shiba Yoshinobu, Commerce and Society in Sung China, trans. Mark Elvin (Ann Arbor:
Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1970), 158, 159–60, 161.
21 Deng, Huaji, 6.78–79; see discussion in John Hay, “Chinese Fan Painting,” in Chinese Paint-
ing and the Decorative Style, ed. Margaret Medley (London: Percival David Foundation of
Chinese Art, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1975), 106; and
Robert J. Maeda, trans., Two Sung Texts on Chinese Painting and the Landscape Styles of the
11th and 12th Centuries (New York: Garland Publishing, 1978), 102–104.
22 Deng, Huaji, 10.126–27; for a full translation of Deng’s commentary on fans, see Maeda,
Two Sung Texts on Chinese Painting, 102–104.

via free access
218 Chapter 4
In the Southern Song capital of Hangzhou, shops that specialized in painted

fans were located at the Coal Bridge;23 presumably one could order a fan with
specific themes at such places.
When affixed to a handle, painted fans have additional practical functions.
Either a man or a woman might carry a round fan, effectively making it part of
a costume and suggesting that the pictured scene might expose some aspect of
the bearer’s identity or aspirations.24 Alternatively, one might use a fan to ob-
scure one’s face, suggesting the possibility of masquerade. This function of fans
is inferred in the term bianmian 便面, which dates back to the Former Han and
might be translated as “convenient [for screening the] face.”25 It is most often
mentioned in conjunction with men’s use, as in an infamous story about Li
Gonglin that describes how he once covered his face with a fan in order to
avoid two disciples of a colleague who had fallen out of political favor.26 The
plain fan used by Han Xizai in Scene IV of the Beijing Palace Museum version
of Night Revels of Han Xizai (figs. 9.1–9.5) possibly serves a similar purpose.
Women, however, might also take advantage of the fan as screen. Round fans
used to screen women’s faces appear in a poem by a reputed concubine of cal-
ligrapher Wang Xianzhi 王獻之 (344–88) named Taoye 桃葉 (fl. fourth cen-
tury), in which a woman hides her worn face from her lover, and a Tang poem
by Wang Jian, in which a female musician conceals her sorrow.27 Damage to
the vertical axis of A Lady at Her Dressing Table and Embroidered Cage, Morning
23 Sullivan, “Some Notes on the Social History of Chinese Art,” 169; citing Jacques Gernet,
Daily Life in China, on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion, 1250–1276, trans. H.M. Wright (Stan-
ford: Stanford University Press, 1962), 85.
24 Gernet, Daily Life in China, 132; Ankeney Weitz, “The Vocabulary of Fashion: Word-Image
Play in Southern Song Painted Fans,” National Palace Museum Bulletin 44 (October 2011):
39.
25 On the date of the term and the function of bianmian, see Hay, “Chinese Fan Painting,” 99.
I have slightly amended the translation found in Ka Bo Tsang, More than Keeping Cool:
Chinese Fans and Fan Paintings (Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum, 2002), 12.
26 Robert E. Harrist Jr., Painting and Private Life in Eleventh-Century China: “Mountain Villa”
by Li Gonglin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 13.
27 Taoye, “Da Wang Tuanshan ge san shou 答王《團扇歌》三首 [Replying to Wang Xian-
zhi’s ‘Round Fan Song,’ Three Poems, 3/3],” YTXY, 10.2b–3a; cf. translations in Birrell, New
Songs from a Jade Terrace, 267; and Samei, Gendered Persona and Poetic Voice, 67. Wang
Jian, “Gongzhong Tiaoxiao 宮中調笑 [Tiaoxiao within the Palace],” Tune: “Tiaoxiao 調
笑,” translated in Wagner, The Lotus Boat, 111. Later, in fifteenth-century Suzhou, women
could choose a different format, the folding fan, for the purposes of flirtatiously conceal-
ing and then revealing their faces; Marshall P.S. Wu, The Orchid Pavilion Gathering: Chi-
nese Painting from the University of Michigan Museum of Art, 2 vols. (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan, 2000), 1:68.

via free access
Mirror, corresponding to where the silk would have been attached to a handle,
suggests that they were once mounted as fans rather than as album leaves, in-
dicating that someone may have actually used them for this sort of practical
purpose (although such damage could also have occurred if these fans were
folded for a long period).
Thus, either men or women might acquire a fan painting of a lonely woman
for personal reasons. Still, although the image of a woman longing for her lover
might have charmed a male viewer, it is hard to imagine a man openly carrying
a fan with this theme. Such an action would be tantamount to publicly declar-
ing an interest in erotic poetry or an unseemly concern with matters of the
inner quarters. A man who owned a fan painting of this nature would more
likely have kept it for private perusal, possibly mounting it as an album leaf.
A scholar or court figure who appreciated a fan painting of a lonely woman
might have considered it a projection of his own feelings of longing or home-
sickness.
It is also possible, however, that his female lover had ordered a fan painted
with an image of a lonely woman as an expression of her affection. Two early
poems that may be of female authorship suggest that a woman might give a
man a fan as a gift: another poem by Taoye28 and the famous “Song of Lament”
(Yuan gexing 怨歌行) attributed to Ban Jieyu, the concubine of Emperor
Chengdi of the Former Han. The latter poem reads:
Newly cut, the gleaming silk of Qi,

Fresh and pure as frost or snow,
Trim it to form a fan with acacias pictured,
As round and full as the bright moon.
It frequents the folds of My Lord’s robes,
Trembles to bring forth a light breeze.
But it always fears that autumn comes,
When cool gusts disperse the blazing heat.
Then it will be cast aside in your box—
Your favor cut off in its prime.
新裂齊紈素，鮮潔如霜雪。裁為合歡扇，園園似明月。出入君懷袖，
動搖微風發。常恐秋節至，涼飆奪炎熱。棄捐篋笥中，恩情中道
絕。
In this poem, a fan painted with acacias (hehuan, “joyous union”) serves as a
token of the female speaker’s affection for her husband, who keeps it on his
28 Taoye, “Replying to Wang [Xianzhi’s] ‘Round Fan Song,’ three poems [1/3],” YTXY, 10.2b.

via free access
220 Chapter 4
person. She takes his regard for it as a measure of his affection for her. Sup
posedly, Ban Jieyu inscribed this poem upon a round fan herself and sent it to
the emperor.29
“Song of Lament” might do more than express the female persona’s feelings:
the fan mentioned therein, painted with such a significant image, serves as a
conscious protestation of her loyalty. The idea of fans suggesting loyalty ap-
pears in writing beginning in the Han dynasty: a fan’s seasonal appearances
and disappearances could connote an official coming forth to give loyal coun-
sel to his ruler and then respectfully retreating, as in Fu Yi’s 傅毅 (d. ca. 90 ce)
“Fan Inscription” (Shan ming 扇銘). Another early poem shares a number of
elements with “Song of Lament,” including the use of a fan to convey both loy-
alty and personal feelings: Fu Xian’s 傅咸 (249–94) “Rhapsody on the Fan”
(Shan fu 扇賦) features a personified fan cast aside and put into storage, la-
menting that its goodness went unrecognized and resenting its isolation.30
Intriguingly, the voice of this poem is indeterminate as to gender—it could
easily be read as male or female. “Song of Lament,” on the other hand, with its
references to gleaming silk, joyful union, roundness, and the moon (a yin ele-
ment), demands to be read in female voice, regardless of the sex of the author.
Clearly, though, part of the force of “Song of Lament” is its reliance upon the
allegorical equivalence between a government official and a consort as a
means of conveying devotion.
In addition to literary evidence that fans could be conceived as gifts express-
ing a woman’s feelings for a man, there is material evidence for this practice in
the Southern Song. A fan painting, Autumn Mallows (Kuihua jiadie 葵花蛺蝶),
found in the tomb of Ming Prince Zhu Tan 朱檀 (1370–89), may have initially
been a gift from Empress Wu to her husband, Emperor Gaozong. Trained to
write in Gaozong’s calligraphic style, she could have written the gold-ink in-
scription on the fan: members of the Southern Song imperial family often used
that medium to inscribe gifts. The inscription is a poem, best understood as a
lament in female voice. Autumn mallows are associated with loyalty, making
this an appropriate image for the empress’s gift to her husband. For these rea-
sons, this fan may embody the empress’s commitment to Gaozong.31 These ex-
29 Ban Jieyu’s poem is also recorded under the title “Yuan shi yi shou 怨詩一首 [Poem of
Lament],” YTXY, 1.14b–15a; Rouzer, Articulated Ladies, 120–21 (his translation). Rouzer
notes modern skepticism about the attribution of this poem to her. For more on the attri-
bution, see Knechtges, “The Poetry of an Imperial Concubine,” 132–36.
30 These writings by Fu Yi and Fu Xian are translated and discussed in Knechtges, “The
Poetry of an Imperial Concubine,” 133–35.
31 Lee, “The Emperor’s Lady Ghostwriters,” 75–76. Autumn Mallows, now mounted as a
handscroll, is in the collection of the Shandong Provincial Museum in Ji’nan. For repro-

via free access
amples show that an accepted function of fan paintings was to picture a

metaphor for a woman’s lament, which she could then convey to her beloved.
It is not such a stretch to imagine a similar function for fan paintings depicting
lonely women in an isolated garden, and thus one cannot rule out male owner-
ship and appreciation of these works.
If these paintings of lonely women were publicly used as fans, however,
meaning that they were worn on the body as part of an ensemble, and some-
times used to screen one’s face, then that would favor women’s ownership.
There are several reasons why women might have wanted to use fans with such
content. One is self-expression: a woman who appreciated the theme of the
lonely woman might have identified with it or recognized how appealing the
theme might be to her lover. In addition, courtesans had a vested interest in
writing and performing lyrics on the theme, the better to beguile their custom-
ers. Hiding their faces behind a painted fan that depicted a lonely woman
might have enhanced their performance of vulnerability and thereby their de-
sirability, and the clear connections between the painted imagery and themes
of erotic poetry would have been an asset for a courtesan. It is also conceivable
that men gave such fans to signify attachment.32 I speculate that such objects
might have been exchanged at the time of parting or sent in the course of a
long separation.
In keeping with the multivalent nature of images that focus on longing and
heartbreak, one could analyze the lonely figures in these fan paintings as po-
tent metaphors for the loss of political favor33 or as sites for the projections of
men’s feelings. Alternatively, women might have acquired these paintings pre-
cisely because they modeled the idealized feminine image, revealing those at-
tributes that men found most appealing, particularly enduring loyalty even in
the face of suffering.34 Because the fans under discussion engage directly with
ductions of both the image and the inscription, see Shandong Sheng Bowuguan
山东省博物馆, “Fajue Ming Zhu Tan mu jishi 發掘明朱檀墓紀實 [Report on the Exca-
vation of the Ming Tomb of Zhu Tan],” Wenwu 文物 [Cultural Relics], no. 192 (May 1972):
pls. 2, 3.1. The poem is a revised version of a quatrain by poet Liu Chang 劉敞 (1019–68);
Robert E. Harrist Jr., “Ch’ien Hsüan’s Pear Blossoms: The Tradition of Flower Painting and
Poetry from Sung to Yüan,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 22 (1987): 56.
32 Ankeney Weitz has argued that the imagery on a fan with emotional themes was meant
to indicate the feelings of the person bearing it or presenting it as a gift, in “Fan Paintings
in Song Dynasty Material Culture” (paper presented at the 88th Annual Conference of the
College Art Association, New York, 23–26 February 2000).
33 Rouzer, Articulated Ladies, 120–21.

via free access
222 Chapter 4
the theme of a woman’s construction of her image, I suggest that these paint-
ings potentially had greater meaning for a female audience.
The Enclosed Garden

One feature that these three fans share is their representation of private gar-
dens, which, as bounded exteriors, are liminal spaces:35 interior because of
their presumed proximity to the women’s quarters and simultaneously exte-
rior as apparent microcosms of the natural world. Although one might think of
an outdoor garden as a space quite dissimilar from an inner room in the wom-
en’s quarters, in the poetic context a garden was also likely to be regarded as
essentially inner and feminine. Song dynasty lyrics about lovelorn women,
with their references to “inner courtyards” and “lonely gardens,” give the im-
pression that these spaces were set aside for women, where they could spend
contemplative moments. As a cultivated, artificially constructed, domestic
space, the garden was poised in direct contrast with the (masculine) untamed
wilderness.36 Few scholars have addressed the history of Chinese women’s gar-
dens, although one study of Ming gardens raises important questions about
women’s enjoyment of these spaces. These questions include whether women
were permitted to spend time in gardens independently, where the garden fit
into the gendered space of a segregated household, and, most significantly,
whether there were certain types of gardens whose attributes were viewed as
essentially feminine.37 These are critical points of inquiry not only for the
Ming dynasty but also for the Song, not least in the representation of gardens
in paintings of women.
What makes the garden a setting especially well suited to themes of love and
longing is its ability to evoke time38 and the gendering of the natural elements
found within it. The seasonal changes of the garden were believed to parallel
the human life span, alluding to the transience of both youth and beauty. It is
not hard to see why such a setting would be employed in works on the theme of
fleeting love. Certain flowers, trees, rocks, and insects may serve as metaphors
for women and men, and their placement may suggest male-female interac-
35 For a discussion of liminality in ninth- and tenth-century song lyric, see Shields, Crafting
a Collection, 189–90.
36 Miao, “T’ang Frontier Poetry,” 117.
37 Craig Clunas, Fruitful Sites: Garden Culture in Ming Dynasty China (Durham: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 1996), 206.
38 David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames have written of the Chinese garden’s vistas as intrinsic
structures of temporality, meant to evoke memories, in “The Cosmological Setting of Chi-
nese Gardens,” Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes 18, no. 3 (Autumn
1998): 182.

via free access
tion. In the Book of Songs, nubile women are commonly compared to many
types of flowering plants and trees, primarily for their characteristics of beauty
and fertility; this analogy appeared in later works as well, through the Song
dynasty and beyond.39 Garden elements could also be gendered masculine:
bamboo, pine, and flowering plum may all refer to a scholar or man of talent,
because of their perseverance in and endurance of cold weather, a metaphor
for hardship.40 An ornamental garden rock is not only strongly associated with
scholars through its use in scholars’ gardens, but also a metaphor for the ruler
or a court official because its vertical, craggy form refers to a mountain or to
hills.41 Butterflies, attracted to feminine flowers, stand for male lovers.42 Even
the wind, which leaves flowers disheveled and blows open women’s skirts, is
39 For examples from the Book of Songs, see “Taoyao 桃夭 [Tender Peach]” and “Biao you
mei 摽有梅 [Plums Are Falling]” in Zhu, Shijing jizhu, 1.4, 1.9–10; cf. translations in Wat-
son, The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry, 19, 21. One of countless later examples is Xiao
Gang (Liang Jianwendi), “Meihua fu 梅花賦 [Flowering Plum],” the titular poem in Fran-
kel, The Flowering Plum and the Palace Lady, 1–3.
40 In painting, these three plants are sometimes shown together, as in Zhao Mengjian 趙孟
堅 (fl. ca. 1226–90), Three Friends of the Cold Season (Suihan san you 歲寒三友), Song
dynasty, National Palace Museum (VA2f), Taipei; reproduced in Guoli Gugong Bowuyuan
and Guoli Zhongyang Bowuyuan 國立故宮博物院、國立中央博物院, Gugong ming-
hua sanbai zhong 故宮名畫三百種 [Three Hundred Masterpieces of Chinese Painting in
the Palace Museum], 6 vols. (Taichung, Taiwan: Guoli Gugong, Zhongyang Bowuyuan
gongtong lishihui, 1959), 131.
41 On garden rocks and the literati in the Northern Song, see Xiaoshan Yang, Metamorphosis
of the Private Sphere: Gardens and Objects in Tang–Song Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., and
London: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003), 118–48. Evidence for the garden rock as a
referent for a mountain is found in Kong Chuan 孔傳, “Xu 序 [Preface],” in Du Wan 杜綰,
Yunlin shipu 雲林石譜 [Stone Compendium of Cloudy Forest] (ca. 1127–32; reprint, Taipei:
Yiwen yinshuguan, 1966), 1a–2a; see the translation by John Hay, Kernels of Energy, Bones
of Earth: The Rock in Chinese Art (New York: China House Gallery, China Institute in Amer-
ica, 1985), 37–38. Stephen Little discusses this passage in Spirit Stones of China: The Ian
and Susan Wilson Collection of Chinese Stones, Paintings, and Related Scholars’ Objects
(Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1999), 16. The mountains and hills as metaphor for the
ruler and his court officials is found in Guo Xi and Guo Si 郭熙、郭思, Linquan gaozhi 林
泉高致 [The Lofty Message of Forests and Streams], in Zhongguo hualun leibian 中國畫
論類編 [Categorized Discussions of Chinese Paintings], ed. Yu Kun 俞崑 [Yu Jianhua 俞劍
華] (reprint, Taipei: Huazheng shuju, 1984), 1:635, 642; cf. translations in Bush and Shih,
Early Chinese Texts on Painting, 153, 178.
42 See the Song dynasty tune title “Die lian hua [Butterflies Love Flowers].”

via free access
224 Chapter 4
gendered masculine.43 The elements of the garden setting are a rich source of
meaning.
In the gardens represented in A Lady at Her Dressing Table, Embroidered
Cage, Morning Mirror, and A Lady Watching a Maid with a Parrot, barriers are
emphasized: they are clearly enclosed. An enclosed garden, in juxtaposing
cultivated space and untrammeled landscape,44 is especially appropriate as a
setting for longing due to the heightened awareness of such a space as simul
taneously inner/feminine and outer/masculine. The tension between the two
states is seen in the early poem “Please, Zhongzi” (Jiang Zhongzi 將仲子) from
the Book of Songs: the barriers surrounding village, house, and garden assume
metaphorical significance. The poem reads:
Please, Zhongzi,
don’t trespass in my village,
don’t snap the willow trees.
Do you think I care about them?
It’s that I respect my father and mother.
I could love you, Zhong,
but what my parents say
I should respect.
Please, Zhongzi,
don’t leap over my wall,
don’t break my mulberry trees.
It’s that I respect my older brothers.
but what my brothers say
I should respect.
Please, Zhongzi,
don’t steal into my garden,
don’t break my sandalwood trees.
I’m just afraid of people’s gossip.
43 Shen Yue, “Hui pu lin chunfeng 會圃臨春風 [Encountering the Spring Wind in a
Garden],” YTXY, 9.19a–20a; cf. translation in Birrell, New Songs from a Jade Terrace, 249–51.
See also Empress Yang Meizi’s couplet for Apricot Blossoms, cited above.
44 Hall and Ames, “The Cosmological Setting of Chinese Gardens,” 175.

via free access

but the gossip of others
is not to be taken lightly.
將仲子兮，無踰我里，無折我樹杞。豈敢愛之，畏我父母。仲可懷
也，父母之言，亦可畏也。
將仲子兮，無踰我墻，無折我樹桑。豈敢愛之，畏我諸兄。仲可懷
也，諸兄之言，亦可畏也。
將仲子兮，無踰我園，無折我樹檀。豈敢愛之，畏人之多言。仲可懷
也，人之多言，亦可畏也。45
The enclosures in these verses are clearly metaphors for the girl’s chastity, and
Zhongzi seems eager to penetrate the barriers separating them, at least in her
telling. More importantly, the poem explicitly identifies the girl’s particular dif-
ficulty: remaining true to her own inclinations while simultaneously negotiat-
ing an appropriate public image. The enclosed spaces described here are apt
images for the dilemma she faces.
The Chinese enclosed garden has a European counterpart in medieval lit-
erature and art: the hortus conclusus, which is also frequently associated with
representations of love relationships.46 The associations of the hortus conclu-
sus with chastity help to make it a metaphor for an unattainable object of de-
sire, and the sense of boundaries is crucial to the trope.47 But the European
hortus conclusus differs from the Chinese enclosed garden in its exaltation of
its female occupant and its frequent appearance in works on a religious theme.48
The bounded garden described in palace-style poetry and song lyric com-
monly represents lost love. It is a space within which a solitary female figure
waits for someone to return, usually entirely preoccupied with her longing (al-
45 Zhu, Shijing jizhu, 3.39–40; cf. translation by Watson, The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry,
26–27.
46 The hortus conclusus makes an early and possibly allegorical appearance in the “Song of
Solomon”; Stanley Stewart, The Enclosed Garden: The Tradition and the Image in Seven
teenth-Century Poetry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), 35–40; cf. Song of
Sol. 4:12 RSV.
47 Gail Finney, The Counterfeit Idyll: The Garden Ideal and Social Reality in Nineteenth-Cen-
tury Fiction, vol. 81 of Studien zur deutschen Literatur (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1984),
17–18; Stewart, The Enclosed Garden, 31–45; Michael Niedermeier, “‘Strolling under Palm
Trees’: Gardens—Love—Sexuality,” trans. Michael and Louise Davidson-Schmich, Jour-
nal of Garden History 17, no. 3 (Autumn 1997): 187–88.
48 I discuss some aspects of the differences in Blanchard, “Lonely Women and the Absent
Man,” 37–38.

via free access
226 Chapter 4
though A Lady Watching a Maid with a Parrot, which shows the concubine
Meifei with books, suggests that she could find other pursuits worthy of her
time). Furthermore, the woman who waits within the garden walls is the one
who is desirous, with her longing focused outward. Within the fictive space of
the poem or painting, she is no one’s object of desire. (The girl of “Please,
Zhongzi” is an earlier construction, significantly different from her counter-
part in palace-style poetry and song lyrics.) Finally, the Chinese garden places
greater emphasis on the passage of time,49 with the seasonal cycle of the gar-
den’s natural elements prodding the lonely woman to mark the passage of time
in her own body. The enclosures of the garden prevent her from pursuing her
lover, even as she concentrates on what may befall him beyond its walls.
By the Song dynasty, a representation of a bounded garden seems to be ex-
clusively associated with themes of longing. The female figure caught within,
unable or unwilling to move beyond the garden walls, is presented as passive
and helpless, in stark contrast with her absent, traveling lover, yet because of
its dual nature the enclosed garden encompasses the woman as well as her
memories and imaginings of the man. In Chinese gardens, an enclosing wall is
generally meant to emphasize a space’s center,50 yet, in works that deal with
longing, a sense of the boundaries between inner and outer is essential.51
In paintings of lonely women, the visual cues that indicate an enclosed gar-
den can be essential to understanding this friction between inner and outer. In
A Lady at Her Dressing Table, the small space represented is clearly bounded: a
carved balustrade marks the garden’s perimeter. The wave screen affords the
lady a measure of privacy as she gazes upon her reflection52 and enhances the
sense of enclosure, serving as a painted wall. Even the potted plants echo this
theme.
The sense of enclosure is also crucial in Embroidered Cage, Morning Mirror.53
The word “cage” in the English title comes from a variant character (long 籠)
and heightens the sense that the central figure is confined to this space. The
term usually refers to a luxurious boudoir or a lattice (long 櫳, the character
used in the Chinese title) used to mark a space’s boundaries,54 neither of which
49 Stewart discusses several examples of enclosed gardens that reflect the passage of time in
“Time,” Chapter 4 in The Enclosed Garden, 97–149.
50 Hall and Ames, “The Cosmological Setting of Chinese Gardens,” 175.
52 Sarah Handler, “The Chinese Screen: Movable Walls to Divide, Enhance, and Beautify,”
Journal of the Classical Chinese Furniture Society 3, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 16.
53 I discuss this idea in Blanchard, “Lonely Women and the Absent Man,” 37.
54 Ellen Johnston Laing discusses the cage as a trope for the boudoir in “Chinese Palace-Style
Poetry,” 288. Birrell discusses the use of the lattice in palace-style poetry in “Erotic Decor,”
124–32.

via free access
is evident in this painting. The blue silk gauze stretched over a frame, however,
evokes a wall, and stones set in the ground suggest a paved border.55 The land-
scape screen painted with mountains and rivers and thus representing the
outer wilderness emphasizes that this garden is, by contrast, both an interior
and an exterior space.
A Lady Watching a Maid with a Parrot, for its part, provides an example of
what a “cage” was supposed to look like. The setting of this scene is a garden
adjacent to a building, with a lattice window visible at upper left. A low balus-
trade wends through the space, and a translucent screen stands behind the
lady seated at the table. While the angle of the balustrade as it approaches the
right edge of the composition might give the impression that the female figure
in this picture sits outside the enclosure, not within it, I surmise that it is the
area in front of the balustrade that is supposed to be enclosed. (The balustrade
in A Lady at Her Dressing Table is similarly drawn.) The presence of the parrot,
which lives its life in a cage, underscores the idea of confinement.56 Again, the
theme of the lonely woman is aptly conveyed by the sense of an enclosed exte-
rior space.
Mirrors, Makeup, Interiority, and Performing Femininity

The image of a woman looking into a mirror and/or applying makeup provided
another way of showing the connections between interiority and surface. The
trope draws its meaning from two concepts: the early equation of examining
and improving one’s outward appearance with assessing and cultivating one’s
inner character, and the idea that feelings were manifested upon the face.
Thus, in poetry and painting, the interiority of a female figure who peers into a
mirror should be understood as fully exposed. Although mirrors and makeup
are closely intertwined tropes, they have rather different rhetorical functions.
Chinese philosophers conceived of the mirror as a tool for self-awareness,
associating mirrors with wisdom and virtue in early texts. The Zhuangzi 莊子
uses the mirror as a metaphor for the heart of a wise man (shengren 聖人,
“sage,” or zhiren 至人, “perfected man”).57 Similarly, the writings of Han Fei
55 Mary H. Fong sees these stones set in the ground as a garden path, a metaphor for a man
on the road, in “Images of Women,” 24.
56 Lee, Empresses, Art, and Agency, 106.
57 Bernhard Karlgren, “Early Chinese Mirror Inscriptions,” Bulletin of the Museum of Far
Eastern Antiquities, no. 6 (1934): 12; cf. the “Yingdiwang 應帝王 [Responses for Emperors
and Kings]” and “Tiandao 天道 [The Way of Heaven]” chapters of Zhuangzi, Xinyi
Zhuangzi duben 新譯莊子讀本 [New Interpretations of Zhuangzi] (Taipei: Sanmin shuju,
1974), 121, 169. The Yingdiwang chapter is the seventh “inner chapter” of the Zhuangzi and
as such likely dates to the late fourth century bce, whereas the Tiandao chapter (the

via free access
228 Chapter 4
韓非 (ca. 280–ca. 233 bce), collected in the Han Fei zi 韓非子, compare a mirror
to “right principles,” for both provide the capacity for critical self-examination.58
Because the mirror was closely tied to notions of self-awareness,59 examples of
shinü hua that take advantage of this trope might promote feminine virtue.
Mirrors also reveal a figure’s interiority. A well-known poem from the Book
of Songs, “Cypress Boat” (Bo zhou 柏舟), includes the following line: “My heart
is not a mirror, / you can’t just peer into it!” (我心匪鑒，不可以茹。)60 Song
dynasty poets and painters, however, employed a woman’s mirror as a rhetori-
cal device that could perfectly reflect her heart/mind, manifested superficially
as expression and gesture. An early inscription upon a mirror reads: “The bright
mirror reflects the self and knows people’s feelings” (昭兒明鏡知人請).61 In
some of the most sophisticated poems from New Songs from a Jade Terrace,
poets employed the mirror image to reveal a female persona’s awareness of her
inner state.62 By the tenth century there was a long history of poetry concern-
ing the potential of mirrors to reveal emotion. While a reader might under-
stand a figure’s feelings to serve as metaphors for other elements of her
interiority, such as her character, longing and desire were becoming gendered
as feminine, and so they were also an important aspect of the idealized wom-
an’s image.
Because the representation of feelings is so important in erotic poetry, the
mirror is a common trope there, but in addition, textual evidence from the
Tang dynasty and earlier indicates that bronze mirrors sometimes functioned
as tokens of a couple’s attachment. Inscriptions upon mirrors include phrases
such as these: “May we forever not forget each other” (長毋相忘), “The beauty
and the king will never forget their hearts’ longings” (美人大王，心思毋忘),
and “[…] may husband and wife enjoy each other; may they day by day love
thirteenth) dates between 180 bce and the fourth century ce; Loewe, Early Chinese Texts,
56–57.
58 Karlgren, “Early Chinese Mirror Inscriptions,” 13; for more on the Han Fei zi, see Loewe,
Early Chinese Texts, 115–17.
59 Wu Hung discusses more evidence of this idea in early texts in “The Admonitions Scroll
Revisited: Iconology, Narratology, Style, Dating,” in McCausland, Gu Kaizhi and the Admo-
nitions Scroll, 91.
60 Translated by Watson, The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry, 22–23; Zhu, Shijing jizhu, 2.13.
61 Inscription 87 in Karlgren, “Early Chinese Mirror Inscriptions,” 26, 74. Karlgren notes that
qing 請 is a variant character for qing 情.
62 Birrell, “The Dusty Mirror,” 58. Three examples are Wang Rong 王融 (468–94), “Guyi er
shou 古意二首 [Two Poems on a Classic Theme, 1/2]”; Xiao Gang (Liang Jianwendi), “Qie
boming pian shi yun 妾薄命篇十韻 [My Sad Fate, Ten Rhymes]”; and idem., “Ni gu 擬古
[After a Classic],” YTXY, 4.14a, 7.7b–8b, and 9.26a; cf. translations in Birrell, New Songs
from a Jade Terrace, 125, 188–89, 256–57.

via free access
each other better” (夫婦相喜，日益親善).63 According to poetry, men gave

mirrors to women as tokens of affection as early as the Han dynasty and con-
tinuing into the Southern Dynasties; this sort of exchange seems especially as-
sociated with marriage.64 In the Southern Dynasties and the Tang dynasty,
poets capitalized on the mirror’s role as a love token by using it as a prop in
poems about women’s unhappy feelings about love. Thus song lyrics describe
a woman waiting for her lover to return as she faces her mirror, or, more poi-
gnantly, clasping her mirror to her body as she weeps.65 In both cases the
reader can imagine the women pining for the men who presented them with
these gifts. And in one poem, a female musician who changes households
keeps a mirror as a reminder of her former love.66
With the mirror understood as a tangible reminder of the attachment be-
tween a man and a woman, it became possible to use it to signal the status of
a heteroerotic relationship. The female persona in question might be either a
courtesan (who has fallen for a client she entertained only once, or who en-
joys an ongoing but sporadic relationship with her beloved, interrupted by
visits from other clients) or a wife (with a traveling or otherwise wandering
husband).67 The mirror serves as a metaphor for the state of her relationship or
as a metonym for her feelings about her lover. This presupposed a connection
63 Inscriptions 43, 56, and 162 in Karlgren, “Early Chinese Mirror Inscriptions,” 21, 49, 73, 76.
The translations are Karlgren’s with modifications.
64 Xin Yannian 辛延年 (fl. 2nd cent.), “Yulin lang shi 羽林郎詩 [The Imperial Guards Offi-
cer]”; Qin Jia 秦嘉 (fl. ca. 147), “Zeng fu shi san shou 贈婦詩三首 [To My Wife, Three
Poems, 3/3]”; Shen Yue, “Shaonian xinhun wei zhi yong 少年新婚為之詠 [For a Newly
Married Youth]”; Shi Baoyue 釋寶月 (fl. late 5th cent.), “Xing lu nan 行路難 [The Road Is
Hard],” YTXY, 1.13b–14b, 1.17b–18a, 5.4b–5b; 9.17b; cf. translations in Birrell, New Songs from
a Jade Terrace, 42, 46, 137–38, 247.
65 “Puquan si zhong yi jiao xiu xing, yibaisanshisi shou 普勸四眾依教修行一百三十四首
[Universally Exhorting the Four Peoples to Rely on Teachings to Enter Practice, 134
poems],” Tune: “Shi’er shi 十二時 [The Twelfth Hour, 34/134],” Dunhuang nos. P. 2054, P.
2714, P. 3087, P. 3286, DHGC, 3:6.1611. Sun Guangxian 孫光憲 (898?–968), Tune: “Huanxi
sha [4/9],” in Zhao Chongzuo 趙崇祚, comp., Xinyi “Huajian ji” 新譯花閒集 [New Inter-
pretation of “Among the Flowers,” hereafter abbreviated as HJJ], ed. Zhu Hengfu 朱恆夫
(Taipei: Sanmin shuju, 1998), 388; cf. translation in Fusek, Among the Flowers, 143.
66 Liu Yuxi 劉禹錫, “Tainiang ge 泰娘歌 [Song of Tainiang],” QTS, 6:356.3996–97; cf. transla-
tion by Daniel Bryant in Liu and Lo, Sunflower Splendor, 197–99.
67 Xiao Yan (Liang Wudi), “Ni ‘Mingyue zhao gaolou’ 擬明月照高樓 [After ‘The Bright
Moon Shines on the High Tower’]”; and Xiao Lun 蕭綸 (507–51) [Shaoling Wang 邵陵王],
“Dai ‘Qiu Hu fu guiyuan’ 代秋胡婦閨怨 [After ‘The Bedroom Resentment of Qiu Hu’s
Wife’],” YTXY, 7.2a–b, 7.20b; cf. translations in Birrell, New Songs from a Jade Terrace, 183,
201.

via free access
230 Chapter 4
between a woman’s self-adornment and her meetings with a man. A woman

applying makeup and arranging her hair would naturally consult her mirror
reflection,68 and she might particularly take pains with her appearance if she
had arranged a rendezvous with a lover; a woman with no such plans had no
reason to do so (at least, in poets’ imaginations). An abandoned woman might
ignore her mirror for months or years, ceasing to polish it, leaving it covered,
or letting it lie cold.69
Thus, in erotic poetry and painting, images of women looking into mirrors
are commonly paired with the application of makeup.70 Artificially enhanced
beauty was a defining attribute of aristocratic personae in particular. This was
the case as early as the Southern Dynasties, as the poems of New Songs from a
Jade Terrace testify. One poet devotes his verse to a catalogue of a desirable
woman’s embellishments: her face is a surface for the painting of peach-pink
rouge and grass-green brow powder, her body an armature for the draping of
thin silk skirts and light gauze sleeves. Another rhapsodizes over the refined
appearance of a woman to whom he longs to give a mirror: her waist with its
embroidered sash, her delicately shod “jade” feet, her jeweled hairpins and
brooches, her cloud-like hair, her pale skin, and especially her brow powder
and lipstick.71 In Song poetry and painting, this delight in the adornments
68 Mirrors were already being used for this purpose in the late Zhou and Han dynasties;
W.T. Chase and Ursula Martius Franklin, “Early Chinese Black Mirrors and Pattern-Etched
Weapons,” Ars Orientalis 11 (1979): 240–41.
69 For dusty mirrors, see Xu Gan 徐幹 (171–218), “Shi si 室思 [Bedroom Longing]”; idem.,
“Qing shi 情詩 [Feelings]”; Jiang Yan 江淹 (444–505), “Zhang Sikong liqing 張司空離情
[Zhang Sikong’s Feelings on Parting]”; and Shen Yue, “Hui pu lin chunfeng,” YTXY, 1.20.b–
21b, 1.21b–22a, 5.1b–2a, 9.19a–20a; cf. translations in Birrell, New Songs from a Jade Terrace,
49–50, 51, 134–35, 249–51. See also Gu Xiong, Tune: “Jiuquan zi 酒泉子 [Song of the Wine
Spring, 1/7],” and idem., Tune: “Xia fang yuan,” HJJ, 356, 364; cf. translations in Fusek,
Among the Flowers, 134, 136–37. For covered mirrors, see Bao Zhao, “Ni gu,” and Xiao Ji 蕭
紀 (508–53) [Wuling Wang 武陵王], “Xiaosi 曉思 [Dawn Longings],” YTXY, 4.7b–8a,
7.23a; cf. translations in Birrell, New Songs from a Jade Terrace, 118, 204. See also Gu Xiong,
Tune: “He chuan [1/3]” and idem., Tune: “Jiuquan zi [5/7]”; Sun Guangxian, Tune: “Lin
jiang xian [1/2]” and idem., Tune: “Qing ping yue [1/2],” HJJ, 340, 360, 411–12, 415; cf. transla-
tions in Fusek, Among the Flowers, 128, 135, 151, 153. For stained and cold mirrors, see Liu
Shuo 劉鑠 (431–53), “Dai ‘Xingxing zhong xingxing’ 代行行重行行 [After ‘On and On
Forever’]”; Liu Huan 劉緩 (ca. 549), “Hangui 寒閨 [Cold Bedroom]”; and Bao Zhao, “Xing
lu nan si shou 行路難四首 [The Road Is Hard, Four Poems, 1/4],” YTXY, 3.17a–b, 8.12a–b,
9.16a–b; cf. translations by Birrell, New Songs from a Jade Terrace, 63, 220, 246.
70 Birrell, “The Dusty Mirror,” 46.
71 Shi Rongtai 施榮泰 (fl. late 5th cent.), “Za shi 雜詩 [Miscellaneous Poem]”; and Shen Yue,
“Shaonian xinhun wei zhi yong,” YTXY, 4.19b, 5.4b–5b; cf. translations in Birrell, New Songs
from a Jade Terrace, 131, 137–38.

via free access
available to women would persist. References to makeup, especially to expres-

sive brows or tear-stained rouge, are ubiquitous in song lyrics of the period,
and in paintings, female figures, whether courtesans or palace ladies, wear cos-
metics in part as a marker of their status. Night Revels of Han Xizai (figs. 9.1–
9.5), for example, shows courtesans with whitened faces, accentuating the
pallor of a woman who does not labor outdoors. In the Palace (figs. 1.1–4.2) ac-
centuates the reddened cheeks and lips of the imperial concubines, suggesting
the rosy flush of a sexually aroused woman.
Makeup has a different rhetorical function than the mirror: where the mir-
ror is a trope for self-awareness, makeup emphasizes the construction and per-
formance of femininity, as an early poem about cross-dressing demonstrates.
The “Song of Mulan” (Mulan shi 木蘭詩), dating to the fifth or sixth century,
relates the story of a young woman, Hua Mulan 花木蘭, who passes as a man
in order to take her father’s place in the army. Marjorie Garber has discussed
transvestite figures as indicative of the disruption of cultural boundaries, not
simply crossing between the categories male/female but others as well;72 if
that logic can be applied to this Chinese example, the figure of Mulan calls into
question the border between inner and outer. To signal her successful perfor-
mance of both femininity and masculinity, the poet refers to gendered dress,
adornments, and activities. At the beginning of the poem, Mulan engages in
one form of womanly work, weaving. But the poet confounds the expectation
that longing for someone is a quintessentially feminine trait:
Ask her whom she’s longing for!

Ask her whom she’s thinking of!
She’s longing for no one at all,
She’s thinking of no one special.
問女何所思，問女何所憶。女亦無所思，女亦無所憶。73
Longing for no one marks Mulan as an atypical young woman, preparing the
reader for her decision to enlist in the army. To enact a man’s role, she outfits
herself in masculine cloaks and acquires a horseman’s gear. Following a suc-
cessful campaign, she requests that the emperor permit her to return to her
village with her fellow soldiers. After arriving home—apparently bypassing
her parents, sister, and brother, who all have advance notice of her arrival and
72 Garber, Vested Interests, 16.

73 Translated by William H. Nienhauser in Liu and Lo, Sunflower Splendor, 77; “Mulan shi er
shou 木蘭詩二首 [Song of Mulan, 1/2],” YFSJ, 2:25.373–74.

via free access
232 Chapter 4
turn out to greet her—she disappears into her former bedroom, dresses in
feminine attire, styles her hair, and makes up her face with pollen. (One com-
ponent of makeup for fashionable women from the sixth century through the
Tang dynasty was the application of powder to their foreheads, especially yel-
low powder or pollen,74 significant for its association with the sexual reproduc-
tion of plants.) Afterward, Mulan emerges to greet her comrades. According to
the tale, her appearance astonished her fellow soldiers, who had never sus-
pected over the course of twelve years that she was female. The poem ends
with a comment on the difficulty of distinguishing between the sexes:
The hare draws in his feet to sit,

His mate has eyes that gleam,
But when the two run side by side,
How much alike they seem!
雄兔腳撲朔，雌兔眼迷離。兩兔傍地走，安能辨我是雄雌。75
The unknown poet overtly treats gender as mutable and wholly constructed.
Mulan’s discard of feminine behaviors and assumption of masculine attributes
allow her to pass as a man; reversing this equation, on the other hand, reveals
her as a woman.
Erotic poems that describe women’s makeup thus emphasize their feminin-
ity, and those that focus on its application accentuate the performative aspect
of gender. At the same time, despite its concern with the enhancement of sur-
face, this construction of femininity is usually presented as a matter for the
inner quarters. In the Southern Song, for example, the inner quarters was the
site for footbinding, an intimate practice involving mothers and daughters;
judging from pictorial evidence, a woman did not display bound feet but hid
them under long skirts.76 In poetry, the application of cosmetics similarly
takes place in secluded bedrooms or gardens, and for the most part, a made-up
woman is not seen by outsiders, unless she is a courtesan. Wearing cosmetics,
despite its apparently superficial nature, is an “inner” behavior, and when a
74 Edward H. Schafer, “The Early History of Lead Pigments and Cosmetics in China,” T’oung
Pao 44, no. 4–5 (1956): 419; Zhu Renxing 朱仁星, “Dang chuang li yunbin, dui jing tie
huahuang 當窗理雲鬢，對鏡貼花黃 [At the Window, Arranging a Cloud Coiffure; /
Facing the Mirror and Applying Pollen],” in Guoli Gugong Bowuyuan, Wenwu guanghua
文物光華 [Highlights of Cultural Relics] (Taipei: Guoli Gugong Bowuyuan, 1990), 4:54.
75 Translated by William H. Nienhauser in Liu and Lo, Sunflower Splendor, 80; “Mulan shi
ershou [1/2],” YFSJ, 2:25.373–74.
76 Ebrey, The Inner Quarters, 37–43.

via free access
male reader gains access to an image of a female persona making up her face,
the image becomes more titillating because of the sense of voyeurism involved.
Perhaps for this reason, men drew pleasure from the makeup itself. The infa-
mous account of Zhang Chang, whose penchant for painting his wife’s eye-
brows earned him an imperial reprimand, reveals that it was considered
inappropriate for a man to concern himself with something so “inner.” His
story is recalled in a Southern Dynasties poem by Liu Xiaowei 劉孝威 (d. 548),
which describes a faithful husband longing to return to his wife, a woman he
remembers as careworn and haggard. In the poem, written as a letter to her, he
encourages her to refresh her makeup in preparation for his arrival but begs
that she leave the painting of her eyebrows to him.77 Poems such as these ex-
plicitly acknowledge the construction of feminine beauty as a masquerade at
which men may assist, through fantasy, word, or deed.78
In the Song dynasty, the conservative historian Sima Guang commented in
Precepts for Family Life (Jiafan 家範),
It is said that for a wife to be virtuous, she needs no bright talent nor to be
extraordinary in any way. A wife’s speech need not be eloquent or lyrical.
A wife’s face need not be beautifully made up. A wife’s achievements
need not be so clever as to surpass those of men.
夫云，婦德不必才明絕異也。婦言不必辯口利辭也。婦容不必顏色美
麗也。婦功不必功巧過人也。79
This passage draws a clear parallel between the application of makeup and
other forms of self-cultivation. Not all shared the sanctimonious view that at-
tempts to refine themselves would distract women from matters of greater im-
port, however. Centuries beforehand, a didactic poem by Zhang Hua 張華
(232–300), “Admonitions of the Instructress” (Nüshi zhen 女史箴), suggested
that self-adornment and cultivating one’s character are analogous:
All people know how to adorn their faces

but not how to refine their characters.
An unrefined character
77 Liu Xiaowei, “Ruo xian yujian ren zhi shuai’er ji fu 鄀縣遇見人織率爾寄婦 [I Saw Some-
one Weaving in Ruo County and Spontaneously Sent This to My Wife],” YTXY, 8.9b–10a; cf.
translation in Birrell, New Songs from a Jade Terrace, 217–18.
78 I am grateful to Patricia Simons for this suggestion.
79 Sima Guang, Jiafan, 6.594.

via free access
234 Chapter 4
may deviate from what is correct.

Sculpt it and polish it,
and one could study to be a sage.
人咸知飾其容，而莫知飾其性。性之不飾，或愆禮正。斧之藻之，克
念作聖。80
Significantly, the painting of the same title once attributed to Gu Kaizhi illus-
trates these lines with a scene of palace women examining their mirror reflec-
tions (fig. 16). One lady smiles with satisfaction at her reflection in the round
mirror she holds, raising her other hand to pat her hair; another lady faces a
mirror mounted on a stand, sitting patiently with her arms in her sleeves, while
a third woman dresses her hair. Cosmetic boxes litter the floor about them.
With the lines from Zhang Hua’s poem inscribed beside these women on the
scroll, the painter seems to imply that these women, who turn a critical eye to
outward appearances, should be equally concerned with their behavior and
character—which the mirror also has the capacity to reveal. A painting such as
this, which takes up a woman’s ideal comportment and uses mirrors to signal
its educational function, may be referenced even in paintings based on erotic
poetry that use the mirror to suggest a woman’s longing.
In other Song dynasty circles, a woman’s concern for how a man viewed her
was seen as a natural reflection of her attachment to him. When Su Shi grieved
for his first wife in the poem titled “My Wife, Ms. Wang, Died First, So I Wrote
This Lyric in Mourning” (Gong zhi furen Wang shi xian zu, wei ci ci, gai daowang
ye 公之夫人王氏先卒，味此詞，蓋悼亡也), he remembered her applying her
makeup:
Ten years have widened the gulf between living and dead.
I don’t think about it,
but it’s hard to forget.
A thousand miles away lies the solitary grave,
and I have nowhere to speak of my loneliness.
Even if we met you wouldn’t recognize me,
the dust covering my face,
my hair like frost.
80 Zhang Hua, “Nüshi zhen,” in Xiao and Hu, Wen xuan, 56.2a. For translations of the full
poem, see Shih, “Poetry Illustration and the Works of Ku K’ai-chih,” 10–12; “Text and Trans-
lation of Zhang Hua’s Poem, ‘Admonitions of the Instructress to the Court Ladies’ (‘Nüshi
zhen’),” in McCausland, Gu Kaizhi and the Admonitions Scroll, 15–17.

via free access
Figure 16 Detail of self-adornment scene from Admonitions of the Court Instructress to the
Palace Ladies. After Gu Kaizhi (ca. 345–406), possibly 5th–7th century; handscroll,
ink and color on silk, 24.4 × 343.8 cm. The British Museum, London.

via free access
236 Chapter 4
In a night’s lonely dream I suddenly returned home.

At the little room’s window
you were combing your hair, applying makeup.
We gazed at each other without a word,
only a thousand streams of tears.
Year after year I know the heartbreak of that place,
the moonlit nights,
the ridge of young pines.
十年生死兩茫茫。不思量。自難忘。千里孤墳，無處話淒涼。縱使相
逢應不識，塵滿面，鬢如霜。
夜來幽夢忽還鄉。小軒窗。正梳妝。相顧無言，惟有淚千行。料得年
年斷腸處，明月夜，短松岡。81
This lyric is unusual in part for its emphasis on the male speaker’s emotions. Su
Shi writes of his loneliness, using characters with that connotation to describe
the grave, his feelings, and his dream. But he also attends to appearances, both
his own and his late wife’s. In the last three lines of the first stanza, he specu-
lates about a reunion that could only occur in a dream, noting how the years
since her death have aged him. His vision of her at her makeup stand suggests
that her loveliness is an integral part of the poet’s idealization of her memory.
She is, in his mind, forever young and beautiful, and the stark contrast with his
own deteriorating appearance helps to emphasize the passage of time since
her death, underscoring Su Shi’s abiding love for her.
The ability of makeup to heighten a woman’s desirability is due only in part
to its accentuation of her femininity and enhancement of her beauty: another
important function of makeup is its capacity for expressing her longing. A
woman’s need to enhance her beauty and the ephemeral qualities of the cos-
metics themselves reflect both the passage of time and the vicissitudes of
male-female relationships, as seen in poems of both the Southern Dynasties
and the Tang dynasty. In these works, a female persona could apply cosmetics
to delight her lover, but if he left she might become obsessed with self-adorn-
ment, as if wishing for him to return. In one poem, the persona depends on
81 Su Shi, “Gong zhi furen Wang shi xian zu, wei ci ci, gai daowang ye,” Tune: “Jiang shenzi
[9/9],” QSC, 1:300. My translation owes a debt to that of Burton Watson in The Columbia
Book of Chinese Poetry, 365 (under the title “Song of River City”); I have only made his
excellent translation more literal.

via free access
makeup to hold her lover.82 More often, her attempts to call him back remain
futile: as an aging or abandoned woman, or as a courtesan with little claim on
him, she could not realistically expect to receive her beloved’s favor again.83
Her pains to make herself alluring could make her a pathetic figure, especially
if tears subsequently streaked her makeup.84 For the most part, however, poets
write of the solitary female persona who no longer attends to her makeup,
whether her male lover had abandoned her long before or had only recently
departed.85 Instead, she is described as sitting disconsolately in front of her
mirror, reflecting on the uselessness of applying cosmetics and deliberately re-
nouncing her rouge or brow powder.86 Such neglect of her appearance signi-
fied the end of both her relationship and her desirability.
82 Wang Xun 王訓 (511–36), “Fenghe shuai’er you yong 奉和率爾有詠 [Spontaneous Song,
Respectfully Submitted to the Emperor, Matching the Rhymes of His Poem],” YTXY, 8.7a;
cf. translation in Birrell, New Songs from a Jade Terrace, 214.
83 For poems about the aging woman, see Fei Chang, “Xing lu nan er shou 行路難二首 [The
Road Is Hard, Two Poems],” YTXY, 9.23a–b; cf. translation in Birrell, New Songs from a Jade
Terrace, 254; and Wen Tingyun 温庭筠 (812?–66?), Tune: “Pusa man 菩薩蠻 [Deva-Like
Barbarian, 7/14],” HJJ, 14–15; cf. translation in Fusek, Among the Flowers, 38–39. For poems
about the abandoned woman, see Liu Lingxian 劉令嫻 (late fifth century to early sixth
century), “Da wai shi er shou 答外詩二首 [Replying to the One Away, Two Poems, 1/2],”
and Ms. Liu 劉氏 (wife of Wang Shuying 王叔英, fl. late fifth–early sixth century),
“Zengda yi shou 贈答一首 [Reply, One Poem],” YTXY, 6.16b and 9.30a–b; cf. translations
in Birrell, New Songs from a Jade Terrace, 178, 262. See also Gu Xiong 顧夐 (fl. ca. 933),
Tune: “Yu meiren [2/6]”; idem., Tune: “Yulou chun 玉樓春 [Spring at the Jade Tower,
3/4]”; and Li Xun 李珣 (855?–930?), Tune: “Lin jiang xian [2/2],” HJJ, 335, 348, 514; cf. trans-
lations in Fusek, Among the Flowers, 126, 131, 188. For a poem about a courtesan, see Xiao
Gang (Liang Jianwendi), “Yan’ge pian shiba yun 艷歌篇十八韻 [Song of Yan, Eighteen
Rhymes, 1/3],” YTXY, 7.5b–6b; cf. translation in Birrell, New Songs from a Jade Terrace, 187–
88.
84 Gu Xiong, Tune: “Yulou chun [4/4],” HJJ, 349; cf. translation in Fusek, Among the Flowers,
131. See also “Fengqing wenda er shou 風情問答二首 [Responding with Feeling, Two
Poems],” Tune: “Nan gezi 南歌子 [Song of the South],” Dunhuang no. P. 3836, DHGC,
2:3.638; cf. translations by Marsha Wagner in The Lotus Boat, 99–100, and by Maija Bell
Samei in Gendered Persona and Poetic Voice, 107–108.
85 Wang Sengru, “Chungui you yuan 春閨有怨 [Spring Bedroom Resentment]” and Xiao
Gang (Liang Jianwendi), “Qiugui yesi 秋閨夜思 [Night Thoughts in an Autumn Bed-
room],” YTXY, 6.7b, 7.14a–b; cf. translations in Birrell, New Songs from a Jade Terrace, 167,
194. Wen Tingyun, Tune: “Pusa man [12/14],” HJJ, 21; cf. translations in Fusek, Among the
Flowers, 40; and Wagner, The Lotus Boat, 149.
86 Xiao Gang (Liang Jianwendi), “Dongxiao 冬曉 [Winter Dawn],” YTXY, 7.12a; cf. translation
in Birrell, New Songs from a Jade Terrace, 192. “You dang jing nian 遊蕩經年 [Years of Dis-
sipated Wandering],” Tune: “Zhu zhizi 竹枝子 [Bamboo Branch],” Dunhuang no. S. 1441,

via free access
238 Chapter 4
Related to the wishful application of cosmetics was an unhappy woman’s lit-

eral writing of longing upon her brow, in willow-branch or mountain makeup,
a phenomenon found in Tang, Five Dynasties, and Song poetry. Describing a
female persona painting her eyebrows green87 to resemble willow branches or
mountains represented a different level of signification altogether. In a sense,
her face became an expanse of silk or paper, upon which the poet drew evoca-
tive pictures.
The landscape elements thus evoked were well-established metaphors in
their own right. Willow branches already connoted the separation of friends or
lovers, and willow-branch brows on female personae suggested their longings
for beloved travelers.88 Even more common than willow-branch brows, though,
were mountain brows, resembling another landscape feature that could evoke
thoughts of men’s travel. High foreheads powdered yellow might resemble hills
bathed in evening light, as in one of Wen Tingyun’s 温庭筠 (812?–66?) poems.89
A Tang lyric about a man taken with a courtesan describes her colorful beauty
mark: “painted between her brows, a mountain in two dots” (眉間畫得山兩
DHGC, 1:1.135 (a poem from the High Tang Yunyao ji); cf. a translation of a version with
slightly different wording by Maija Bell Samei in Gendered Persona and Poetic Voice, 77–78.
“Longshang miao shi shou 壟上苗十首 [Sprouts upon the Mound, Ten Poems],” Tune:
“Baisui pian 百歲篇 [Songs for a Hundred Years, 4/10],” Dunhuang nos. P. 3361, S. 1588,
DHGC, 3:5.1324–25; for a French translation, see Jao and Demiéville, Airs de Touen-houang,
101.
87 Several poems refer to women painting their brows green, an important component of
willow-branch or mountain brows. One example is Wei Zhuang, Tune: “Ye jinmen 謁金門
[Paying Homage at the Golden Gate, 1/2],” HJJ, 119; cf. translations in Fusek, Among the
Flowers, 66; Yates, Washing Silk, 222. Another is Ouyang Xiu, Tune: “Ta suo xing 踏莎行
[Treading on Grass, 2/2],” QSC, 1:123; cf. translation in Liu, Major Lyricists of the Northern
Sung, 34–35. Other poems mention cases where the brows are simply darkened.
88 For Tang dynasty examples, see “Wuling kenqie er shou 五陵懇切二首 [Wuling Sincer-
ity, Two Poems, 2/2],” Tune: “Huanxi sha,” Dunhuang no. S. 1441, DHGC, 1:1.185 (a poem
included in the High Tang Yunyao ji); cf. translation in Fong, “Engendering the Lyric,”
115–16. See also Wen Tingyun, Tune: “Ding xifan 定西番 [Pacifying the Western Barbar-
ians, 3/3],” HJJ, 42; cf. translation in Fusek, Among the Flowers, 45. For Song dynasty exam-
ples, see Ouyang Xiu, “Ruan lang gui 阮郎歸 [Young Ruan Returns, 1/2]”; Shu Dan
(1041–1103) 舒亶, “Ci yun zeng geji 次韻贈歌妓 [Incidental Rhymes for a Singing Girl],”
Tune: “Mulan hua 木蘭花 [Magnolia Blossoms, 1/3]”; and Chao Duanli, Tune: “Man ting
fang 滿庭芳 [Garden Filled with Fragrance, 5/5],” QSC, 1:162, 365, 421. English renditions
of Ouyang’s poem appear in Kenneth Rexroth, trans., One Hundred Poems from the Chi-
nese (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1971), 53; and Landau, Beyond Spring, 106.
89 See Rouzer’s comment and his translation of Wen Tingyun, “Ou you 偶遊 [Carefree Wan-
derings],” in Writing Another’s Dream, 21–22.

via free access
點).90 These marks must have been similar to those found on the foreheads of
the female figures in Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk (figs. 11.1–11.2).
Other poems suggest that the brows themselves take on the form of a moun-
tain. In one, a man longs for a devastatingly beautiful woman, “her brows made
up like melancholy, distant mountains” (一雙愁黛遠山眉).91 In other works,
women pine for men long absent while wearing “brows the same as distant
Mt. Xiang” (眉共湘山遠)92 or made up with “two lines of brow powder like the
ridges of distant mountains” (兩條眉黛遠山橫).93
Song dynasty poets explicitly acknowledged how mountain brows might ex-
press emotion.94 One example that clearly demonstrates how this sort of
makeup could encode feelings is a song lyric by Ouyang Xiu. Significantly, he
titled it “Thoughts Revealed in Eyebrows” (Mei yi 眉意) and set it to the tune
“Telling My Innermost Feelings” (Su zhongqing 訴衷情):
At clear dawn, the bamboo blind rolls up a thin layer of frost.

She puffs at her hands (hah!) and tries some plum makeup.
Everything comes from her resentment of parting,
which she paints as a line of distant mountains.
Thinking of past affairs,
she regrets her lost beauty.
It is easy to be hurt.
Preparing to sing, she first wrinkles her brow,
wanting to laugh but frowning again.
This really breaks people’s hearts.
清晨簾幕卷輕霜。呵手試梅妝。都緣自有離恨，故畫作遠山長。
思往事，惜流芳。易成傷。擬歌先斂，欲笑還顰，最斷人傷。95
90 Wei Chengban 魏承班 (fl. ca. 910), Tune: “Pusa man [1/2],” HJJ, 440; cf. translation in
Fusek, Among the Flowers, 162.
91 Wei Zhuang, Tune: “Heye bei 菏葉杯 [Lotus Leaf Cup, 1/2],” HJJ, 112; cf. translation in
Fusek, Among the Flowers, 63.
92 Sun Guangxian, Tune: “Pusa man [3/5],” HJJ, 399; cf. translation in Fusek, Among the Flow-
ers, 147.
93 Gu Xiong, “Xiafang yuan 遐方怨 [Lament on Distant Places],” HJJ, 364; cf. translation in
Fusek, Among the Flowers, 136–37.
94 Wang Qiyu 王齊愈 (n.d.), “Ji qing 寄情 [Sending Feelings],” Tune: “Yu meiren”; Shu Dan,
“Yong jiuyun xi Wu Fengyi 用舊韻戲吳奉議 [Using Old Rhymes as a Play on Wu Fen-
gyi],” Tune: “Jianzi mulan hua [1/2]”; Chao Duanli, Tune: “Ta suo xing 踏莎行 [Treading
on Grass, 2/3]”; idem., Tune: “Pusa man [5/5]”, QSC, 1:358, 365, 429, 433.
95 Ouyang Xiu, “Mei yi [Thoughts Revealed in Eyebrows],” Tune: “Su zhongqing [Telling My
Innermost Feelings],” QSC, 1:123; cf. Julie Landau’s translation in Beyond Spring, 96; and

via free access
240 Chapter 4
Painting eyebrows to resemble mountains was, again, a way of expressing long-

ing for departed lovers; and the fact that so many poets describe a particular
resemblance to distant mountains emphasizes that the mountains are a meta-
phor for someone far away.
In these examples of willow-branch and mountain brow makeup, the reader
of erotic poetry finds that makeup could enhance the expression of a woman’s
feelings. At the same time, the curiously pictorial nature of the makeup—with
a face as a blank surface—suggests an interest in new methods of visualizing
longing, by inscribing it upon a woman’s body. One might conclude that this
move towards making emotion pictorial parallels the proliferation of the
theme of women at their makeup mirrors in Song paintings.
The allusions to adornment in the titles of A Lady at Her Dressing Table and
Embroidered Cage, Morning Mirror provide the first hint of their themes.96 The
“morning mirror” (xiaojing 曉鏡) in particular seems to have been a resonant
image with specific connotations, appearing in several song lyrics of the pe-
riod. One lyric by Yan Jidao 晏幾道 (fl. ca. 1105), to the tune “Moon over the
West River,” reads as follows:
Melancholy brows wrinkle to form the crescent moon,

and as I weep, my makeup streaks like a wilted flower.
With only a mandarin duck pillow, I retire at night.
Reflected in the morning mirror, my heart’s feelings are listless.
The wind worries your drinking cap, up in the eaves,
and a cold smell emerges from the sleeves of your army shirt.
With the green river in spring floods, sending word is hard,
and the time when we hold hands in reunion will be later still.
愁黛顰成月淺，啼妝印得花殘。只消鴛枕夜來閒。曉鏡心情便懶。
醉帽檐頭風細，征衫袖口香寒。綠江春水寄書難。攜手佳期
又晚。97
In this lyric, the shift from nighttime to morning imagery suggests the passage
of time and the endurance of the female persona’s disconsolate feelings. These
verses also describe a woman obsessed with her appearance in the absence of
her lover, presenting a scenario that is credible as a theme not only for Embroi
dered Cage, Morning Mirror but also for A Lady at Her Dressing Table. In both of
Ronald C. Egan’s translation in The Literary Works of Ou-yang Hsiu (1007–72) (Cambridge
and London: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 135.
96 Laing, “Chinese Palace-Style Poetry,” 286.
97 Yan Jidao, Tune: “Xijiang yue 西江月 [Moon over the West River, 1/2],” QSC, 1:256.

via free access
these paintings, the image that appears upon the mirror’s surface provides a
key to its significance. The ladies’ emotions are manifested in the objects that
surround them as well, especially uniquely pictorial elements like screen
paintings.
The central figure of A Lady at Her Dressing Table views her reflection in a
mirror, cosmetics in stacked bamboo trays at her disposal. Her expression, only
visible on the polished surface of the mirror, is discontented: her anxious look
of appraisal assesses whether her beauty has begun to fade, whether physical
shortcomings drove her beloved away or discourage him from returning to her.
At the same time, the magnification of her reflected image in the large mirror
may be the artist’s strategy for emphasizing her interiority.98 The combination
of mirror, cosmetics, and a love-knot tied in a bright red ribbon at her waist
indicates that this woman is deeply attached to a man and likely indulging in
thoughts of him. But judging from her expression and her relative isolation
(she seems oblivious to the presence of the solicitous maid waiting at her el-
bow), it seems likely that those thoughts are not happy ones.99 The typical
poetic scenario would have her abandoned by her beloved, examining her fea-
tures for signs of stress, perhaps weighing whether or not her cosmetics will be
of further use,100 but certainly wasting away from incurable lovesickness.101
The best she could hope for—aside from the return of her beloved—was that
she would find another lover and have occasion to use her mirror again.102 But
more often, poets suggest her life to be over, in some instances likening her to
a dead goose or a lonely phoenix (birds almost always conceptualized in

99 Wu Hung relates this painting to a Chinese saying, duiying zilian 對影自憐, which he
translates as “gazing at one’s own image and lamenting one’s fate,” in The Double Screen,
15.
100 Some poems describe the unwilling separation of a couple, but even these still emphasize
their separation, with the reunion as yet unrealized. A number of poems constructed as
letters between husbands and wives exist; e.g., Qin Jia, “Zeng fu shi san shou [To My Wife,
Three Poems],” and his wife, Xu Shu 徐淑, “Da shi yi shou 答詩一首 [Reply, One Poem]”;
Lu Yun 陸雲 (262–303), “Wei Gu Yanxian zeng fu wangfan si shou 為顧彥先贈婦往返四
首 [Letters to a Wife, Four Poems for Gu Yanxian]”; Xu Fei 徐悱 (d. 524), “Zeng nei 贈内
[Sent to the One Inside],” and his wife, Liu Lingxian, “Da wai shi ershou [Replying to the
One Away, Two Poems],” YTXY, 1.16b–18a; 3.7a–8b; 6.12a, 6.16b–17a; cf. translations in
Birrell, New Songs from a Jade Terrace, 45–47, 94–95, 172, 178.
101 Xie Tiao 謝朓 (464–99), “Jingtai 鏡臺 [The Mirror Stand]” and Shen Yue, “Xie shou qu
攜手曲 [Song on Holding Hands],” YTXY, 4.18a–b, 5.5b; cf. translations in Birrell, New
Songs from a Jade Terrace, 129–30, 138.
102 Gao Shuang 高爽 (fl. ca. 502), “Yong jing 詠鏡 [On a Mirror],” YTXY, 5.15b; cf. translation
in Birrell, New Songs from a Jade Terrace, 149.

via free access
242 Chapter 4
male-female pairs).103 The solitary woman dwells on her sad state and longs
incessantly for the man who left her, searching her mirror for a sign of what
caused him to leave. In this Song painting, her fidelity to and complete preoc-
cupation with the absent man—in this case, her husband—is evident.
This reading is reinforced by various elements of the painting that together
reveal the lady’s mood.104 Several of the objects that surround her provide the
richest material for interpretation. For example, her stacked cosmetic boxes
seem to be made of spotted bamboo, a reference to the loneliness of the be-
reaved Xiang River goddesses. The hill censer on the table may show the lady’s
taste in antiques (as these objects date back to the Former Han dynasty), but,
similar to the coals in Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk, it might also
suggest her smoldering passion.105 The censer’s hill-shaped lid may be signifi-
cant too: for a woman keeping herself hidden away from the outside world and
dwelling on the absence of her lover, the image of a mountain might bring to
mind a traveling man. Finally, the wave screen behind the table deserves men-
tion, as the concept of the melding of feeling and scene may well be operative
here.106 The screen depicts an expanse of stylized, patterned waves, rendered
in short, even, curvilinear strokes that suggest the billowing surface of a large
body of water. The waves may represent a sort of pictorial pun: one word for
waves, lang 浪, can also be used to describe romantic feelings, uninhibited be-
havior, and even wandering.107 I propose that the wave imagery represents her
longing for her wandering husband,108 especially appropriate given the per-
103 Xiao Gang (Liang Jianwendi), “Yong ren qi qie 詠人棄妾 [On an Abandoned Concubine],”
and Xu Ling, “Wei Yang Yanzhou jiaren da xiang jing 為羊兗州家人答餉鏡 [Reply with
Thanks for a Mirror, for the Maid of Yang Yanzhou],” YTXY, 7.15b, 8.17b; cf. translations in
Birrell, New Songs from a Jade Terrace, 195, 227.
104 Ellen Johnston Laing discusses the poetic use of such a strategy in “Chinese Palace-Style
Poetry,” 288.
105 Early hill censers were used in religious ceremonies, where the incense could help to
focus prayer and meditation. The figures and fantastic animals that usually appear on the
mountain-shaped lid might suggest the realm of the immortals. Lothar Ledderose, “The
Earthly Paradise: Religious Elements in Chinese Landscape Art,” in Theories of the Arts in
China, ed. Susan Bush and Christian Murck (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983),
178.
106 Wu Hung, in The Double Screen, 16, has observed that the screen reflects the lady’s mind;
he contrasts the screen with the mirror, which he sees as reflecting her physical likeness
only.
107 Luo, Hanyu da cidian, s.v. langren 浪人 (wanderer), langman 浪漫 (wanton; poetic),
langdang 浪蕩 (to wander; dissolute behavior).
108 Alternatively, the waves may refer to the lady’s “suppressed desire”; Wu, The Double Screen,
15. This interpretation may be based on Zhu Xi’s comparison of desire to waves; see

via free access
ception of water as a yin element. However, they could also signify an unsettled
situation or instability.109
As for Embroidered Cage, Morning Mirror, it goes even further in conveying
the hopeless situation of the central figure, whose somber expression is again
only visible in her mirror reflection.110 She remains faithful to her absent lover,
as represented by the blue love-knot she wears, but because her face is visibly
aging, the viewer understands that he has abandoned her. The mirror shows a
horizontal line beneath her right eye, suggesting her bagging flesh, while her
profile exhibits a receding chin, drawn skin about her eyes and lips, and mul-
tiple lines by her ear that indicate her sagging jawline.111 The unhappy woman
whose appearance has begun to deteriorate is a common figure in erotic po-
etry. Her grim consultations with her mirror reveal a lined face, hollow cheeks,
and thinning hair, the natural result of loneliness, aging, or both.112 In this
painting, the woman stares fixedly at her gaunt face, ignoring the cosmetics in
Martin W. Huang, “Sentiments of Desire: Thoughts on the Cult of Qing in Ming–Qing

Literature,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 20 (December 1998): 157.
Yet another interpretation suggests that the screen imagery was intended to give pleasure,
as she could imagine herself “gently rocking on the waves in the painting”; Handler, “The
Chinese Screen,” 16. Wave screens have also been used in the context of a double portrait
of a deceased husband and wife, as in a tomb mural, ca. 1099, from Baisha, Henan prov-
ince, which is reproduced in Su Bai 宿白, Baisha Song mu 白沙宋墓 [Song Dynasty
Tombs at Baisha] (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1957), plate 22; for discussions of it, see
Sullivan, “Notes on Early Chinese Screen Painting,” 249; and Handler, “The Chinese
Screen,” 16.
109 A song lyric by Yan Jidao describes how the poet becomes unsettled after listening to a
song by a courtesan named Yuzhen 玉真: “At the end of the song, one’s feelings are like
the flowing waves” (曲終人意似流波). Yan Jidao, Tune: “Mulan hua [6/8],” QSC, 1:233. In
this case, the word for waves is not lang but bo 波.
110 I discussed the figures and the landscape screen in Blanchard, “Lonely Women and the
Absent Man,” 36, 40.
111 These minute details, visible upon close inspection, tend to be invisible in reproductions.
I am grateful to Lin Po-t’ing and Wang Yao-t’ing of the National Palace Museum for arrang-
ing a viewing session of this painting.
112 Wang Sengru, “Wei ji ren zishang 為姬人自傷 [For a Courtesan Hurt by Someone]”; Ji
Shaoyu 紀少瑜 (fl. ca. 535), “Chunri 春日 [Spring Day]”; and Xiao Gang (Liang Jian-
wendi), “Chougui zhaojing 愁閨照鏡 [Reflecting Mirror in a Melancholy Bedroom],”
YTXY, 6.10a; 8.16a; and 10.20b; cf. translations in Birrell, New Songs from a Jade Terrace, 170,
225, 288. Wen Tingyun, Tune: “Pusa man [5/14 and 7/14],” HJJ, 12–13, 14–15; cf. translations
in Fusek, Among the Flowers, 38, 38–39. See also Feng Yansi 馮延巳 (903–60), Tune: “Die
lian hua [6/6],” QTS, 12:898.10158; Daniel Bryant translates the lyric and notes that its tune
title should be “Que ta zhi 鵲踏枝 [Magpie on the Branch],” in Liu and Lo, Sunflower
Splendor, 297–98.

via free access
244 Chapter 4
gold lacquer trays at her fingertips. When a mirror reflects the ravages of age,
the female persona cannot hope to attract a new love (an exclusive privilege of
the young),113 and this aging woman’s position is undeniably different from
that of the younger lady in the foreground of the painting. Dressed in compa-
rable finery, the latter boasts a plump, rounded face, and she bends eagerly
over the fresh supply of cosmetics that a maid has just brought. Her youthful
energy contrasts with the older woman’s fading beauty.
The reliance upon an evocative painting-within-painting becomes even
more important in the relatively spare environment of Embroidered Cage, Mor
ning Mirror, where fewer objects allude to the aging woman’s feelings. The
landscape screen stands out: rather than serving a practical function,114 it
seems to be a means of indicating the absence of the woman’s lover, drawing
upon the associations between wanderers and landscapes of mountains and
rivers. The painter has used this screen rhetorically, to underscore the woman’s
thoughts of her traveling lover.
Thus in these two paintings, the women’s faces, attitudes, and even objects
in their environment all speak to their overwhelming unhappiness at the ab-
sence of their men. Although these lonely ladies are depicted at their makeup
tables, examining their faces in mirrors, it is significant that they make no
move to use the many cosmetics available to them. Each appears to have for-
sworn the assistance that makeup can provide in enhancing beauty and at-
tracting lovers: with the beloved gone from the picture, there is no one to
attract. At the same time, there is no suggestion that these women are beyond
love—even though at least one of them seems to be aging—for they still keep
love-token mirrors, wear love-knots, and wait for absent men to return. The
viewer is impressed by their faithfulness. It is probably no coincidence that the
type of woman who would use these fans would want to cultivate this sort of
image. Meanwhile, a male viewer might be intrigued by the sight of women in
private moments. But more importantly, the mirror provides the best view of
their faces, reflecting not only their physical appearance but also their hearts.
113 Liu Lingxian, “Da wai shi er shou [2/2],” YTXY, 6.16b–17a; cf. translation in Birrell, New
Songs from a Jade Terrace, 178. Xue Zhaoyun 薛昭蘊 (ca. 900–32), Tune: “Xiao chong shan
小重山 [Manifold Little Hills, 2/2],” HJJ, 166; cf. translation in Fusek, Among the Flowers,
78.
114 For an example of how landscape screens could serve a more material purpose, see a
tenth-century lyric by Mao Wenxi 毛文錫 (fl. ca. 930), Tune: “Su zhongqing [1/2],” HJJ,
274; cf. translation in Fusek, Among the Flowers, 108. This lyric suggests that in a brothel,
landscape screens divided sleeping areas and served as objects of contemplation for cour-
tesans.

via free access
A Lady Watching a Maid with a Parrot presents a somewhat different scene.

In this painting, Meifei’s face is clearly visible, presented in three-quarter view,
and her expression is calm. The viewer sees only the back of the bronze mirror
mounted on a stand to her left. Meifei turns away from it and from the adjacent
stack of covered cosmetic boxes. She may not have been using her mirror at all;
with books on the table and next to her on the couch, the servant and parrot
are probably drawing her attention away from her reading. Meifei, in fact, is
not supposed to have been interested in makeup, and when Xuanzong turned
from her to Yang Guifei, as the story goes, she tried to win his attention again
through poetry rather than cosmetics.115 One could interpret the mirror shown
here as a neglected mirror, a metaphor for hopeless love in poetry, but the con-
ventions of the trope do not precisely match what is depicted in this fan. In
poetry, a mirror’s disuse usually indicates the female persona’s lack of concern
for her appearance, meaning that she has no one for whom to make herself
desirable. In this case, Meifei’s hair is elaborately dressed, and her face is made
up, with a whitened forehead and nose. The mirror might still stand for a love
token, and coupled with another metaphor for longing, the incense burner, it
suggests that one might understand her as lonely, albeit not desperate or help-
less. The parrot, of course, signifies her romantic rival.
The presence of the books and writing implements introduces an element
not yet seen in an example of shinü hua: the woman’s literacy. But what books
are these, and is she preparing to write? Several interpretations are possible.
Perhaps Meifei is studying texts that define a woman’s ideal conduct, in which
case one might understand the presence of the mirror and cosmetic boxes as
tropes that signal her exemplary self-awareness. In fact, as a woman who does
not seem wholly preoccupied with her appearance, she rather recalls Sima
Guang’s dictum about the virtuous woman. Perhaps, surrounded as she is by
emblems of her loneliness and still secluded in her garden, the books repre-
sent a collection of love poetry, and Meifei is preparing to record her thoughts
about the emperor in her own poem or else writing a letter to him. In this case,
one might see the mirror and cosmetic boxes as tropes that help to establish an
image of a lonely woman consumed with her relationship—a romanticized
figure. But unquestionably, this painting suggests reading and writing as ap-
propriate pastimes for women.116 In doing so, it expands upon the earlier con-
struction of the image of the idealized woman, presenting a new model of
femininity.
115 Bickford, Ink Plum, 56; Lee, Empresses, Art, and Agency, 104.

via free access
246 Chapter 4
These fan paintings, which engage with the poetic construct of the lovelorn
woman, also address the ways that a woman’s interiority, including her feelings
about her beloved, might be essential to the performance of femininity. A
woman was supposed to be concerned with matters that were inner, and this
was a crucial part of her superficial image: these paintings indicate that there
were ways of balancing these two opposing principles. Moreover, they reveal a
strategy whereby women could increase their own attractiveness. The poetic
record makes it evident that the image of a lonely, faithful woman appealed to
many men. But a woman could profit from her association with these images:
by carrying such a fan publicly or even by studying it in private, she might proj-
ect an eminently desirable persona.
Ladies Adorning Their Hair with Flowers: A Bed-Screen?
Ladies Adorning Their Hair with Flowers (fig. 17), attributed to Zhou Fang, is
another painting that may well have constructed an image of idealized femi-
ninity for a female viewer. In this case, the original format of the painting sug-
gests that women might have had access to it in relatively intimate moments.
The painting, now mounted as a handscroll, originally was a low folding screen
(xiaoquping 小曲屏), meant to be placed next to a couch (kang 炕), which
could be used either for sitting or sleeping. Intriguingly, the painting could
have been the central panel of a bed-screen.117 It is close in height (46 cm) to
another painting that may once have been a folding screen: Verdant Forests,
Distant Peaks (Maolin yuanxiu tu 茂林遠岫圖), attributed to Li Cheng, in the
Liaoning Provincial Museum, now mounted as a handscroll.118 Ladies Adorning
Their Hair with Flowers must have been remounted as a handscroll no later
than 1131–62, judging from its Shaoxing seal.119 It also bears the seal of thir-
teenth-century prime minister Jia Sidao;120 the two seals together indicate that
it belonged to the imperial collection in the early Southern Song and later
117 Bed-screens are described in Wen Tingyun, Tune: “Pusa man [1/14],” HJJ, 4; and Yan Jidao,
Tune: “Huanxi sha [5/21],” QSC 1: 239.; cf. translation for Wen’s lyric in Fusek, Among the
Flowers, 37.
118 Attributed to Li Cheng, Verdant Forests, Distant Peaks, handscroll, color on silk, 45.5 × 142.1
cm; reproduced in Zhejiang Daxue, Song hua quanji 3, part 1: 36–51.
119 Zhao Xiaohua 趙曉華, “Zanhua shinü tu: you pingfeng hua gai wei juanzhou hua chuan
cang zhi renshi 簪花仕女圖–由屏風畫改為卷軸畫傳藏之認識 [Ladies Adorning
Their Hair with Flowers: Recognition of a Screen Painting Remounted as a Handscroll],”
Gugong wenwu yuekan, no. 149 (August 1995): 120, 123.
120 Laing, “Notes on Ladies Wearing Flowers in Their Hair,” 32.

via free access
passed into the collection of a prominent figure at court. This suggests that the
perceived function of the painting changed sometime during the Song
dynasty.
Poems from the Tang and Song dynasties, as well as A Lady at Her Dressing
Table and Embroidered Cage, Morning Mirror, indicate that screens were
among the furnishings found in feminine space. Perhaps this is why one art
historian asks whether Ladies Adorning Their Hair with Flowers may have
“represent[ed] women to themselves, providing models of ideal deportment
and physical beauty.”121 The painting appears to represent concubines compet-
ing for a man’s attention, and I suggest that such a screen would have been
appropriately located anywhere that women prepared for or engaged in sexual
interaction with men.122 As such, it would be a clear artifact of heteroerotic
desire.
Ladies Adorning Their Hair with Flowers may be one of the earliest surviv-
ing examples of shinü hua, possibly dating to the Tang or Southern Tang.123
Although the painting therefore may only indicate pre-Song patterns of fe-
male viewership, it still suggests what women might have learned from images
that romanticize longing and desire. The painting depicts six female figures.
Five are ladies of high status who wear headdresses with floral sprays or single
blossoms of considerable size. The single maid lacks the elaborate headdress
of fresh flowers but carries a fan with a painting of a peony blossom.124 The
prominence and size of these adornments suggests that the painting repre-
sents Flower Morning:125 notice that the figure at far left holds a butterfly in
one delicate hand and another figure holds a flower. The attraction of butter-
121 Craig Clunas, Art in China (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 49.
122 Although Tang song lyrics mention painted screens as items of furniture in brothels,
I have found no references to the use of screens decorated with images of women.
123 Zhao Xiaohua argues that it dates to the Tang and represents a late work by Zhou Fang,
whereas Ellen Johnston Laing notes that the styles of the women’s dress and hair conform
to figures in the tenth-century tomb of the first emperor of the Southern Tang, Li Bian
李昪 (r. 937–43): Zhao, “Zanhua shinü tu,” 118–25; Laing, “Notes on Ladies Wearing Flowers
in Their Hair,” 34–35; citing Xie Zhiliu 謝稚柳, “Dui Tang Zhou Fang Zanhua shinü tu de
shangque 對唐周昉簪花仕女圖的商榷 [Some Different Opinions about Ladies Adorn-
ing their Hair with Flowers by Zhou Fang of the Tang Dynasty],” Wenwu cankao ziliao 文物
參考資料 6 (1958): 25–26. Yet another possibility, of course, is that the painting is a Song
copy of an earlier work.
124 Zhou Xun 周汛 concurs in identifying this less elaborately adorned woman as a maidser-
vant in Zhongguo lidai funü zhuangshi 中國歷代婦女妝飾 [Adornments of Chinese
Women throughout the Ages] (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 1988), 86.
125 Laing, “Notes on Ladies Wearing Flowers in their Hair,” 35–39; idem, “Chinese Palace-Style
Poetry,” 284–86.

via free access
248
Figure 17 Ladies Adorning Their Hair with Flowers. After Zhou Fang (ca. 730–ca. 800), late 9th–10th century; handscroll, ink and color on silk, 46 × 180 cm.
COLLECTION OF LIAONING PROVINCIAL MUSEUM, SHENYANG, P.R.C.
Chapter 4
via free access

flies to flowers was by this period clearly associated with male-female roman-
tic and sexual interaction. Flower Morning may have originated in a spring
fertility ceremony,126 making these references to such interaction especially
appropriate.
Unusually, the juxtaposition of masculine butterflies and feminine flowers
suggests a sense of fulfillment. One story about the Tang emperor Xuanzong
relates that on one occasion every spring he would choose his consort for the
evening by having the court ladies adorn their hair with flowers and waiting for
a butterfly to alight upon one of them. The story may well be apocryphal,127 but
it is still entirely possible that Ladies Adorning Their Hair with Flowers refers to
it. The serene smiles of the figures and their attitudes of pleasure and content-
ment suggest a mood of happy anticipation, which fundamentally concords
with what one might expect from a representation of Xuanzong’s concubines
engaged in such a contest.
The setting of this painting is also a garden: at the far left, one finds a mag-
nolia shrub with a profusion of budding blossoms next to a garden rock. The
structures that might bound such a garden, however, are not apparent: there is
no confining wall or balustrade, nor any use of painted or silken screens. This
sort of erotic garden is closer to the European concept of the locus amoenus
than to the hortus conclusus. The origins of the locus amoenus—the “bower” or
“pleasance”—can be traced in part to the garden of Venus, goddess of love and
fertility, a paradisiacal place of uninhibited sensuality.128 In such a space, the
sense of enclosure was not paramount, making a woman found there sexually
accessible and the garden a site for a tryst.129 The figures in the unbounded
garden of Ladies Adorning Their Hair with Flowers revel in their sensuality. The
natural elements of the garden—masculine butterflies and garden rock, to-
gether with feminine flowers—suggest the female figures’ accessibility and
their sexual fulfillment. A male viewer could easily project himself as the un-
pictured object of their desire.
One curious thing about this painting, however, especially if it is meant to
represent Xuanzong’s concubines seeking a summons to the imperial bed, is
126 Laing, “Notes on Ladies Wearing Flowers in their Hair,” 36.

127 Ibid., 37.
128 Ilva Beretta, “The World’s a Garden”: Garden Poetry of the English Renaissance (Uppsala:
S. Academiae Upsaliensis; Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1993), 23–24.
However, the source of the term itself appears in Virgil’s Aeneid, where he describes
Aeneas’s journey to Elysium; Finney, The Counterfeit Idyll, 16.
129 Rachel Crawford, “Troping the Subject: Behn, Smith, Hemans and the Poetics of the
Bower,” Studies in Romanticism 38, no.2 (Summer 1999): 255–56, 258, 259.

via free access
250 Chapter 4
the lack of rivalry among these women. Depicting the reality of women’s com-
petition might have contradicted the agreeable fiction of harmony among the
concubines, even as the painter represented their desire for the same man. The
painting’s appeal to a male audience is incontrovertible, but one can imagine
a female viewer using it as a model for the construction of an irresistible per-
sona: a woman who was appropriately desirous yet not outwardly aggressive.
While examples of shinü hua may well have provided women with strategies
for competing against each other for male attention, Ladies Adorning Their
Hair with Flowers actually depicts such a competition but deliberately excises
its least pleasant aspects.
…
Though male and female viewers might respond to examples of shinü hua in
different ways, both audiences would likely understand these paintings of
women as commentary on intimate, heteroerotic relationships, perhaps see-
ing the depicted narratives as analogous to their own circumstances. Still, be-
cause most painters of shinü hua were male, and because they were adapting
tropes from poetic genres that were largely male-authored, a female viewer
might have taken these images as representative of what men wanted to see.
Fan paintings and bed-screens in particular are readily identifiable as met-
onyms for idealized femininity, items that women may have sought as a means
of constructing an appropriate feminine persona. This does not mean that
women never looked at handscrolls such as Goddess of the Luo River, Night
Revels of Han Xizai, or Pounding Cloth—only that no evidence connects women
to those works, so it is harder to project what a woman’s response to them
might have been. Nor does it mean that artists intended fan paintings and bed-
screens that depicted feminine longing and desire for women’s eyes only; these
paintings would undoubtedly have (at least in private) appealed to men.
Yet in A Lady at Her Dressing Table, Embroidered Cage, Morning Mirror, and
A Lady Watching a Maid with a Parrot, the artists’ employment of mirrors and
makeup as tropes of self-cultivation recall earlier didactic texts and images,
suggesting that these paintings could serve as models for other aspects of
womanhood. In addition, the multiple ways that these Song paintings evoke
the dualities of inner and outer neatly mimic the process of emphasizing qual-
ities associated with interiority in the construction of an appropriately femi-
nine façade. Ladies Adorning Their Hair with Flowers includes no allusions to
self-awareness and likely dates to an earlier period, yet it is impossible to rule
out its use in the inner quarters of the palace, as one may surmise from the fact
that it was once mounted as a three-panel screen and may have been used

via free access
adjacent to a bed. Because it engages with the realities of women’s competi-

tion, it provides a model for women’s comportment in intimate circumstances.
These cases clarify the different messages that women might have received
from shinü hua.

via free access
252 Conclusion
Conclusion
Interiority and the Value of Connection
Song romantic paintings of women demonstrate multiple ways that art and
interiority intertwine. First, and most obviously, they depict women feeling
(most typically) longing or desire—themes that require a painter’s representa-
tion of not only an ineffable inner state, but also a female figure’s subjectivity.
Second, paintings that were so clearly about emotion could serve, in much the
same way as poems, as the authors’ expressions of their own interiority: thus,
painters or patrons could use art to convey their ideas on topics that pertained
to romance or addressed other situations. Third, paintings of longing and de-
sire could stir thoughts or emotions in their viewers, as evident from some of
the surviving inscriptions for these works. The skillful handling of subjectivity
in particular allowed viewers to identify with a painted figure or to imagine
themselves interacting with her, and that in turn meant that paintings on these
themes could serve as political allegories or as models for femininity. Finally,
the themes of interiority under consideration in these paintings could foster
connections among people precisely because they stimulated deeper feelings,
and this quality made the works intrinsically valuable, making them appropri-
ate as gifts, for example.
Throughout the early chapters of this book, I chose to focus on paintings
with themes of longing or desire for which I could reconstruct a historical or
social context. Though some are associated with members of the literati, most
were produced at court. This suggests that the predilection for romantic themes
was more prominent among members of the court than among the literati, es-
pecially given that some of the latter group registered distaste for paintings of
this type, though it may also reflect the better preservation of works that once
belonged to the imperial art collections. Thus: the Northern Song emperor
Huizong commissioned Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk. The Liaoning
Provincial Museum version of Goddess of the Luo River can arguably be placed
at the court of Southern Song emperor Gaozong. At the court of Southern Tang
ruler Li Yu, Zhou Wenju painted the original version of In the Palace, and both
he and Gu Hongzhong painted versions of Night Revels of Han Xizai, possibly
for the ruler’s inspection; Song copies of these compositions were owned or
viewed by officials or scholars. Mou Yi, a painter who may have served at court
but had literati sensibilities, created two versions of Pounding Cloth, giving one
to an official and another to a friend who was a collector. Looking at tenth-
through thirteenth-century patterns of artistic production, collecting, and

via free access
Interiority and the Value of Connection 253
viewing, then, both members of the court and highly educated individuals,
including some who served in the bureaucracy, demonstrate a clear interest in
romantic themes, a trend also seen in the broader culture.
Because so much can be determined about the early histories of the paint-
ings listed above, one can speculate on what they might have meant to specific
male artists, male patrons, male collectors, and male viewers. The composi-
tions of Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk and Goddess of the Luo River
are believable as political instruments, with the former used by Emperor
Huizong to assert his possession of the mandate of heaven and the latter pos-
sibly used as a signifier of political legitimacy at Emperor Gaozong’s court.
Night Revels of Han Xizai, when first created, may have functioned as Li Yu’s
critique of his minister; the Song copy seems to present the minister’s point of
view, as a man of integrity unappreciated by his ruler. The surviving version of
Pounding Cloth arouses sentiments consistent with homesickness and nostal-
gia, perhaps relating artist Mou Yi’s feelings during his travels, while at the
same time attesting to his connection to his friend Dong Shi, the scroll’s
recipient.
Only In the Palace is difficult to classify, and this is because we know too lit-
tle about collector Zhang Cheng’s motivations. Perhaps obtaining a copy of a
painting owned in the Northern Song by official Zhu Zaishang helped to dem-
onstrate Zhang Cheng’s esteem for this presumably influential man. Many fig-
ures within this painting approach the archetype of the neglected palace
consort, which may have stood for an official with unshakable devotion to his
ruler, though its presentation of multiple ladies passing time together may also
convey camaraderie among officials.
Coincidentally, Zhang Cheng is recorded as the author of another colophon,
dated 1141 and mounted on a fragmentary copy of Night Revels of Han Xizai that
is held in the National Palace Museum, Taipei. The colophon has striking simi-
larities of content to the colophon written for In the Palace: following informa-
tion about the painter (in this case, a summary of Gu Hongzhong’s court
service and ruler Li Yu’s commission of Night Revels), whole passages are re-
peated verbatim or with minor changes (see my translation of the colophon in
Chapter 1). The writer asserts that the artist is working in a style “similar to
Zhou Fang’s but more delicate and beautiful,” referring in particular to the
“abundantly fleshy” figures “with long skirts of fine silk.” (The figures in the
surviving fragment, however, are slenderer than the figures in In the Palace.) He
again recalls a visit to Jiaonan during which he viewed imperial portraits, and
he compares the hairstyles of the female figures in Night Revels to those of pal-
ace women. (The hairstyles of the figures in this painting are actually some-
what different from those found in In the Palace, rendering it unlikely that a

via free access
254 Conclusion
connoisseur would make the same claim for both.) Once more, the writer
draws a link between the Southern Tang rulers and Tang style, but asserts that
the style seen in this painting derives from the Six Dynasties. Finally, he con-
cludes with the same aphorism about looking at “clothing, carts, and furniture”
to date paintings. The colophon for In the Palace was dated to the fifth lunar
month of 1140 and signed Danyan Jushi; this colophon is dated to the fifth lunar
month of 1141 and signed “Danyan Jushi Zhang Cheng.” The quantity of re-
peated language might indicate that this colophon is forged, though it does
bear a seal reading “Danyan Jushi” as well as the problematic half-seal reading
“Junsima yin” that is also found on In the Palace.1 If the colophon for Night
Revels were a genuine inscription by Zhang Cheng, it would suggest either that
he had a particular interest in representations of figures neglected by their rul-
ers, or, more simply, that he was an enthusiastic viewer of erotic representa-
tions of palace ladies and courtesans. If it is instead a forgery, however, that
suggests that someone expected that it would be believable for Zhang Cheng
to have consistent taste in regard to paintings with erotic subject matter.
Chapter 4 turned to paintings of much more uncertain provenance: A Lady
at Her Dressing Table; Embroidered Cage, Morning Mirror; A Lady Watching a
Parrot; and Ladies Adorning Their Hair with Flowers. Judging from media alone,
they must be the works of court or professional painters, and each one is in fact
traditionally attributed to a specific painter. Su Hanchen was a figure painter at
the Northern and Southern Song courts, but though the attribution of A Lady
at Her Dressing Table to him is credible, it is impossible to know for whom the
painting was created. The traditional attribution for Embroidered Cage,
Morning Mirror is somewhat questionable: Wang Shen lived in the Northern
Song, but the painting probably dates to the Southern Song, in the twelfth or
thirteenth century. A Lady Watching a Maid with a Parrot has a similar discrep-
ancy of dates: it is thought now to date to the Southern Song, but Wang Juzheng
is supposed to have been an eleventh-century painter—though very little is
known of him. Finally, Ladies Adorning Their Hair with Flowers is not entirely
believable as an eighth-century painting, though images of full-figured women
do suggest the Tang style of Zhou Fang. Though one cannot say for certain how
these paintings functioned, their formats—fans and a folding screen—tend to
1 Night Revels of Han Xizai (Han Xizai yeyan tu), handscroll, ink and color on silk, 27.9 × 69 cm,
National Palace Museum, Taipei. For reproductions of the painting and the text of the colo-
phon, see Guoli Gugong Bowuyuan, Gugong shuhua tulu 故宮書畫圖錄 [A Catalogue of
Chinese Painting and Calligraphy in the National Palace Museum], 20 vols. (Taipei: Guoli
Gugong Bowuyuan, 1989–), 15: 105–108. The colophon is mentioned in Max Loehr, “Chinese
Paintings with Sung Dated Inscriptions,” Ars Orientalis: The Arts of Islam and the East 4 (1961):
252.

via free access
suggest women’s viewership and use. Indeed, if they were intended for a fe-
male audience, which was less likely to be recorded, that could explain why
their provenance is less clear.
I have left two paintings of roughly the correct time period that include ro-
manticized images of women out of this discussion, not because they are ir-
relevant to it, but because I could not identify author or audience with sufficient
specificity. The first is Palace Ladies Tuning the Lute, another Zhou Fang attri-
bution of uncertain date (fig. 18).2 Its media suggest a court painter; as a hand-
scroll, it could have been viewed by either men or women. It depicts five figures
in a garden setting. Two of these are maids, shown at either end of the compo-
sition—the one at right carries a cup, the one at left a tray. The three figures in
the middle are ladies. At the center right, a lady dressed in pale colors sits on a
chair beside a paulownia tree, gazing into the distance. The central figure sits
with her back to us, next to a blossoming tree; she too holds a cup. The figure at
center left sits facing us on a low, flat garden rock; her left hand plucks the
strings of a seven-stringed zither (guqin 古琴) in her lap, while her right hand
is shown beneath the instrument—positions that clarify that she is tuning the
zither. The act of tuning an instrument rather than playing it has specific con-
notations, as made clear in a palace-style poem:
Swallows play then return to the eaves.

Flowers fly then fall before my pillow.
My true feelings3 you don’t see.
Wiping away tears, I sit tuning the strings.
燕子戲還簷，花飛落枕前。寸心君不見，拭淚坐調弦。4
This poem articulates the unrequited longings of a female persona waiting for
her beloved to return, the idea most likely expressed in the painting as well.5
One might interpret this in numerous ways, however: is the painting meant to
evoke ideas about political loyalty, perhaps that of an unappreciated official?
2 The earliest seal on the painting may date to the early twelfth century; Eight Dynasties of
Chinese Painting, 8. James Cahill assessed this as a Song composition in An Index of Early
Chinese Painters and Paintings: T’ang, Sung, and Yüan (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London:
University of California Press, 1980), 8.
3 Kroll, A Student’s Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese, s.v. cun xin 寸心.
4 He Xun 何遜, “Wei ren qie si 為人妾思 [A Concubine’s Longings],” in YTXY, 10.13a; cf. transla-
tion in Birrell, New Songs from a Jade Terrace, 278.
5 Audrey Spiro proposes instead that the painting is a parody of typical images of ladies, assert-
ing that the zither is usually associated with scholars, in “Creating Ancestors,” 60–61.

via free access
256
Figure 18 Palace Ladies Tuning the Lute. After Zhou Fang (ca. 730–ca. 800); handscroll, ink and color on silk, 28 × 75.3 cm. the nelson-Atkins Museum
of Art, Kansas City, Mo. Purchase: William Rockhill Nelson Trust, 32-159/1.
Conclusion
via free access

Should we read the theme of longing more literally as the expression of a wom-
an’s feelings toward a marital partner who neglects her? Or did the creator or
the owner of the painting simply appreciate palace-style poetry or erotic imag-
ery? How the painting functioned—what the artist or the patron saw in it—
cannot be determined.
A second painting presents a courtesan in a romantic light, positioning her
as the idealized partner of a scholar (fig. 19).6 The painting, Sima Caizhong’s
Dream of the Courtesan Su Xiaoxiao (Sima Caizhong meng Su Xiaoxiao 司馬才
仲夢蘇小小), is by Liu Yuan 劉元 (fl. early thirteenth century) of the Jin dy-
nasty and is his only surviving work; according to the signature on the paint-
ing, he worked under a portrait painter and served in the Crafts Office (Zhiying
si 祗應司).7 The story of Sima Caizhong and Su Xiaoxiao dates to the Song
dynasty,8 but these two figures lived in different historical periods, and the
story has fantastic elements. Sima You 司馬槱, courtesy name Caizhong, re-
ceived the jinshi 進士 degree in 1091;9 Su Xiaoxiao was a late-fifth-century cour-
tesan and poet. The painting shows Caizhong asleep in a chair, resting his head
in the crook of his arm, with books at a table by his side indicating that he has
been working into the night; at the bottom right corner, a sleeping boy is curled
up on the floor. Su Xiaoxiao appears to him in a dream, a realm in which (some
believed) two separated souls might be able to meet, as attested by Song dy-
nasty song lyric;10 appropriately, the left side of the painting depicts a misty
vision of the courtesan. The clapper that she holds under one arm indicates
that she is an entertainer, while the scarves swirling about her suggest that she
is a ghost. She presses a hand to her mouth in the familiar gesture conveying
sorrow. According to the story, she sings to him of her former home in Qiantang
錢塘 (present-day Zhejiang province) and the passing of years. Caizhong is
subsequently transferred there, only to discover Su Xiaoxiao’s tomb behind his
house, and he dies shortly thereafter.11 Intriguingly, a quatrain by Su Xiaoxiao
6 For an assessment of this painting as an example of scholar-courtesan interaction, see

Blanchard, “A Scholar in the Company of Female Entertainers,” 229–31.
7 Ellen B. Avril, Chinese Art in the Cincinnati Art Museum (Cincinnati: The Museum, 1997),
60; Hucker, A Dictionary of Official Titles, s.v. 1097, chih-ying ssu.
8 The story appears in He Wei 何薳 (1077–1145), Chunzhu jiwen 春渚紀聞 [Record of Things
Heard on a Spring Islet] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1983), 102–103. A synopsis of the story is
given in Li, “Dream Visions of Transcendence,” 70–72.
9 Peter C. Sturman, “The Poetic Ideas Scroll Attributed to Mi Youren and Sima Huai,” Zhe
jiang University Journal of Art and Archaeology 1 (2014): 107.
10 Egan, The Burden of Female Talent, 345–46.
11 For further discussion of the painting, see Laing, “Erotic Themes and Romantic Heroines,”
85–86; and Avril, Chinese Art in the Cincinnati Art Museum, 59–60.

via free access
258
Figure 19 Sima Caizhong’s Dream of the Courtesan Su Xiaoxiao. Liu Yuan ( fl. early 13th cent.), Jin dynasty; handscroll, ink and color on silk, 29.2 × 73.6 cm.
Cincinnati Art Museum, J.J. Emery Endowment and Fanny Bryce Lehmer Endowment (1948.79), Cincinnati, Oh.
Conclusion
via free access

preserved in the sixth-century New Songs from a Jade Terrace alludes to lovers
meeting in a tomb, and the anthology identifies her as being from Qiantang;12
undoubtedly the story about her and Sima Caizhong builds upon these details.
The story affirms the Song taste for romantic tales, and the painting indicates
that interest in this particular tale persisted some one hundred years later in
northern China under the Jin dynasty. The predominant message of the paint-
ing seems to be one of strong attachment even in the face of insurmountable
obstacles. The precise motivations of Liu Yuan in making the painting are un-
clear, however, as the expression of such ideas could be appropriate in many
situations.
The number of surviving tenth- to thirteenth-century Chinese paintings
that address themes of longing or desire through images of women is small,
then, but other Song-era paintings raise these themes as well: for example, sev-
eral paintings from the flower-and-bird genre. As discussed in Chapter 4, one
art historian has considered the anonymous Autumn Mallows and Ma Yuan’s
Apricot Blossoms, both fan paintings of the Southern Song court, as direct ex-
pressions of the feelings of Empress Wu and Empress Yang toward their hus-
bands. Moving earlier, to the Northern Song, a hanging scroll attributed to
Emperor Huizong, Mountain Birds on a Wax-Plum Tree (Lamei shanqin 蠟梅山
禽), includes a poem that clarifies that this image of a pair of white-crested
bulbuls perched on a branch can be read as a wish for an everlasting commit-
ment between a man and a woman (enduring “a thousand autumns,” qian qiu
千秋). The combination of painting, poem, and imperial calligraphy would
work well as a gift on the occasion of a marriage or anniversary, or as an expres-
sion of Huizong’s own feelings toward one of his palace women.13 In each of
these cases, the paintings are paired with poems that clarify the romantic as-
sociations of the images.
A similar situation is presented in a 1216 flower painting by court painter Ma
Lin 馬麟 (fl. ca. 1216–ca. 1254),14 Layers of Icy Silk (Ceng die bing xiao 層疊冰綃,
12 Su Xiao[xiao] 蘇小, “Qiantang Su Xiao ge yi shou 錢唐蘇小歌一首 [A Song by Su Xiao

of Qiantang, One Poem],” YTXY, 10.536; cf. translation by Birrell, New Songs from a Jade
Terrace, 272.
13 This aspect of the painting is discussed in Qianshen Bai, “Image as Word: A Study of
Rebus Play in Song Painting (960–1279),” Metropolitan Museum Journal 34 (1999): 63–64;
and Bickford, “Huizong’s Paintings,” 469–70. The painting is reproduced in color in Ebrey
and Bickford, Emperor Huizong and Late Northern Song China, fig. 11.5. See also Wang Yao-
t’ing, “Images of the Heart,” Part 2, 5.
14 For Ma Lin, I propose activity dates of approximately 1216 to 1254 based on the dates of his
paintings Layers of Icy Silk and Evening. For a discussion of his dates and a reproduction
of Evening, see Edwards, The Heart of Ma Yuan, 2–3, pl. 23.

via free access
260 Conclusion
Figure 20 Layers of Icy Silk. Ma Lin (ca. 1216–ca. 1254), Southern Song dynasty,
1216; handscroll, ink and color on silk, 101.5 × 49.6 cm. Palace Museum,
Beijing, P.R.C. Photograph provided by the Palace Museum.

via free access
fig. 20), which reads as a straightforward expression of eroticism but probably

does not express the patron’s personal feelings. In some respects, the painting
is superficially similar to Apricot Blossoms, which had been painted by Ma Lin’s
father. Layers of Icy Silk depicts two branches of blossoming plum set at an
angle, one extending vertically and one horizontally. The vertical branch points
to a quatrain, inscribed by Empress Yang. The poem is about the pictured
blossoms:
Joined, like a cold butterfly passing the night in a flowery boudoir,

embracing the sandalwood heart, remembering old fragrance.
Open even at the cold tips of the branches, the blossoms are especially
lovable:
they must be the type used in Han-palace makeup.15
渾如冷蝶宿花房，擁抱檀心憶舊香。開到寒梢尤可愛，此般必是漢宮
粧.
Layers of Icy Silk belonged to a set of four plum-blossom paintings, each in-
scribed with poems full of romantic imagery written in the voice of a palace
lady; this particular composition depicts a species of plum with luxurious dou-
ble-petal blossoms.16 The poem’s first line, with its image of a butterfly warm-
ing itself inside the petals of a flower, not only describes the layered structure
of the flowers but also evokes the intimate behavior of lovers and sets a tone
for the rest of the poem. The ensuing references to “heart” and “love” (ai 愛)
seem to confirm the nature of the feelings being expressed. The “boudoir” and
the “Han palace” call to mind the living space of a lady of high status. Allusions
to “sandalwood,” “fragrance,” and “makeup” suggest the artificial embellish-
ments that enhance a lady’s femininity and desirability; plum-blossom makeup
in particular appeared as an image in a lyric by Ouyang Xiu, as discussed in
Chapter 4. The descriptions of action—“passing the night” and “embracing”—
suggest sexual intercourse, though the word “remembering” appears here as
well, suggesting that the true topic is cooled desire and nostalgia.
15 Painting and poem are discussed in Harrist, “Ch’ien Hsüan’s Pear Blossoms,” 58–59; Lee,
Empresses, Art, and Agency, 203–205; and Edwards, The Heart of Ma Yuan, 62–66.
16 Richard Edwards translates all four poems and identifies the variety of plum tree depicted
in this painting as viridicalyx in The Heart of Ma Yuan, 62–65. The other three paintings in
the set do not survive. Maggie Bickford clarifies that viridicalyx is a cultivar of Prunus
mume in Bones of Jade, Soul of Ice, 247.

via free access
262 Conclusion
With Empress Yang as the acknowledged patron, fifty-four years of age in

1216, perhaps the natural assumption is that Layers of Icy Silk was intended as
an intimate communication to her husband, Emperor Ningzong. Other evi-
dence on the painting, however, contradicts this interpretation: it bears an in-
scription in tiny characters, located between the empress’s seals, dedicating it
to an official, Supervisor Wang (Wang Tiju 王提舉), someone who received
more than one example of painting and calligraphy from Ningzong and his
empress. This detail immediately calls into question any reading of poem and
painting as an expression of the empress’s own feelings for the scroll’s recipi-
ent. One possibility is that Empress Yang used this work to create an image of
herself as an idealized palace lady, someone of considerable status.17 Alter
natively, she might have presented the painting to commemorate a happy
event in the official’s life, such as his marriage, a function perhaps similar to
that of Huizong’s Mountain Birds on a Wax-Plum Tree. In the end, Layers of Icy
Silk suggests the ways that romantic imagery could be used in flower-and-bird
paintings to political ends; an imperial gift to an official would certainly honor
him and convey the giver’s regard for him, even if it did not address the nature
of their own relationship.
Landscape paintings might be used to convey romantic feelings as well.
I mentioned in Chapter 3 that Mou Yi used the style of Zhao Lingrang’s paint-
ings as a source for the second painting-within-painting in Pounding Cloth.
A surviving painting by Zhao Lingrang in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,
suggests that his work, like Mou Yi’s, could address the sorrow of lovers’ separa-
tion. Like Mou Yi, Zhao Lingrang was a figure who moved between different
social circles: a member of the imperial family, he was nevertheless affiliated
with Northern Song scholars such as Su Shi, Huang Tingjian 黃庭堅 (1045–
1105), and Dong You 董逌 (fl. 1100–30).18 His painting Whiling Away the Summer
by a Lakeside Retreat (Huzhuang qingxia tujuan 湖莊清夏圖卷), dated to 1100
(figs. 21.1–21.4), reveals why not only the style but also the content of his work
might have inspired Mou Yi’s painting.
Whiling Away the Summer by a Lakeside Retreat is a handscroll that depicts an
apparently unpopulated landscape, filled with images that repeat so often that
they begin to seem insistent. These include humble houses at the beginning
17 This work identifies the recipient as Wang Tiju, but Hui-shu Lee observes that other works
identify him as Wang Dutiju 王都提擧, Supervisor-in-Chief Wang; cf. Hucker, A Diction-
ary of Official Titles, s.v. 6395, t’i-chü; 7294, tu t’i-chü. For more on the recipient, and for this
interpretation of Empress Yang’s intent, see Lee, Empresses, Art, and Agency, 93–94, 203–
205.
18 Bush, The Chinese Literati on Painting, 44, 51, 96–97.

via free access
Figure 21.1 Whiling Away the Summer by a Lakeside Retreat. Zhao Lingrang (nicknamed Danian, fl. ca. 1080–ca. 1100), Northern Song dynasty, 1100;
handscroll, ink and color on silk, 19.1 × 161.3 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Keith McLeod Fund (57.724). Photograph © 2017 Museum of
Fine Arts, Boston.
263
via free access

264
Fine Arts, Boston.
Conclusion
via free access

Fine Arts, Boston.
265
via free access

266
Fine Arts, Boston.
Conclusion
via free access

and in the center of the painting; paths that lead from the houses into nature;
low bridges; groves and individual specimens of deciduous trees (including
willows); bands of mist that curl through the trees’ foliage; green lotus leaves
floating on the surface of the water, most thickly at the water’s edge; and at
least three species of birds, shown in the branches of trees, swimming, rest-
ing at the water’s edge, and in flight. Taken in its entirety, this imagery starts
to evoke the theme of parting. The contrasting images of houses and paths
suggest travelers and those waiting for their return. As discussed in Chapter 3,
willows evoke parting, and their juxtaposition with bridges deepens that as-
sociation, while mist connotes transience.
The lotus leaves and birds, however, particularly suggest that this painting is
about the parting of lovers. One of the words for lotus is lian 蓮, a homophone
for another lian 戀 which means “love,” and lotuses growing lushly on a lake
bring to mind poetry about “lotus boats” filled with young women seeking to
gather their blossoms,19 even though neither blossoms nor boats are present
here. More significantly, paired birds in poetry often stand for enduring
unions,20 and in Zhao Lingrang’s painting, the birds are almost always shown
in groups of even numbers. (The pigment that he used for these birds has faded
considerably over the centuries, and some are nearly invisible in reproduc-
tions.) At the right side of the composition, the tallest tree has four birds
perched in it, a leaning willow has two birds in its branches, a pair of ducks
swims near the first bridge, and at least three ducks (possibly four) can be
found in the reeds. In the center of the composition, ten ducks swim on the
lake; a pair of ducks swims toward willows on a small island; a pair of long-
necked white birds sits at the distant shoreline behind them; a second pair of
ducks is visible to their left, stretching their necks toward the water; and a third
pair of ducks sits with their heads raised, bodies half hidden by the sloping
embankment. Finally, toward the left side of the composition, there are two
long-necked white birds to the left of a planked bridge; two long-legged, long-
beaked birds stand at the bottom edge of the composition; four more ducks
rest on the banks among the trees; another four ducks swim toward a final spit
of land; at least one ghostly image of a bird appears hidden among lotus leaves;
and two pairs of birds fly from the trees at the end of the painting. The details
19 On poetry about lotus boats and characters pronounced lian, see Wagner, The Lotus Boat,
x–xi, xiii, 146.
20 Stuart, “Revealing the Romance in Chinese Art,” 15; citing Bai Juyi, “Chang hen ge,” QTS,
7:435.4816–20; cf. translation by Levy in Chinese Narrative Poetry, 129–33. A single bird, on
the other hand, could be used to signify divorce, as in “Kongque dongnan fei,” YTXY, 1.23b–
31a; cf. translation in Watson, The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry, 82–92.

via free access
268 Conclusion
of paired birds in this painting are especially striking, and taken in conjunction
with the rest of the painting’s imagery, they may indicate that Whiling Away the
Summer by a Lakeside Retreat was meant to evoke the loneliness of someone
waiting for a traveler to return, most likely a wife missing a husband, or else the
homesickness of a traveler.
A thorough survey of Song paintings in all genres would potentially reveal
more paintings that allude to romance than those mentioned above, but the
fact that such references are found in paintings of multiple genres indicates
that tropes of longing and desire were useful concepts that were open to a va-
riety of interpretations. Looking at examples from different genres also reveals
that painters were able to convey these ideas with varying degrees of subtlety.
Figure paintings that show the interactions of courtesans and scholar-officials
or of a goddess and a prince stand as perhaps the most explicit representations
of heteroerotic relationships. More ambiguous are images of women sitting in
enclosed gardens, or engaging in activities such as playing music, making
clothing, or catching butterflies; in these cases, the idea of the relationship is
strongly implied. Flower-and-bird paintings and landscapes that use poetic
imagery to evoke such feelings are perhaps the most covert of all, requiring
careful decoding to reveal their meaning.
It is undoubtedly significant that the compositions I have discussed were
created predominantly by court painters and to a lesser extent by members of
the literati, as it indicates that these two groups tended to value different
means of representing interiority. The literati antipathy to images of romantic
longing and desire only intensified with time. Indeed, by the later periods of
imperial China, those artists who specialized in romantic or erotic images of
women were primarily court painters, professional painters, or printmakers.21
The importance of interiority in Song painting becomes even clearer when
we broaden our scope to consider works that focus on areas of emotional at-
tachment beyond erotic longing and desire—particularly friendship, which is
21 For studies of such works, see Laing, “Erotic Themes and Romantic Heroines,” 68–91;
Dawn Ho Delbanco, “The Romance of the Western Chamber: Min Qiji’s Album in
Cologne,” Orientations 14, no. 6 (June 1983): 12–23; Hsu Wen-Chin, “Representations of the
Romance of the Western Chamber in Chinese Woodblock Prints and Ceramics,” Asian
Culture Quarterly, no. 4 (1991): 21–34; Blanchard, “Imagining Du Liniang in The Peony
Pavilion,” 125–33; Cahill, “Paintings Done for Women,” 1–54; Cahill, Pictures for Use and
Pleasure; James Cahill et al., Beauty Revealed: Images of Women in Qing Dynasty Chinese
Painting (Berkeley: University of California Press, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film
Archive, 2013); and Wu Hung, “Beyond Stereotypes: The Twelve Beauties in Qing Court Art
and the ‘Dream of the Red Chamber,’” in Widmer and Chang, Writing Women in Late Impe-
rial China, 306–65.

via free access
addressed in and through painting in similar ways, and which I propose as the
topic that members of the literati were more inclined to respond to than paint-
ings of romantic themes. Possibly the most important Song dynasty painting to
allude to this subject was literati painter Li Gonglin’s A Picture of Yang Pass
(Yangguan tu 陽關圖). Though it is not extant, literary sources reveal that the
painting was a response to a farewell poem by Wang Wei 王維 (ca. 699–ca. 761),
“Seeing Yuan’er Off to Anxi” (Song Yuan’er shi Anxi 送元二使安西), which men-
tions the pass. Wang’s poem was recorded as an example of Music Bureau po-
etry under the title “Song of Wei City” (Weicheng qu 渭城曲). Significantly, Li
Gonglin inscribed a poem on his painting that presented a new perspective on
friendship: while Wang’s poem mourns the loss of friendship, Li’s ends with the
possiblity of the renewal of friendships.22 I earlier mentioned a farewell paint-
ing of the early twelfth century that serves as a vehicle for emotional expres-
sion: Hu Shunchen’s Calligraphy and Painting for He Xuanming upon His
Dispatch to Qin, which includes poems by both the painter (who was likely a
member of Huizong’s Academy of Painting) and minister Cai Jing to the paint-
ing’s recipient; Cai’s poem suggests the continuation of their bond.23 Another
painting, The Red Cliff, by Li Gonglin’s nephew, Qiao Zhongchang, straightfor-
wardly addresses the subject of friendship in its pictorial imagery, beginning
with the premise that it will represent an experience shared by Su Shi and his
friends. Qiao’s handscroll includes a colophon dated 1123 by Zhao Lingzhi 趙令
畤 (1064–1134), one of Su Shi’s close friends.24
In fact, paintings on various subjects bear inscriptions that indicate they
were used as a vehicle for communication among friends. In the Song era, we
begin to see paintings with colophons that allude to these kinds of connec-
tions: for example, Mi Youren’s 米友仁 (1086–1165) landscape painting Cloudy
Mountains (Yunshan tu 雲山圖), which bears the painter’s inscription dedicat-
ing the work to an unnamed friend.25 In one especially complex case, three
22 Brotherton, “Two Farewell Paintings of the Late Northern Song,” 51; she includes transla-
tions of both Wang’s and Li’s poems. Wang’s poem is also translated in Owen, An Anthol-
ogy of Chinese Literature, 375; the Chinese text appears in YFSJ, 4:80.1139.
23 Brotherton, “Two Farewell Paintings of the Late Northern Song,” 55–56.
24 A recent article argues that the painting serves a memorial function and may have been
commissioned by Liang Shicheng 梁師成 (ca. 1063–1126), a eunuch at Huizong’s court
who claimed to be Su Shi’s “expelled son” (chuzi 出子); Lei Xue, “The Literati, the Eunuch,
and a Memorial: The Nelson-Atkins’s Red Cliff Handscroll Revisited,” Archives of Asian Art
66, no. 1 (2016): 25–49.
25 Sturman, “Mi Youren and the Inherited Literati Tradition,” 162–63. The painting’s inscrip-
tion is discussed in Loehr, “Chinese Paintings with Sung Dated Inscriptions,” 247. It is
reproduced in Eight Dynasties of Chinese Painting, cat. 24.

via free access
270 Conclusion
Northern Song friends used a painting of a scholar—The Ear-Picker (Tiao er tu

挑耳圖), also known as Collating Texts (Kan shu tu 勘書圖), attributed to
Southern Tang court painter Wang Qihan 王齊翰 (fl. 961–75)—as a catalyst for
political commentary. The handscroll bears the colophons of brothers Su Che
and Su Shi as well as their friend Wang Shen, attesting to the scroll’s circulation
among these men, their close connections to each other, and their use of the
scroll as the basis for personal expression and communication.26
Significantly, all of the examples listed above concern the interaction of
members of the literati or scholar-officials with painting, and some members
of this group considered that paintings of subjects from nature could reveal
the interiority of an artist, as revealed by their poems-on-paintings (tihua shi
題畫詩). For example, consider Su Shi’s poem for the scholar Song Di’s 宋迪
(ca. 1015–80) painting titled An Evening Landscape of the Xiao-Xiang Region
(Xiao Xiang wanjing tu 瀟湘晚景圖). It reveals that one group of the Northern
Song literati perceived the act of painting as a manifestation of a painter’s
thoughts:
What a vast expanse you embrace,

hills and rivers naturally bent and coiled.
Managed properly from the beginning,
the scattering and sprinkling should not be hard.
A river city, people and houses few,
a misty village with old trees in clusters.
I know you have hidden thoughts—
I look at the fine details to seek them.
落落君懷抱，山川自屈蟠。經營初有適，揮灑不應難。江市人家少，
煙村古木攢。知君有幽意，細細為尋看。27
26 De-nin D. Lee, “Colophons and Cultural Biography: Episodes from the Life of The Ear
Picker,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 126, no. 1 (January–March 2006): 53–60.
The painting and colophons are also discussed at length in Sturman, “In the Realm of
Naturalness,” 173–77. The seals and inscriptions are discussed in Loehr, “Chinese Paintings
with Sung Dated Inscriptions,” 235–36. The painting, a handscroll in ink and color on silk,
28.4 × 65.7 cm, belongs to the Department of History, Nanjing University; for a reproduc-
tion, see Zhongguo gudai shuhua jianding zubian 中國古代書畫鑑定組編, Zhongguo
gudai shuhua tumu 中國古代書畫圖目 [Illustrated Catalogue of Selected Works of
Ancient Chinese Painting and Calligraphy], 23 vols. (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1986–
2001), 6:304, 蘇 18–01.
27 Su Shi, “Song Fugu hua Xiao Xiang wan jing tu san shou 宋復古畫瀟湘晚景圖三首
[Song Di’s Painting of An Evening Scene of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers, Three Poems, 2/3],”

via free access
The painting unfortunately does not survive, but it was evidently a landscape
painting, possibly with content similar to Zhao Lingrang’s Whiling Away the
Summer by a Lakeside Retreat, given the poem’s mention of coiled rivers, a vil-
lage in mist, and clusters of trees. This poem demonstrates that in the Northern
Song, literati friends would study each other’s paintings, looking for evidence
of what the artist was thinking when he painted. At the same time, this paint-
ing which perhaps expressed Song Di’s ideas in pictorial form served as a ve-
hicle for poetic communication between these two friends.
The clear implication, then, is that we can understand certain Song paint-
ings as artifacts of interiority—as disclosed through subject matter that cor-
responds to poetry, through the written texts that they accrued, and through
the purposes that they served. What this may reveal about Song society is the
different priorities of different social classes. Themes of longing and desire—
of heteroerotic attachment—correlate with relationships defined by the hier-
archy of gender, and the fact that painting and poetry incorporating these
themes were predominantly created and enjoyed by members of the court, it-
self structured as a hierarchy, is undoubtedly not a coincidence. Because these
themes were often expressed through female figures, though, they must also
have seemed directly relevant to women—not only palace ladies, but also
women of literati families and courtesans. Members of the literati, on the other
hand, seem to have used themes of longing and desire in painting and poetry
as a means of addressing all sorts of emotional situations, including the bond
of homosocial friendship—a relationship that in its essential form was consid-
ered to eschew hierarchy and perhaps reflected increased social mobility in
the Tang–Song era.28 The fact that the literati from the Northern Song on be-
gan to turn to paintings of other subjects, especially nature, as vehicles for per-
sonal expression and discourse only affirms the high regard in middle imperial
China for paintings that addressed interiority in any form. Such works could
not only provide an outlet for pictorial and verbal expression, but also function
to strengthen bonds between people of various social groups, to affirm the
value of connection.
Su Shi shiji hezhu 2:17.876. My translation is based on Ronald Egan’s in “Poems on Paint-
ings,” 442; he discusses this poem’s claims about the inner life of the artist. See also Alfreda
Murck’s discussion of the poem in Poetry and Painting in Song China, 68; she analyzes it as
suggesting that paintings could reveal the painter’s character.
28 Anna Shields discusses the Confucian notion that friendship was a non-hierarchichal
relationship, the personal connections between literati during the Tang–Song transition,
and the ways that mid-Tang poets used themes of longing to stand for friendship in One
Who Knows Me, 18, 32–34, 55, 61–64, 165–67, 336. Peter Bol discusses the social mobility of
scholars in the Song dynasty in “This Culture of Ours,” 60, 341–42.

via free access
272 Conclusion

via free access
Works Cited
Works Cited 273
Works Cited
Allee, Stephen D., Joseph Chang, and Ingrid Larsen. Song and Yuan Dynasty Painting
and Calligraphy. Washington, D.C.: Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution,
2012. <http://www.freersackler.si.edu/publications/songyuan/>.
Allen, Joseph Roe, III. “From Saint to Singing Girl: The Rewriting of Lo-fu Narrative in
Chinese Literati Poetry.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 48, no. 2 (December 1988):
321–61.
Allen, Joseph Roe, III. In the Voice of Others: Chinese Music Bureau Poetry. Ann Arbor:
Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1992.
Alley, Rewi, trans. Bai Juyi: 200 Selected Poems. Beijing: New World Press, 1983.
Ang, John Kwang-ming. “Redating The Night Revels of Han Hsi-tsai 韓熙載 Attributed to
Ku Hung-chung 顧閎中 in the Peking, Palace Museum.” Master’s thesis, University
of Michigan, 1985.
Avril, Ellen B. Chinese Art in the Cincinnati Art Museum. Cincinnati: The Museum, 1997.
Bai, Qianshen. “Image as Word: A Study of Rebus Play in Song Painting (960–1279).”
Metropolitan Museum Journal 34 (1999): 57–72.
Barnhart, Richard M. Li Kung-lin’s “Classic of Filial Piety.” New York: The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, 1993.
Barnhart, Richard M., James Cahill, Wu Hung, Yang Xin, Nie Chongzheng, and Lang
Shaojun. Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting. New Haven and London: Yale
University Press; Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1997.
Baxandall, Michael. Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the
Social History of Pictorial Style. 2nd ed. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
1988.
Beretta, Ilva. “The World’s a Garden”: Garden Poetry of the English Renaissance. Acta
Universitatis Upsaliensis, Studia Anglistica Upsaliensa, vol. 84. Uppsala: S. Academiae
Upsaliensis; Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1993.
Bian Yongyu 卞永譽, comp. Shigutang hua kao 式古堂畫攷 [A Study of Paintings of the
Shigu Hall]. 30 juan. 1682. Reprint. In Shigutang shuhua kao 式古堂書畫攷 [A Study
of Calligraphy and Paintings of the Shigu Hall], compiled by Bian Yongyu. 60 juan.
Wuxing: Jiangu shushe, 1921. <http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/002334902>.
Bickford, Maggie. Bones of Jade, Soul of Ice: The Flowering Plum in Chinese Art. With
contributions by Mary Gardner Neill, Hans H. Frankel, Chang Ch’ung-ho and Hui-Lin
Li. New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1985.
Bickford, Maggie. “Emperor Huizong and the Aesthetic of Agency.” Archives of Asian Art
53 (2002–2003): 71–104.
Bickford, Maggie. “Huizong’s Paintings: Art and the Art of Emperorship.” In Emperor
Huizong and Late Northern Song China: The Politics of Culture and the Culture of
via free access
274 Works Cited
Politics, edited by Patricia Buckley Ebrey and Maggie Bickford, 453–513. Harvard East
Asian Monographs, no. 266. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Asia
Center, 2006.
Bickford, Maggie. Ink Plum: The Making of a Chinese Scholar-Painter Genre. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Birrell, Anne M. “The Dusty Mirror: Courtly Portraits of Woman in Southern Dynasties
Love Poetry.” In Expressions of Self in Chinese Literature, edited by Robert E. Hegel
and Richard C. Hessney, 33–69. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.
Birrell, Anne M., trans. New Songs from a Jade Terrace: An Anthology of Early Chinese
Love Poetry, Translated with Annotations and an Introduction. London, Boston, and
Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1982.
Birrell, Anne Margaret. “Erotic Decor: A Study of Love Imagery in the Sixth Century a.d.
Anthology: ‘Yu-t’ai hsin-yung’ 玉臺新詠 (New poems from a jade terrace).” Ph.D. diss.,
Columbia University, 1979.
Blanchard, Lara C. W. “Huizong’s New Clothes: Desire and Allegory in Court Ladies
Preparing Newly Woven Silk.” Ars Orientalis 36 (2006): 111–35.
Blanchard, Lara C. W. “Imagining Du Liniang in The Peony Pavilion: Female Painters,
Self-portraiture, and Paintings of Beautiful Women in Late Ming China.” In Women,
Gender and Art in Asia, ca. 1500–1900, edited by Melia Belli Bose, 125–46. London and
New York: Routledge, 2016.
Blanchard, Lara C. W. “Lonely Women and the Absent Man: The Masculine Landscape
as Metaphor in the Song Dynasty Painting of Women.” In Gendered Landscapes: An
Interdisciplinary Exploration of Past Place and Space, edited by Bonj Szczygiel,
Josephine Carubia, and Lorraine Dowler, 33–47. University Park, Penn.: The Center
for Studies in Landscape History, The Pennsylvania State University, 2000.
Blanchard, Lara C. W. “Mou Yi’s Pounding Cloth: Painting, Play, Reference, and Discourse
in Song China.” Artibus Asiae 73, no. 2 (2013): 295–341.
Blanchard, Lara C. W. “A Scholar in the Company of Female Entertainers: Changing
Notions of Integrity in Song to Ming Dynasty Painting.” NAN NÜ: Men, Women and
Gender in China 9, no. 2 (2007): 189–246.
Bodde, Derk. Festivals in Classical China: New Year and Other Annual Observances during
the Han Dynasty 206 b.c.–a.d. 220. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975.
Bodman, Richard Wainwright. “Poetics and Prosody in Early Mediaeval China: A Study
and Translation of Kūkai’s Bunkyō Hifuron.” Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1978.
Bol, Peter K. “This Culture of Ours”: Intellectual Transitions in T’ang and Sung China.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.
Bossler, Beverly. Courtesans, Concubines, and the Cult of Female Fidelity. Harvard-
Yenching Institute Monograph Series, no. 83. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard
University Asia Center, 2013.

via free access
Works Cited 275
Bossler, Beverly. “Shifting Identities: Courtesans and Literati in Song China.” Harvard
Journal of Asiatic Studies 62, no. 1 (2002): 5–37.
Bray, Francesca. Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China. Berkeley,
Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1997.
Brotherton, Elizabeth. “Two Farewell Handscrolls of the Late Northern Song.” Archives
of Asian Art 52 (2000–2001): 44–62.
Bryant, Daniel, trans. Lyric Poets of the Southern T’ang: Feng Yen-ssu, 903–960, and Li Yü,
937–978. Vancouver and London: University of British Columbia Press, 1982.
Bush, Susan. The Chinese Literati on Painting: Su Shih (1037–1101) to Tung Ch’i-ch’ang
(1555–1636). Harvard-Yenching Institute Studies, no. 27. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1971.
Bush, Susan, and Hsio-yen Shih, comp. and ed. Early Chinese Texts on Painting.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard-Yenching Institute, Harvard University Press, 1985.
Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge,
1993.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York:
Routledge, 1990.
Cahill, James. An Index of Early Chinese Painters and Paintings: T’ang, Sung, and Yüan.
Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1980.
Cahill, James. The Painter’s Practice: How Artists Lived and Worked in Traditional China.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Cahill, James. “Paintings Done for Women in Ming–Qing China?” NAN NÜ: Men, Women
and Gender in China 8, no. 1 (2006): 1–54.
Cahill, James. Pictures for Use and Pleasure: Vernacular Painting in High Qing China.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2010.
Cahill, James. “Types of Artist-Patron Transactions in Chinese Painting.” In Artists and
Patrons: Some Social and Economic Aspects of Chinese Painting, edited by Chu-tsing
Li, 7–20. Lawrence, Kans.: Kress Foundation Department of Art History, University
of Kansas; Kansas City, Mo.: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1989.
Cahill, James, Chen Fongfong, Sarah Handler, and Julia M. White. Beauty Revealed:
Images of Women in Qing Dynasty Chinese Painting. Berkeley: University of California
Press, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2013.
Center for the Art of East Asia. Digital Scrolling Paintings Project. Chicago: The University
of Chicago, 2013–. <https://scrolls.uchicago.edu/>.
Chang, Kang-i Sun. The Evolution of Chinese Tz’u Poetry: From Late T’ang to Northern
Sung. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.
Chang, Kang-i Sun. “Symbolic and Allegorical Meanings in the Yüeh-fu pu-t’i Poem
Series.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 46, no. 2 (1986): 353–85.
Chang, Kang-i Sun, and Haun Saussy, eds. Women Writers of Traditional China: An
Anthology of Poetry and Criticism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.

via free access
276 Works Cited
Chao, Chia-ying Yeh. “The Ch’ang-chou School of Tz’u Criticism.” In Chinese Approaches
to Literature: Confucius to Liang Ch’i-ch’ao, edited by Adele Austin Rickett, 151–88.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978.
Chase, W.T., and Ursula Martius Franklin. “Early Chinese Black Mirrors and Pattern-
Etched Weapons.” Ars Orientalis 11 (1979): 215–58.
Chen Pao-chen. “The Goddess of the Lo River: A Study of Early Chinese Narrative
Handscrolls.” 2 vols. Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1987.
Chen Wannai 陳萬鼐. “Zhi tan Yeyan tu 摭談夜宴圖 [Resuming Discussion of the
Painting Night Revels].” Gugong wenwu yuekan 故宮文物月刊 [The National Palace
Museum Monthly of Chinese Art], no. 24 (March 1985): 41–52.
Ching, Dora C. Y. “The Language of Portraiture in China.” In A Companion to Chinese
Art, ed. Martin J. Powers and Katherine R. Tsiang, 136–57. Wiley Blackwell Companions
to Art History, no. 8. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2016.
Ching, Julia. “Sung Philosophers on Women.” Monumenta Serica: Journal of Oriental
Studies 42 (1994): 259–74.
Ching Chung, Priscilla. Palace Women in the Northern Sung: 960–1126. Monographies du
T’oung Pao, no. 12. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1981.
Chou, Diana Yeongchau. A Study and Translation from the Chinese of Tang Hou’s “Huajian
(Examination of Painting).” Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2005.
Ciyuan 辭源 [The Source of Words]. 4 vols. in 1. Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1988.
Clunas, Craig. Art in China. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Clunas, Craig. Fruitful Sites: Garden Culture in Ming Dynasty China. Durham: Duke
Contag, Victoria, and Wang Ch’i-Ch’ien. Seals of Chinese Painters and Collectors of the
Ming and Ch’ing Periods, Reproduced in Facsimile Size and Deciphered. Rev. ed. Hong
Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1966.
Crawford, Rachel. “Troping the Subject: Behn, Smith, Hemans and the Poetics of the
Bower.” Studies in Romanticism 38, no.2 (Summer 1999): 249–79.
Cui Lingqin [Sai Reikin] and Sun Qi [Son Kei] 崔令欽、孫棨. Jiaofang ji, Beili zhi
[Kyoboki, Hokurishi] 教坊記、北里志 [Records of the Music Bureau; Records of the
Northern Ward]. Ca. 749, ca. 889. Reprint. Edited by Saitō Shigeru 斉藤茂. Tokyo:
Heibonsha, 1992.
Cyrus-Zetterström, Ulla. Textile Terminology: Chinese-English-French-Swedish. Borås,
Sweden: Centraltryckeriet Åke Svenson AB, 1995.
Delbanco, Dawn Ho. “The Romance of the Western Chamber: Min Qiji’s Album in
Cologne.” Orientations 14, no. 6 (June 1983): 12–23.
Deng Chun 鄧椿. Huaji 畫繼 [More on Painting]. 10 juan. 1167. Reprint. Beijing: Renmin
meishu chubanshe, 1963.
Diény, Jean-Pierre. “Les Dix-neuf poèmes anciens 古詩十九首.” Bulletin de la Maison
Franco-Japonaise, n.s. 7, no. 4 (1963) : 1–194.

via free access
Works Cited 277
Doane, Mary Ann. “Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator.” Screen
23, no. 3/4 (September/October 1982): 74–87.
Dong Shi 董史. Huang Song shulu 皇宋書錄 [Record of Calligraphy of the Imperial Song].
Ca. 1242. Reprint. Taipei: Yiwen yinshuguan, 1966.
Du Mu 都穆. Tiewang shanhu 鐵網珊瑚 [Iron Net for Coral]. 20 juan. 1758. Reprint. Taipei:
Guoli Zhongyang Tushuguan, 1970.
Du Wan 杜綰. Yunlin shipu 雲林石譜 [Stone Compendium of Cloudy Forest]. Ca. 1127–32.
Reprint. Taipei: Yiwen yinshuguan, 1966.
Eberhard, Wolfram. Dictionary of Chinese Symbols: Hidden Symbols in Chinese Life and
Thought. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986.
Ebrey, Patricia Buckley. The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in
the Sung Period. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993.
Ebrey, Patricia Buckley, and Maggie Bickford, eds. Emperor Huizong and Late Northern
Song China: The Politics of Culture and the Culture of Politics. Cambridge, Mass., and
London: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006.
Ecke, Tseng Yu-ho. “Emperor Hui Tsung, the Artist, 1082–1136.” Ph.D. diss., New York
University, 1972.
Edwards, Richard. The Heart of Ma Yuan: The Search for a Southern Song Aesthetic. Hong
Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011.
Edwards, Richard. “Mou I’s Colophon to His Pictorial Interpretation of ‘Beating the
Clothes.’” Archives of the Chinese Art Society of America 18 (1964): 7–12.
Egan, Charles. “Recent-Style Shi Poetry: Quatrains (Jueju).” In How to Read Chinese Poetry:
A Guided Anthology, edited by Zong-qi Cai, 199–225. New York: Columbia University
Press, 2008.
Egan, Ronald. The Burden of Female Talent: The Poet Li Qingzhao and Her History in China.
Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series, no. 90. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Asia Center, 2013.
Egan, Ronald. “Conceptual and Qualitative Terms in Historical Perspective.” In A
Companion to Chinese Art, ed. Martin J. Powers and Katherine R. Tsiang, 277–92. Wiley
Blackwell Companions to Art History, no. 8. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2016.
Egan, Ronald. “Huizong’s Palace Poems.” In Emperor Huizong and Late Northern Song
China: The Politics of Culture and the Culture of Politics, edited by Patricia Buckley
Ebrey and Maggie Bickford, 361–94. Harvard East Asian Monographs, no. 266.
Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006.
Egan, Ronald. The Problem of Beauty: Aesthetic Thought and Pursuits in Northern Song
Dynasty China. Harvard East Asian Monographs, no. 271. Cambridge, Mass., and
London: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006.
Egan, Ronald C. The Literary Works of Ou-yang Hsiu (1007–72). Cambridge and London:
Cambridge University Press, 1984.

via free access
278 Works Cited
Egan, Ronald C. “Poems on Paintings: Su Shih and Huang T’ing-chien.” Harvard Journal
of Asiatic Studies 43, no. 2 (1983): 413–51.
Egan, Ronald C. “The Problem of the Repute of Tz’u during the Northern Sung.” In Voices
of the Song Lyric in China, edited by Pauline Yu, 191–225. Studies on China, no. 18.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994.
Egan, Ronald C. Word, Image, and Deed in the Life of Su Shi. Harvard-Yenching Institute
Monograph Series, no. 39. Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard
University, and the Harvard-Yenching Institute, 1994.
Eight Dynasties of Chinese Painting: The Collections of the Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum,
Kansas City, and The Cleveland Museum of Art. With essays by Wai-kam Ho, Sherman
E. Lee, Laurence Sickman, and Marc F. Wilson. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art,
1980.
Eoyang, Eugene. “The Wang Chao-chün Legend: Configurations of the Classic.” Chinese
Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 4, no. 1 (January 1982): 3–22.
Fan Shu 范攄. Yunxi youyi 雲溪友議 [Discussions of Friends of Clouds and Streams].
Shanghai: Gudian wenxue chubanshe, 1957.
Fan Xiwen 范晞文, comp. Duichuang yeyu 對牀夜語 [Night Chats Facing My Bed].
Reprint. Congshu jicheng chubian, edited by Wang Yunwu 王雲五, no. 2573. Changsha:
Shangwu yinshuguan, 1937.
Finney, Gail. The Counterfeit Idyll: The Garden Ideal and Social Reality in Nineteenth-
Century Fiction. Studien zur deutschen Literatur, vol. 81. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer,
1984.
Fong, Grace S. “Engendering the Lyric: Her Image and Voice in Song.” In Voices of the
Song Lyric in China, edited by Pauline Yu, 107–44. Studies on China, no. 18. Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994.
Fong, Mary H. “Images of Women in Traditional Chinese Painting.” Woman’s Art Journal
17, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 1996): 22–27.
Fong, Wen C. Beyond Representation: Chinese Painting and Calligraphy 8th–14th Century.
New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.
Frankel, Hans H. “Cai Yan and the Poems Attributed to Her.” Chinese Literature: Essays,
Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 5, no. 1/2 (July 1983): 133–56.
Frankel, Hans H. “Fifteen Poems by Ts’ao Chih: An Attempt at a New Approach.” Journal
of the American Oriental Society 84, no. 1 (January–March, 1964): 1–14.
Frankel, Hans H. The Flowering Plum and the Palace Lady: Interpretations of Chinese
Poetry. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976.
Fusek, Lois, trans. Among the Flowers: The “Hua-chien chi.” New York: Columbia University
Press, 1982.
Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York:
HarperCollins/Routledge, 1992.

via free access
Works Cited 279
Gernet, Jacques. Daily Life in China, on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion, 1250–1276.
Translated by H.M. Wright. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962.
Graham, A.C. Studies in Chinese Philosophy & Philosophical Literature. Singapore:
Institute of East Asian Philosophies, 1986.
Graham, William T. Jr. “Mi Heng’s Rhapsody on a Parrot.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic
Studies 39, no. 1 (June 1979): 39–54.
Granet, Marcel. “Chansons d’amour de la vieille Chine.” Revue des arts asiatiques 2, no.
3 (September 1925): 24–40.
Granet, Marcel. Fêtes et chansons anciennes de la Chine. 2nd ed. Paris: Librairie Ernest
Leroux, 1929.
Gotfrit, Leslie. “Women Dancing Back: Disruption and the Politics of Pleasure.” In
Postmodernism, Feminism, and Cultural Politics, edited by Henry A. Giroux, 174–95.
Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991.
Gugong Bowuyuan 故宮博物院. Gugong Bowuyuan canghua ji 故宮博物院藏畫集 [The
Painting Collection of the Palace Museum]. 8 vols. Beijing: Renmin meishu chubanshe,
1978–91.
Gulik, Robert Hans van. Chinese Pictorial Art as Viewed by the Connoisseur. Rome:
Instituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriento, 1958. Reprint. Taipei: Southern
Materials Center, 1981.
Gulik, Robert Hans van. Sexual Life in Ancient China: A Preliminary Survey of Chinese
Sex and Society from ca. 1500 b.c. till 1644 a.d. Sinica Leidensia, no. 57. Reprint. Leiden:
Brill, 2003.
Guo Maoqian 郭茂倩, ed. Yuefu shiji 樂府詩集 [A Collection of Music Bureau Poetry].
4 vols. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1979.
Guo Ruoxu 郭若虛. Tuhua jianwen zhi 圖畫見聞誌 [Experiences in Painting]. In Kuo
Jo-hsü’s Experiences in Painting (Tu-hua chien-wên chih): An Eleventh Century History
of Chinese Painting Together with the Chinese Text in Facsimile, translated by Alexander
C. Soper. 6 juan. Washington, D.C.: American Council of Learned Societies, 1951.
Guo Xi and Guo Si 郭熙、郭思. Linquan gaozhi 林泉高致 [The Lofty Message of Forests
and Streams]. Reprint. In Zhongguo hualun leibian 中國畫論類編 [Categorized
Discussions of Chinese Paintings], edited by Yu Kun 俞崑 [Yu Jianhua 俞劍華], 1:631–
50. Taipei: Huazheng shuju, 1984.
Guoli Gugong Bowuyuan 國立故宮博物院. Gugong shuhua jinghua teji 故宮書畫菁華
特輯 [Catalogue to the Treasured Paintings and Calligraphic Works in the National
Palace Museum]. Translated by Donald E. Brix. Taipei: Guoli Gugong Bowuyuan, 1996.
Guoli Gugong Bowuyuan 國立故宮博物院. Gugong shuhua lu 故宮書畫錄 [Record of
Calligraphy and Painting in the Palace Museum]. 4 vols. Rev. ed. Taipei: Taiwan shang-
wu yinshuguan, 1965.

via free access
280 Works Cited
Guoli Gugong Bowuyuan 國立故宮博物院. Gugong shuhua tulu 故宮書畫圖錄 [A Cata

logue of Chinese Painting and Calligraphy in the National Palace Museum]. 20 vols.
Taipei: Guoli Gugong Bowuyuan, 1989–.
Guoli Gugong Bowuyuan and Guoli Zhongyang Bowuyuan 國立故宮博物院、國立中
央博物院 . Gugong minghua sanbai zhong 故宮名畫三百種 [Three Hundred
Masterpieces of Chinese Painting in the Palace Museum]. 6 vols. Taichung, Taiwan:
Guoli Gugong, Zhongyang Bowuyuan gongtong lishihui, 1959.
Hall, David L., and Roger T. Ames. “The Cosmological Setting of Chinese Gardens.”
Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes 18, no. 3 (Autumn 1998):
175–86.
Hammers, Roslyn Lee. Pictures of Tilling and Weaving: Art, Labor, and Technology in Song
and Yuan China. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011.
Handler, Sarah. “The Chinese Screen: Movable Walls to Divide, Enhance, and Beautify.”
Journal of the Classical Chinese Furniture Society 3, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 4–31.
Hansen, Chad. “Qing (Emotions) 情 in Pre-Buddhist Chinese Thought.” In Emotions in
Asian Thought: A Dialogue in Comparative Philosophy, edited by Joel Marks and Roger
T. Ames, 181–211. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995.
Harrist, Robert E. Jr. “Ch’ien Hsüan’s Pear Blossoms: The Tradition of Flower Painting
and Poetry from Sung to Yüan.” Metropolitan Museum Journal 22 (1987): 53–70.
Harrist, Robert E. Jr. “I Don’t Believe in the Literati but I Miss Them: A Postscript.” Ars
Orientalis 37 (2007): 213–17.
Harrist, Robert E. Jr. Painting and Private Life in Eleventh-Century China: “Mountain Villa”
by Li Gonglin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.
Hartman, Charles. “Cao Xun and the Legend of Emperor Taizu’s Oath.” In State Power
in China, 900–1325, edited by Patricia Buckley Ebrey and Paul Jakov Smith, 62–98.
Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2016.
Hawes, Colin S.C. The Social Circulation of Poetry in the Mid-Northern Song: Emotional
Energy and Literati Self-Cultivation. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005.
Hawkes, David, trans. Ch’u Tz’u: The Songs of the South, an Ancient Chinese Anthology.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959.
Hay, John. “Along the River during Winter’s First Snow: A Tenth Century Handscroll of
an Early Chinese Narrative.” The Burlington Magazine 114 (May 1972): 294–303.
Hay, John. “The Body Invisible in Chinese Art?” In Body, Subject and Power in China,
edited by Angela Zito and Tani E. Barlow, 42–77. Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 1994.
Hay, John. “Chinese Fan Painting.” In Chinese Painting and the Decorative Style, edited
by Margaret Medley, 95–117. Colloquies on Art & Archaeology in Asia, no. 5. London:
Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art, School of Oriental and African Studies,
University of London, 1975.

via free access
Works Cited 281
Hay, John. Kernels of Energy, Bones of Earth: The Rock in Chinese Art. New York: China
House Gallery, China Institute in America, 1985.
He Wei 何薳. Chunzhu jiwen 春渚紀聞 [Record of Things Heard on a Spring Islet]. Beijing:
Zhonghua shuju, 1983.
Hearn, Maxwell K. Along the Riverbank: Chinese Paintings from the C.C. Wang Family
Collection. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1999.
Hightower, James R. “The Songwriter Liu Yung.” Parts 1, 2. Harvard Journal of Asiatic
Studies 41, no. 2 (1981): 323–76; 42, no. 1 (1982): 5–66.
Hinton, David, trans. The Selected Poems of Tu Fu. New York: New Directions Books, 1989.
Hinton, David, trans. and ed. Classical Chinese Poetry: An Anthology. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2008.
Ho, Wai-kam. “Aspects of Chinese Painting from 1100 to 1350.” In Eight Dynasties of
Chinese Painting: The Collections of the Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, Kansas City,
and The Cleveland Museum of Art, xxv–xxxiv. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art,
1980.
Ho, Wai-kam [He Huijian 何惠鑑]. “Danyan Jushi Zhang Cheng kaolüe, bing lun Mo
Zhou Wenju Gongzhong tujuan ba hou zhi ‘Junsima yin’ ji qita weiyin 澹巖居士張澂
考略並論《摹周文矩宮中圖卷》跋後之‘軍司馬印’及其他偽印 [A Brief Investi
gation of Danyan Jushi Zhang Cheng, along with a Discussion of the ‘Junsima yin’
and Other Spurious Seals Stamped after the Colophon to the Handscroll In the Palace,
a Copy after Zhou Wenju].” Shanghai Bowuguan jikan 上海博物館季刊 4 (1987):
35–50.
Hong Xingzu 洪興祖, ed. Chuci buzhu 楚辭補註 [Annotated “Songs of Chu”]. Reprint.
Taipei: Yiwen yinshuguan, 1973.
Hsieh, Daniel. Love and Women in Early Chinese Fiction. Hong Kong: Chinese University
Press, 2008.
Hsu Wen-Chin. “Representations of the Romance of the Western Chamber in Chinese
Woodblock Prints and Ceramics.” Asian Culture Quarterly, no. 4 (1991): 21–34.
Hu Jing 胡敬 et al., comp. Bidian zhulin / Shiqu baoji sanbian 秘殿珠林石渠寶笈三編
[Beaded Grove of the Secret Hall / Precious Bookcase of the Stone Channel, Third Com
pilation]. 1816. Reprint. 10 vols. Taipei: Guoli Gugong Bowuyuan, 1969.
Huang, Martin W. “Sentiments of Desire: Thoughts on the Cult of Qing in Ming–Qing
Literature.” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 20 (December 1998):
153–84.
Hucker, Charles O. A Dictionary of Official Titles in Imperial China. Stanford: Stanford
I Lo-fen [Yi Ruofen] 衣若芬. “Bei Song ti shinü huashi xilun 北宋題仕女畫詩析論
[Analysis of Northern Song Paintings and Poems on Women].” In Chuancheng yu
chuangxin: Zhongyang Yanjiuyuan Zhongguo Wenzhe Yanjiusuo shi zhounian jinian
lunwenji 傳承與創新：中央研究院中國文哲研究所十周年紀念論文集 [Tradition

via free access
282 Works Cited
and Innovation: Essays Commemorating the Tenth Anniversary of the Institute of Chi
nese Literature and Philosophy at Academia Sinica], 301–80. Taipei: Institute of Chi
nese Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica, 1999.
I Lo-fen [Yi Ruofen] 衣若芬. “Guiyuan yu xiangsi: Mou Yi Dao yi tu de jiedu 閨怨與相
思：牟益『擣衣圖』的解讀 [Melancholy Longings of the Boudoir: A Reading of
Mou Yi’s Painting ‘Pounding Cloth’].” Zhongguo wenzhe yanjiu jikan 中國文哲研究
季刊, no. 25 (September 2004): 25–59.
Idema, Wilt, and Beata Grant. The Red Brush: Writing Women of Imperial China.
Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004.
Irigaray, Luce. “Any Theory of the ‘Subject’ Has Always Been Appropriated by the
‘Masculine.’” In Speculum of the Other Woman, translated by Gillian C. Gill, 133–46.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.
Jao Tsong-yi [Rao Zongyi] 饒宗頤 and Paul Demiéville. Airs de Touen-houang (Touen-
houang k’iu 敦煌曲). Paris: Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1971.
Kao, Arthur Mu-sen [Gao Musen] 高木森. “Lun Han Xizai yeyan tu 論『韓熙載夜宴圖』
[A Study on the Han Hsi-tsai’s Night Banquet].” Dongwu Daxue Zhongguo yishushi
jikan 東吳大學中國藝術史集刊 [Soochow University Journal of Chinese Art History]
12 (October 1982): 1–15.
Kao, Arthur Mu-sen [Gao Musen] 高木森. “Shiren hua de qingchou yu yaxing—Jinchao
yu Nan Song shiren hua de shiqing 士人畫的清愁與雅興–金朝與南宋士人畫的
詩情 [Pure Melancholy and Refined Enthusiasm of Literati Paintings: Poetic
Sentiment of Literati Paintings of the Jin and Southern Song Dynasties].” Gugong
wenwu yuekan 故宮文物月刊 [The National Palace Museum Monthly of Chinese Art],
no. 59 (February 1988): 68–77.
Karlgren, Bernhard. “Early Chinese Mirror Inscriptions.” Bulletin of the Museum of Far
Eastern Antiquities, no. 6 (1934): 9–79.
Kishibe Shigeo 岸邊成雄. Tōdai ongaku no rekishiteki kenkyū 唐代音樂の歷史的研究
[Research on the History of Tang Dynasty Music]. Tōkyō: Tōkyō Daigaku shuppankai,
1960.
Knechtges, David R. “The Poetry of an Imperial Concubine: The Favorite Beauty Ban.”
Oriens Extremus 36, no. 2 (1993): 127–44.
Knechtges, David R. “Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju’s ‘Tall Gate Palace Rhapsody.’” Harvard Journal
of Asiatic Studies 41, no. 1 (June 1981): 47–64.
Kracke, E.A. Jr. Civil Service in Early Sung China, 960–1067; with Particular Emphasis on
the Development of Controlled Sponsorship to Foster Administrative Responsibility.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953.
Kroll, Paul W. A Student’s Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese. Handbook of
Oriental Studies, no. 30. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015.

via free access
Works Cited 283
Kurz, Johannes L. “Han Xizai (902–970): An Eccentric Life in Exciting Times.” In Five
Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, edited by Peter Lorge, 79–99. Hong Kong: Chinese Uni
versity Press, 2011.
Laing, Ellen Johnston. “Chinese Palace-Style Poetry and the Depiction of A Palace
Beauty.” The Art Bulletin 72, no. 1 (March 1990): 284–95.
Laing, Ellen Johnston. “Erotic Themes and Romantic Heroines Depicted by Ch’iu Ying.”
Archives of Asian Art 49 (1996): 68–91.
Laing, Ellen Johnston. “Neo-Taoism and the ‘Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove’ in
Chinese Painting.” Artibus Asiae 36, no. 1/2 (1974): 1–54.
Laing, Ellen Johnston. “Notes on Ladies Wearing Flowers in Their Hair.” Orientations 21,
no. 2 (February 1990): 32–39.
Lam, Lap. “A Reconsideration of Liu Yong and His ‘Vulgar’ Lyrics.” Journal of Song-Yuan
Studies 33 (2003): 1–47.
Landau, Julie, trans. Beyond Spring: Tz’u Poems of the Sung Dynasty. Translations from
the Asian Classics. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Lawton, Thomas. “Obituary: Wai-kam Ho (1924–2004).” Artibus Asiae 65, no. 1 (2005):
143–51.
Ledderose, Lothar. “The Earthly Paradise: Religious Elements in Chinese Landscape Art.”
In Theories of the Arts in China, edited by Susan Bush and Christian Murck, 165–83.
Lee, De-nin D. “Colophons and Cultural Biography: Episodes from the Life of The Ear
Picker.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 126, no. 1 (January–March 2006):
51–75.
Lee, De-nin D. The Night Banquet: A Chinese Scroll through Time. Seattle and London:
University of Washington Press, 2010.
Lee, Hui-shu. “The Domain of Empress Yang (1162–1233): Art, Gender and Politics at the
Southern Song Court.” 2 vols. Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1994.
Lee, Hui-shu. “The Emperor’s Lady Ghostwriters in Song-Dynasty China.” Artibus Asiae
64, no.1 (2004): 61–101.
Lee, Hui-shu. Empresses, Art, and Agency in Song Dynasty China. Seattle and London:
University of Washington Press, 2010.
Lee, Lily Xiao Hong, and Sue Wiles, eds. Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women,
Volume II: Tang through Ming, 618–1644. University of Hong Kong Libraries
Publications, no. 25. London and New York: Routledge, 2015.
Lei Xue. “The Literati, the Eunuch, and a Memorial: The Nelson-Atkins’s Red Cliff Hand
scroll Revisited.” Archives of Asian Art 66, no. 1 (2016): 25–49.
Leung, Irene S. “The Frontier Imaginary in the Song Dynasty (960–1279): Revisiting Cai
Yan’s Barbarian Captivity and Return.” Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2001.
Levy, Dore J. Chinese Narrative Poetry: The Late Han through T’ang Dynasties. Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 1988.

via free access
284 Works Cited
Levy, Howard S. “The Career of Yang Kuei-fei 楊貴妃.” T’oung Pao 45, no. 4/5 (1957):
451–89.
Li Chi. “The Changing Concept of the Recluse in Chinese Literature.” Harvard Journal
of Asiatic Studies 24 (1962–1963): 234–47.
Li Diaoyuan 李調元. Zhujia canghua bu 諸家藏畫簿 [Register of the Zhu Family Painting
Collection]. 10 juan. 1778. Reprint. In Hanhai 函海 [Sea of Letters], edited by Li Yucun
李雨村, vol. 30. Taipei: Hongye shuju, 1968.
Li Song 李松. Wudai Gu Hongzhong “Han Xizai yeyan tu” 五代顧閎中韓熙載夜宴圖
[“Night Revels of Han Xizai” by Gu Hongzhong of the Five Dynasties]. Beijing: Bamin
meishu chubanshe, 1979.
Li, Wai-yee. “Dream Visions of Transcendence in Chinese Literature and Painting.” Asian
Art (Fall 1990): 53–78.
Li, Wai-yee. Enchantment and Disenchantment: Love and Illusion in Chinese Literature.
Liang Shih-chiu 梁實秋, ed. A New Practical Chinese-English Dictionary (Zuixin shiyong
Han-Ying cidian 最新實用漢英辭典). Taipei: Far East Book Co., 1971.
Lin, Shuen-fu. “The Formation of a Distinct Generic Identity for Tz’u.” In Voices of the
Song Lyric in China, edited by Pauline Yu, 3–29. Studies on China, no. 18. Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994.
Lipking, Lawrence. Abandoned Women in Poetic Tradition. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1988.
Little, Stephen. Spirit Stones of China: The Ian and Susan Wilson Collection of Chinese
Stones, Paintings, and Related Scholars’ Objects. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago,
1999.
Liu, Heping. “Painting and Commerce in Northern Song Dynasty China, 960–1126.” Ph.D.
diss., Yale University, 1997.
Liu I-ch’ing. Shih-shuo Hsin-yü: A New Account of Tales of the World. Translated with an
introduction by Richard B. Mather. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976.
Liu, James J.Y. The Art of Chinese Poetry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.
Liu, James J.Y. The Interlingual Critic: Interpreting Chinese Poetry. Bloomington: Indiana
Liu, James J.Y. Major Lyricists of the Northern Sung, a.d. 960–1126. Princeton: Princeton
Liu Wu-chi and Irving Yucheng Lo, eds. Sunflower Splendor: Three Thousand Years of
Chinese Poetry. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1975.
Liu Xie 劉勰. The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons: A Study of Thought and
Pattern in Chinese Literature (Wenxin diaolong 文心雕龍). Translated and annotated
by Vincent Yu-chung Shih. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1983.

via free access
Works Cited 285
Liu Xie 劉勰. Xinyi “Wenxin diaolong” 新譯文心雕龍 [New Interpretation of “The Literary
Mind and the Carving of Dragons”]. 10 juan. Reprint. Edited by Luo Ligan 羅立乾.
Taipei: Sanmin shuju, 1996.
Liu Yiqing 劉義慶. Shishuo xinyu 世說新語 [A New Account of Tales of the World]. 2 vols.
Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1982.
Loehr, Max. “Chinese Paintings with Sung Dated Inscriptions.” Ars Orientalis: The Arts
of Islam and the East 4 (1961): 219–84.
Loewe, Michael, ed. Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide. Early China Special
Monograph Series, no. 2. Berkeley: The Society for the Study of Early China and the
Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1993.
Luo Zhufeng 羅竹風, ed. Hanyu da cidian 漢語大詞典 [The Great Chinese Dictionary].
12 vols. Shanghai: Shanghai cishu chubanshe, 1986–.
Maeda, Robert J., trans. Two Sung Texts on Chinese Painting and the Landscape Styles of
the 11th and 12th Centuries. New York: Garland Publishing, 1978.
Mair, Victor H., ed. The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994.
Mair, Victor H., ed. The Columbia History of Chinese Literature. New York: Columbia
Mann, Susan. “Presidential Address: Myths of Asian Womanhood.” Journal of Asian
Studies 59, no. 4 (November 2000): 835–62.
Mathews’ Chinese-English Dictionary. Rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1956.
McCausland, Shane. First Masterpiece of Chinese Painting: The Admonitions Scroll. New
York: George Braziller, 2003.
McCausland, Shane, ed. Gu Kaizhi and the Admonitions Scroll. Colloquies on Art &
Archaeology in Asia, no. 21. London: The British Museum Press, 2003.
Meng Yuanlao 孟元老. Dongjing meng hua lu 東京夢華錄 [Bright Dreams of Kaifeng].
Beijing: Zhongguo shangye chubanshe, 1982.
Mi Fu 米芾. Huashi 畫史 [Painting History]. Reprint. In Meishu congshu 美術叢書 [Fine
Arts Series] 10, 1–58. Edited by Huang Binhong and Deng Shi 黃賓虹、鄧實. [Taipei]:
Yiwen yinshuguan, [1947].
Miao, Ronald C. “Palace-Style Poetry: The Courtly Treatment of Glamour and Love.” In
Studies in Chinese Poetry and Poetics, edited by Ronald C. Miao, 1–42. San Francisco:
Chinese Materials Center, 1978.
Miao, Ronald C. “T’ang Frontier Poetry; An Exercise in Archetypal Criticism.” Qinghua
xuebao 清華學報 (Tsing Hua Journal of Chinese Studies) 10, no. 2 (July 1974): 114–41.
Minford, John, and Joseph S.M. Lau, eds. Classical Chinese Literature: An Anthology of
Translations. Volume 1: From Antiquity to the Tang Dynasty. New York: Columbia
University Press; Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2000.

via free access
286 Works Cited
Muller, Deborah Del Gais. “Hsia Wen-yen and His T’u-hui pao-chien (Precious Mirror of
Painting).” Ars Orientalis 18 (1988): 131–48.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18.
Murck, Alfreda. “The Convergence of Gu Kaizhi and Admonitions in the Literary Record.”
In Gu Kaizhi and the Admonitions Scroll, edited by Shane McCausland, 138–45.
Colloquies on Art & Archaeology in Asia, no. 21. London: The British Museum Press,
2003.
Murck, Alfreda. Poetry and Painting in Song China: The Subtle Art of Dissent. Harvard-
Yenching Institute Monograph Series, no. 50. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard
Murray, Julia K. “Didactic Art for Women: The Ladies’ Classic of Filial Piety.” In Flowering
in the Shadows: Women in the History of Chinese and Japanese Painting, edited by
Marsha Weidner, 27–53. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1990.
Murray, Julia K. “The Ladies’ Classic of Filial Piety and Sung Textual Illustration: Problems
of Reconstruction and Artistic Context.” Ars Orientalis 18 (1988): 95–129.
Murray, Julia K. “Sung Kao-tsung as Artist and Patron: The Theme of Dynastic Revival.”
In Artists and Patrons: Some Social and Economic Aspects of Chinese Painting, edited
by Chu-tsing Li, 27–34. Lawrence, Kans.: Kress Foundation Department of Art History,
University of Kansas; Kansas City, Mo.: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1989.
Murray, Julia K. “What Is ‘Chinese Narrative Illustration’?” The Art Bulletin 80, no. 4
(December 1998): 602–15.
Murray, Julia K. “Who Was Zhang Hua’s ‘Instructress’?” In Gu Kaizhi and the Admonitions
Scroll, edited by Shane McCausland, 100–107. Colloquies on Art & Archaeology in
Asia, no. 21. London: The British Museum Press, 2003.
National Palace Museum and National Central Museum. Signatures and Seals on
Painting and Calligraphy: The Signatures and Seals of Artists, Connoisseurs and
Collectors on Painting and Calligraphy Since Tsin Dynasty [Jin Tang yilai shuhuajia
jiancangjia kuanyinpu 金唐以來書畫家鑑藏家款印普]. 5 vols. Kowloon, Hong Kong:
Arts & Literature Press, 1964.
Nelson, Susan E. “On Through to the Beyond: The Peach Blossom Spring as Paradise.”
Archives of Asian Art 39 (1986): 23–47.
Niedermeier, Michael. “‘Strolling under Palm Trees’: Gardens—Love—Sexuality.”
Translated by Michael and Louise Davidson-Schmich. Journal of Garden History 17,
no. 3 (Autumn 1997): 186–205.
Nienhauser, William H. Jr. “T’ang Tales.” In The Columbia History of Chinese Literature,
edited by Victor H. Mair, 579–94. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.
Ortiz, Valérie Malenfer. Dreaming the Southern Song Landscape: The Power of Illusion in
Chinese Painting. Studies in Asian Art and Archaeology, no. 22. Leiden: Brill, 1999.
Owen, Stephen. The End of the Chinese ‘Middle Ages’: Essays in Mid-Tang Literary Culture.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.

via free access
Works Cited 287
Owen, Stephen. The Great Age of Chinese Poetry: The High T’ang. New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 1981.
Owen, Stephen. “Meaning the Words: The Genuine as a Value in the Tradition of the
Song Lyric.” In Voices of the Song Lyric in China, edited by Pauline Yu, 30–69. Studies
on China, no. 18. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994.
Owen, Stephen. Readings in Chinese Literary Thought. Harvard-Yenching Institute
Monograph Series, no. 30. Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard
University, 1992.
Owen, Stephen, ed. and trans. An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911. New
York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996.
Peng Dingqiu 彭定求 et al., ed. Quan Tang shi 全唐詩 [Complete Tang Poems]. 900 juan.
1907. Reprint. 12 vols. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1960.
Powers, Martin J. Art and Political Expression in Early China. New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 1991.
Powers, Martin J. “Discourses of Representation in Tenth and Eleventh Century China.”
In The Art of Interpreting, edited by Susan C. Scott, 88–127. Papers in Art History from
the Pennsylvania State University, no. 9. University Park: Department of Art History,
Pennsylvania State University, 1995.
Powers, Martin J. “Love and Marriage in Song China: Tao Yuanming Comes Home.” Ars
Orientalis 28 (1998): 51–62.
Raphals, Lisa. Sharing the Light: Representations of Women and Virtue in Early China.
SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture, edited by David L. Hall and Roger
T. Ames. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998.
Ren Bantang 任半塘 [Ren Na 任訥], ed. Dunhuang geci zongbian 敦煌歌詞總編
[A Corpus of Song’s Words in Dunhuang Manuscripts]. Reprint. 3 vols. Shanghai:
Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1987.
Rexroth, Kenneth, trans. One Hundred Poems from the Chinese. New York: New Directions
Publishing, 1971.
Rexroth, Kenneth, and Ling Chung, trans. Li Ch’ing-chao: Complete Poems. New York:
New Directions Publishing, 1979.
Roberts, Laurance P. The Bernard Berenson Collection of Oriental Art at Villa I Tatti. With
essays by Sir Harold Acton, Walter Kaiser and John M. Rosenfield. New York: Hudson
Hills Press, 1991.
Robertson, Maureen. “Changing the Subject: Gender and Self-inscription in Authors’
Prefaces and Shi Poetry.” In Writing Women in Late Imperial China, edited by Ellen
Widmer and Kang-i Sun Chang, 171–217. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.
Robertson, Maureen. “Voicing the Feminine: Constructions of the Gendered Subject in
Lyric Poetry by Women of Medieval and Late Imperial China.” Late Imperial China
13, no. 1 (June 1992): 63–110.

via free access
288 Works Cited
Rogers, Howard. “Second Thoughts on Multiple Recensions.” Kaikodo Journal, no. 5

(Autumn 1997): 46–62.
Ropp, Paul S. “Ambiguous Images of Courtesan Culture in Late Imperial China.” In
Writing Women in Late Imperial China, edited by Ellen Widmer and Kang-i Sun Chang,
17–45. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.
Rorex, Robert A., and Wen Fong. Eighteen Songs of a Nomad Flute: The Story of Lady
Wen-chi, a Fourteenth Century Handscroll in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New
York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1974.
Rotours, Robert des, trans. Courtisanes chinoises à la fin des T’ang, entre circa 789 et le 8
janvier 881, Pei-li tche (Anecdotes du quartier du Nord) [Beili zhi]. Bibliothèque de
l’Institut des hautes études chinoises, no. 22. Paris: Presses universitaires de France,
1968.
Rouzer, Paul F. Articulated Ladies: Gender and the Male Community in Early Chinese Texts.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001.
Rouzer, Paul F. Writing Another’s Dream: The Poetry of Wen Tingyun. Stanford: Stanford
Ruan Yuan 阮元, ed. Liji zhushu 禮記注疏 [Annotated “Book of Rites”]. Shisanjing zhushu
edition. 1815. <http://hanchi.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/ihp/hanji.htm>.
Ruan Yuan 阮元, ed. Lunyu zhushu 論語注疏 [Annotated “Analects”]. Shisanjing zhushu
edition. 1815. <http://hanchi.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/ihp/hanji.htm>.
Ruan Yuan 阮元, ed. Maoshi zhengyi 毛詩正義 [Commentary on Mao’s “Songs”].
Shisanjing zhushu edition. 1815. <http://hanchi.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/ihp/hanji.htm>.
Samei, Maija Bell. Gendered Persona and Poetic Voice: The Abandoned Woman in Early
Chinese Song Lyrics. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2004.
Schafer, Edward H. The Divine Woman: Dragon Ladies and Rain Maidens in T’ang
Literature. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973.
Schafer, Edward H. “The Early History of Lead Pigments and Cosmetics in China.” T’oung
Pao 44, no. 4–5 (1956): 413–38.
Shandong Sheng Bowuguan 山東省博物館. “Fajue Ming Zhu Tan mu jishi 發掘明朱檀
墓紀實 [Report on the Excavation of the Ming Tomb of Zhu Tan].” Wenwu 文物
[Cultural Relics], no. 192 (May 1972): 25–36.
Sheng, Angela Yu-yun. “Textile Use, Technology, and Change in Rural Textile Production
in Song China (960–1279).” Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1990.
Shiba Yoshinobu. Commerce and Society in Sung China. Translated by Mark Elvin.
Michigan Abstracts of Chinese and Japanese Works on Chinese History, no. 2. Ann
Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1970.
Shields, Anna M. Crafting a Collection: The Cultural Contexts and Poetic Practice of the
Huajian Ji (Collection from Among the Flowers). Harvard East Asian Monographs, no.
263. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006.

via free access
Works Cited 289
Shields, Anna M. One Who Knows Me: Friendship and Literary Culture in Mid-Tang China.
Harvard-Yenching Institute Monographs, no. 96. Cambridge, Mass., and London:
Harvard University Asia Center, 2015.
Shih, Hsio-yen. “Poetry Illustration and the Works of Ku K’ai-chih.” In The Translation
of Art: Essays on Chinese Painting and Poetry, edited by James C.Y. Watt, 6–29.
Renditions, no. 6. Hong Kong: Centre for Translation Projects, Chinese University of
Hong Kong, 1976.
Silbergeld, Jerome. China into Film: Frames of Reference in Contemporary Chinese Cinema.
London: Reaktion Books, 1999.
Silbergeld, Jerome. “Kung Hsien’s Self-Portrait in Willows, with Notes on the Willow in
Chinese Painting and Literature.” Artibus Asiae 42, no. 1 (1980): 5–38.
Silbergeld, Jerome. “The Yuan ‘Revolutionary’ Picnic: Feasting on the Fruits of Song
(A Historiographic Menu).” Ars Orientalis 37 (2007): 9–31.
Sima Guang 司馬光. Jiafan 家範 [Precepts for Family Life]. Reprint. [Taipei?]: Zhongguo
zixue mingzhu jicheng bian yin ji jin hui, [1977?].
Sirén, Osvald. “Su Tung-p’o as an Art Critic.” Geografiska Annaler 17 (1935): 434–45.
Smithsonian Institution. Smithsonian. <http://www.si.edu>.
Song Lian 宋濂. Song xueshi quanji 宋學士全集 [Complete Collection of Song Scholars].
40 vols. Taipei: Yiwen yinshuguan, 1970.
Soper, Alexander C., trans. Kuo Jo-hsü’s Experiences in Painting (Tu-hua chien-wên chih):
An Eleventh Century History of Chinese Painting Together with the Chinese Text in
Facsimile. Washington, D.C.: American Council of Learned Societies, 1951.
Soper, Alexander C., trans. “T’ang Ch’ao Ming Hua Lu: Celebrated Painters of the T’ang
Dynasty by Chu Ching-hsüan of T’ang.” Artibus Asiae 21, no. 3/4 (1958): 204–30.
Spiro, Audrey. Contemplating the Ancients: Aesthetic and Social Issues in Early Chinese
Portraiture. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990.
Spiro, Audrey. “Creating Ancestors.” In Gu Kaizhi and the Admonitions Scroll, edited by
Shane McCausland, 53–64. Colloquies on Art & Archaeology in Asia, no. 21. London:
The British Museum Press, 2003.
Spiro, Audrey. “Seeing through Words: Shishuo Xinyu and the Visual Arts, a Case Study.”
Early Medieval China 13–14, no. 1 (2007): 143–83.
Stewart, Stanley. The Enclosed Garden: The Tradition and the Image in Seventeenth-
Century Poetry. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966.
Stuart, Jan. “Revealing the Romance in Chinese Art.” In Love in Asian Art & Culture,
edited by Karen Sagstetter, 11–29. Washington, D.C.: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery,
Smithsonian Institution, 1998.
Sturman, Peter C. “Cranes above Kaifeng: The Auspicious Image at the Court of Huizong.”
Ars Orientalis 20 (1990): 33–68.
Sturman, Peter C. “In the Realm of Naturalness: Problems of Self-Imaging by the
Northern Sung Literati.” In Arts of the Sung and Yüan, edited by Maxwell K. Hearn

via free access
290 Works Cited
and Judith G. Smith, 165–85. New York: Department of Asian Art, The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, 1996.
Sturman, Peter C. “The Poetic Ideas Scroll Attributed to Mi Youren and Sima Huai.”
Zhejiang University Journal of Art and Archaeology 1 (2014): 84–128.
Sturman, Peter Charles. “Mi Youren and the Inherited Literati Tradition: Dimensions of
Ink-Play.” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1989.
Su Bai 宿白. Baisha Song mu 白沙宋墓 [Song Dynasty Tombs at Baisha]. Beijing: Wenwu
chubanshe, 1957.
Su Shi 蘇軾. Su Shi shiji hezhu 蘇軾詩集合注 [Annotated Selections of Su Shi’s Poetry].
Edited by Feng Yingliu 馮應榴. 6 vols. Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 2001.
Su Shi 蘇軾. Su Shi wenji 蘇軾文集 [Collected Writings of Su Shi]. Edited by Kong Fanli
孔凡禮. 6 vols. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1986.
Sullivan, Michael. “Notes on Early Chinese Screen Painting.” Artibus Asiae 27, no. 3 (1965):
239–64.
Sullivan, Michael. “Some Notes on the Social History of Chinese Art.” In Proceedings of
the International Conference on Sinology: Section of History of Arts [Zhongyang
Yanjiuyuan Guoji Hanxue huiyi lunwenji, yishushi zu 中央研究院國際漢學會議論文
集，藝術史組], 159–70. Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1981.
Sun Chengze 孫承澤. Gengzi xiaoxia ji 庚子銷夏記 [Notes Written in the Summer of 1660].
8 juan. 1660. 2 vols. China: Bao Tingbo, 1760–61.
Sun Yuepan 孫岳頒, comp. Peiwenzhai shuhuapu 佩文齋書畫普 [Peiwen Hall Calligraphy
and Painting Catalogue]. 100 juan. Beijing: Neifu, Kangxi reign period of the Qing
dynasty [1708–22].
Tang Guizhang 唐圭章, ed. Quan Song ci 全宋詞 [Complete Song Lyrics of the Song
Dynasty]. 5 vols. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1965.
Tang Shuyu 唐漱玉, comp. Yutai huashi 玉臺畫史 [History of Jade Terrace Painting].
5 juan. 1824. Reprint. In Meishu congshu 美術叢書 [Fine Arts Series] 17, 113–244. Edited
by Huang Binhong and Deng Shi 黃賓虹、鄧實. [Taipei]: Yiwen yinshuguan, [1947].
Tao Gu 陶穀. Qingyi lu 清異錄 [Record of the Pure and Unusual]. 4 juan. 4 vols. Reprint.
Tao Yue 陶岳. Wudai shibu 五代史補 [Supplement to the History of the Five Dynasties].
5 juan. 1012. Reprint. Chan hua an congshu, no. 9. [China]: Shanyin Song shi, 1887.
<https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100367254>.
“Text and Translation of Zhang Hua’s Poem, ‘Admonition of the Instructress to the Court
Ladies’ (‘Nüshi zhen’).” In Gu Kaizhi and the Admonitions Scroll, edited by Shane
McCausland, 15–17. Colloquies on Art & Archaeology in Asia, no. 21. London: The
British Museum Press, 2003.
Tsang, Ka Bo. More than Keeping Cool: Chinese Fans and Fan Paintings. Toronto: Royal
Ontario Museum, 2002.
Tuotuo 脫脫. Songshi 宋史 [Song History]. 496 juan. Reprint. 40 vols. Beijing: Zhonghua
shuju, 1977.

via free access
Works Cited 291
Vandier-Nicolas, Nicole, trans. Le Houa-che de Mi Fou (1051–1107), ou Le Carnet d’un

connaisseur à l’époque des Song du Nord. Bibliothèque de l’Institut des hautes études
chinoises, no. 16. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1964.
Varsano, Paula. “Whose Voice Is It Anyway? A Rereading of Wang Changling’s ‘Autumn
in the Palace of Everlasting Faith: Five Poems.’” Journal of Chinese Literature and
Culture 3, no. 1 (April 2016): 1–25.
Vinograd, Richard. “Situation and Response in Traditional Chinese Scholar Painting.”
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (1988): 365–74.
Wagner, Marsha L. The Lotus Boat: The Origins of Chinese “Tz’u” Poetry in T’ang Popular
Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.
Waley, Arthur, trans. Ballads and Stories from Tun-huang: An Anthology. New York:
Macmillan Company, 1960.
Waley, Arthur, trans. The Book of Songs: The Ancient Chinese Classic of Poetry. New York:
Grove Weidenfeld, 1987.
Wang Ch’iu-kuei. “The Formation of the Early Versions of the Meng Chiang-nü Story.”
Tamkang Review 9, no. 2 (Winter 1978): 111–40.
Wang Keyu 汪砢玉. Shanhuwang 珊瑚網 [Coral Net]. 48 juan. 1643. Reprint. Kyoto:
Kanseki Repository, 2016. <http://www.kanripo.org/text/KR3h0060/>.
Wang Yao-t’ing [Wang Yaoting] 王耀庭. “Images of the Heart: Chinese Paintings on a
Theme of Love.” Parts 1, 2. Translated by Deborah A. Sommer. National Palace Museum
Bulletin 22, no. 5 (November–December 1987): 1–21; 22, no. 6 (January–February 1988):
1–21.
Wang Yi 王逸. Lisao jing zhangju 離騷經章句 [Commentary on the Classic of Encountering
Sorrow]. In Chuci buzhu 楚辭補註 [Annotated “Songs of Chu”], edited by Hong Xingzu
洪興祖. Reprint. Taipei: Yiwen yinshuguan, 1969.
Wang Yun 王惲. Shuhua mulu 書畫目錄 [Catalogue of Calligraphy and Painting]. 1276.
Reprint. In Shuhua lu 書畫路 [Record of Calligraphy and Painting], edited by Yang
Jialuo 楊家駱, 1:143–61. Yishu congbian, ser. 1, no. 17. Taipei: Shijie shuju, 1968.
Wang Yuxian王毓賢. Huishi beikao 繪事備考 [Notes on Painting Matters]. 8 juan. Reprint.
Siku quanshu zhenben er ji, nos. 203–204. Taipei: Taiwan shangwu yinshuguan, 1971.
Watson, Burton. Chinese Lyricism: Shih Poetry from the Second to the Twelfth Century,
with Translations. New York: Columbia University Press, 1971.
Watson, Burton, ed. and trans. The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times
to the Thirteenth Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.
Weidner, Marsha, Ellen Johnston Laing, Irving Yucheng Lo, Christina Chu, and James
Robinson. Views from Jade Terrace: Chinese Women Artists 1300–1912. Indianapolis:
Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1988.
Weitz, Ankeney. “Fan Paintings in Song Dynasty Material Culture.” Paper presented at
the 88th Annual Conference of the College Art Association, New York, 23–26 February
2000.

via free access
292 Works Cited
Weitz, Ankeney. “The Vocabulary of Fashion: Word-Image Play in Southern Song Painted
Fans.” National Palace Museum Bulletin 44 (October 2011): 39–48.
Weitz, Ankeney. Zhou Mi’s “Record of Clouds and Mist Passing before One’s Eyes”: An
Annotated Translation. Sinica Leidensia, no. 54. Leiden: Brill, 2002.
Weng, Wan-go H. C., and Yang Boda 翁萬戈、楊伯達. The Palace Museum: Peking Treas
ures of the Forbidden City. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1982.
Whitaker, K.P.K. “Tsaur Jyr’s ‘Luohshern Fuh.’” Asia Major, n.s. 4, no. 1 (1954): 36–56.
Williams, Nicholas Morrow. “A Conversation in Poems: Xie Lingyun, Xie Huilian, and
Jiang Yan.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 127, no. 4 (October 1, 2007):
491–506.
Workman, Michael E. “The Bedchamber Topos in the Tz’u Songs of Three Medieval
Chinese Poets: Wen T’ing-yün, Wei Chuang, and Li Yü.” In Critical Essays on Chinese
Literature, edited by William H. Nienhauser Jr., 167–86. Hong Kong: Chinese University
of Hong Kong, 1976.
Wu, Fusheng. The Poetics of Decadence: Chinese Poetry of the Southern Dynasties and
Late Tang Periods. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998.
Wu Hung. “The Admonitions Scroll Revisited: Iconology, Narratology, Style, Dating.” In
Gu Kaizhi and the Admonitions Scroll, edited by Shane McCausland, 89–99. Colloquies
on Art & Archaeology in Asia, no. 21. London: The British Museum Press, 2003.
Wu Hung. “Beyond Stereotypes: The Twelve Beauties in Qing Court Art and the ‘Dream
of the Red Chamber.’” In Writing Women in Late Imperial China, edited by Ellen
Widmer and Kang-i Sun Chang, 306–65. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.
Wu Hung. The Double Screen: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Wu Hung. “The Origins of Chinese Painting (Paleolithic Period to Tang Dynasty).” In
Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting, by Richard M. Barnhart, Yang Xin, Nie
Chongzheng, James Cahill, Lang Shaojun, and Wu Hung, 15–85. New Haven: Yale
Wu, Marshall P.S. The Orchid Pavilion Gathering: Chinese Painting from the University of
Michigan Museum of Art. 2 vols. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2000.
Wu Tung. Masterpieces of Chinese Painting from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: Tang
through Yuan Dynasties. 2 vols. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1996.
Wu Tung. Tales from the Land of Dragons: 1,000 Years of Chinese Painting. Boston: Museum
of Fine Arts, 1997.
Wu Zimu 吳自牧. Mengliang lu 夢梁錄 [Dreams of Hangzhou]. 20 juan. 1274. Reprint.
[Yonghe, Taipei County]: Wenhai chubanshe, [1981].
Xia Wenyan 夏文彥. Tuhui baojian 圖繪寶鑑 [Treasured Mirror of Painting]. 2 vols.
[Shanghai]: Shenzhou guoguangshe, 1929.
Xiao Tong 蕭統, comp. Wen xuan, or Selections of Refined Literature. Translated by David
R. Knechtges. 3 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982–96.

via free access
Works Cited 293
Xiao Tong and Hu Kejia 蕭統、胡克家, comp. Fangsong Hu Ke Wen xuan 仿宋胡刻文
選 [Selections of Refined Literature] and Wen xuan kaoyi 文選考異 [A Different Study
of “Selections of Refined Literature”]. Edited by Li Shan 李善. 60 juan. Poyang, Jiangxi
Province: 1809.
Xie Zhiliu 謝稚柳. “Dui Tang Zhou Fang Zanhua shinü tu de shangque 對唐周昉簪花仕
女圖的商榷 [Some Different Opinions about Ladies Adorning Their Hair with Flowers
by Zhou Fang of the Tang Dynasty].” Wenwu cankao ziliao 文物參考資料 6 (1958):
25–26.
Xu Bangda 徐邦達. “Gu Hongzhong hua Han Xizai yeyan tu 顧閎中畫《韓熙載夜宴圖》
[Ku Hung-chung’s ‘Night Revels of Han Hsi-tsai’].” Zhongguo wenwu 中國文物 2
(March 1980): 26–27.
Xu Ling 徐陵, comp. Jianzhu “Yutai xinyong” 箋注玉臺新詠 [Annotated “New Songs from
a Jade Terrace”]. Taipei: Guangwen shuju, 1967.
Xuanhe huapu 宣和畫譜 [Xuanhe Painting Catalogue]. 1120. 20 juan. Reprint. Yishu cong
bian, ser. 1, no. 9. Edited by Yang Jialuo 楊家駱. Taipei: Shijie shuju, 1967.
Yan Ming 嚴明. Zhongguo mingji yishushi 中國名妓藝術史 [Famous Courtesans in
Chinese Art History]. Zhongguo wenhua shi waibian, no. 1. Taipei: Wenjin chubanshe,
1992.
Yang, Xiaoshan. Metamorphosis of the Private Sphere: Gardens and Objects in Tang–Song
Poetry. Harvard East Asian Monographs, no. 225. Cambridge, Mass., and London:
Yao Hsin-nung 姚莘農. “When Sing-Song Girls Were Muses.” T’ien-hsia Monthly 4, no. 5
(May 1937): 474–83.
Yashiro Yukio 矢代幸雄. “Saisetsu So bo Shū-Bunku Kyūchū zu 再說宋摹周文矩宮中圖
[Again on the Sung Copy of the Scroll ‘Ladies of the Court’ by Chou Wên-chü].” Bijutsu
Kenkyu 美術研究, no. 169 (1952): 157–62.
Yashiro Yukio 矢代幸雄. “So bo Shū-Bunku Kyūchū zu 宋摹周文矩宮中圖 [A Sung Copy
of the Scroll ‘Ladies of the Court’ by Chou Wen-chü (Chinese, Five Dynasties)].”
Bijutsu Kenkyu 美術研究, no. 25 (January 1934): 1–12.
Yashiro Yukio 矢代幸雄. “So bo Shū-Bunku Kyūchū zu no shin danpen 宋摹周文矩宮
中圖の新斷片 [A New Fragment of the Sung Copy of the Scroll-Painting ‘Ladies of
the Court’ by Chou Wen-chü].” Bijutsu Kenkyu 美術研究, no. 56 (August 1936):
313–16.
Yates, Robin D.S. Washing Silk: The Life and Selected Poetry of Wei Chuang (834?–910).
Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1988.
Yeh, Florence Chia-ying. “Ambiguity and the Female Voice in ‘Hua-chien Songs.’” In
Studies in Chinese Poetry, by James R. Hightower and Florence Chia-ying Yeh, 115–49.
Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series, no. 47. Cambridge, Mass., and London:

via free access
294 Works Cited
Yu Hui 餘輝. “Han Xizai yeyan tu juan niandai kao—jian tan zaoqi renwu hua de jiand-
ing fangfa 《韓熙載夜宴圖》卷年代考–兼探早期人物畫的鑑定方法 [A Study of
the Date of the Scroll The Nocturnal Entertainments of Han Xizai].” Gugong Bowuyuan
yuankan 故宮博物院院刊 [Palace Museum Journal], no. 4 (1993): 37–56.
Yu, Pauline R. “Allegory, Allegoresis, and the Classic of Poetry.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic
Studies 43, no. 2 (December 1983): 377–412.
Yu, Pauline R. The Reading of Imagery in the Chinese Poetic Tradition. Princeton: Princeton
Yuan Haowen 元好問. Yuan Haowen quanji 元好問全集 [The Complete Works of Yuan
Haowen]. 2 vols. Shanxi: Renmin chubanshe, 1990.
Zhang Hua 張華. Bowu zhi 博物志 [A Treatise on the Investigation of Things]. Edited by
Zhou Riyong 周日用. 10 juan. Taipei: Yiwen yinshuguan, ca. 1950.
Zhang Junfang 張君房. Liqing ji 麗情集 [Record of the Feelings of Beauties]. In Songdai
biji xiaoshuo 宋代筆記小説, edited by Zhang Guangpei 張光培, 15:89–94. 24 vols.
Lidai biji xiaoshuo jicheng, no. 18. Shijiazhuang: Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe, 1995.
Zhao Chongzuo 趙崇祚, comp. Xinyi “Huajian ji” 新譯花閒集 [New Interpretation of
“Among the Flowers”]. Edited by Zhu Hengfu 朱恆夫. Taipei: Sanmin shuju, 1998.
Zhao Xiaohua 趙曉華. “Zanhua shinü tu: you pingfeng hua gai wei juanzhou hua chuan
cang zhi renshi 簪花仕女圖–由屏風畫改為卷軸畫傳藏之認識 [Ladies Adorning
Their Hair with Flowers: Recognition of a Screen Painting Remounted as a Handscroll].”
Gugong wenwu yuekan 故宮文物月刊 [The National Palace Museum Monthly of
Chinese Art], no. 149 (August 1995): 118–25.
Zhejiang Daxue Zhongguo gudai shuhua yanjiu zhongxin 浙江大學中國古代書畫研究
中心. Song hua quanji 宋畫全集 [Complete Collection of Song Paintings]. 8 vols.
Hangzhou: Zhejiang Daxue chubanshe, 2008–10.
Zhongguo gudai shuhua jianding zubian 中國古代書畫鑑定組編. Zhongguo gudai
shuhua tumu 中國古代書畫圖目 [Illustrated Catalogue of Selected Works of Ancient
Chinese Painting and Calligraphy]. 23 vols. Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1986–2001.
Zhou Mi 周密. Qidong yeyu 齊東野語 [Words from the Country East of Qi]. 20 juan.
Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1935.
Zhou Mi 周密. Wulin jiushi 武林舊事 [Old Affairs of Hangzhou]. 10 juan. Reprint. Beijing:
Zhonghua shuju, 1991.
Zhou Mi 周密. Yunyan guoyan lu 雲煙過眼錄 [Record of Clouds and Mist that Have Passed
before My Eyes]. 2 juan. Reprint. Taipei: Yiwen yinshuguan, 1969.
Zhou Mi 周密, comp. Guixin zashi 癸辛雜識 [Guixin Miscellaneous Records]. Reprint.
Zhou Xun 周汛. Zhongguo lidai funü zhuangshi 中國歷代婦女妝飾 [Adornments of
Chinese Women throughout the Ages]. Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 1988.
Zhu Jingxuan 朱景玄. Tangchao minghua lu 唐朝名畫錄 [Record of Famous Painters of
the Tang Dynasty]. Ca. 840. Reprint. Edited by Wen Zhaotong 溫肇桐. Chengdu:
Sichuan meishu chubanshe, 1985.

via free access
Works Cited 295
Zhu Renxing 朱仁星. “Dang chuang li yunbin, dui jing tie huahuang 當窗理雲鬢，對
鏡貼花黃 [At the Window, Arranging a Cloud Coiffure; / Facing the Mirror and
Applying Pollen].” In Wenwu guanghua 文物光華 [Highlights of Cultural Relics] 4:
54–57. Taipei: National Palace Museum, 1990.
Zhu Xi 朱熹, ed. Chu ci jizhu 楚辭集注 [Collected Annotations to the “Songs of Chu”]. 8
juan. Reprint. Shanghai: Sanye shanfang, 1930.
Zhu Xi 朱熹, ed. Shijing jizhu 詩經集注 [Collected Annotations to the “Book of Songs”].
Reprint. Taipei: Wanjuan lou tushu, 1996.
Zhuangzi 莊子. Xinyi Zhuangzi duben 新譯莊子讀本 [New Interpretations of Zhuangzi].
Taipei: Sanmin shuju, 1974.
Ziporyn, Brook. “Temporal Paradoxes: The Intersections of Time Present and Time Past
in the Song Ci.” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 17 (December
1995): 89–109.
Zu Wuze 祖無擇. Longxue wenji 龍學文集 [Collected Writings of Longxue]. 16 juan.
Reprint, edited by Wang Yunwu 王雲五. Siku quanshu zhenben wu ji, no. 273. Taipei:
Taiwan shangwu yinshuguan, 1974.

via free access
296 Index Index
Index
abandonment 21 in painting 199, 200–201, 205–6

in painting 78–79, 176, 241–44 in poetry 114, 124
in poetry or song lyric 8, 68, 70, 78–80, Ames, Roger T. 222n38
174, 176, 211, 230, 237 Among the Flowers 29n57
See also loneliness; neglect Analects 6, 32, 65
absence See also Confucianism
of men, in painting 9, 129–30, 157–58, Ang, John Kwang-ming 116n51
183, 201, 204–5, 241–45 An Lushan 24, 120
of men, in poetry or song lyric 8, 69, 78, Apricot Blossoms (Ma Yuan) 209, 224n43,
124–25, 170n44, 195–96, 225–26, 229–30, 259
236–42 passim aristocrats, aristocracy 2, 9, 139, 165, 169, 230
of women, not addressed in painting art collections 23, 33, 75, 95, 116, 140,246–47
158, 160, 207 imperial 72–74, 95, 117n54, 164–65,
of women, in poetry or song lyric 159–60 183n85, 214, 246–47, 252–53
academic painting 94–95, 115, 269 See also collectors; ownership
See also Imperial Painting Academy art history, Chinese. See painting history,
Admonitions of the Court Instructress to the Chinese
Palace Ladies (British Museum) 5, artifacts, paintings as 30, 53, 247, 271
176n68, 208, 209n3, 234–35 artifice
See also Gu Kaizhi; Zhang Hua in painting 22, 34, 53, 64, 75
adornment in performance 28, 124, 155
in painting 7, 9, 32, 35, 41–51, 118, 230–31, in poetry 12, 16n16, 28, 29, 75
234, 240, 247–49 artisans 55
in poetry or song lyric 18, 35n71, 51n79, artists. See painters
194–95, 229–40 art market 113, 216–18
self- 37, 177, 229–30, 233–37 attachment
See also beauty; dressing, in painting or expressions of 159, 221, 228
poetry; makeup in painting 9, 10, 22, 26, 27, 29–30, 35, 77,
affection 35, 74, 81, 122, 132, 147, 156, 204, 220, 160, 165, 203, 204, 241, 259, 268–69
229 in poetry or song lyric 61, 77, 159–60, 229
See also emotions; feelings; love themes of 1, 271
agency 125, 137, 154 See also emotions; feelings; marriage;
aging 168, 202, 237, 243–44 relationships
album leaves 218–19 audience
allegory for musical performance, in painting or
deployed by painters 75–76, 79–80, 148, poetry 40, 41, 53, 124, 126
252 for painting 5–6, 11–13, 71–76, 185, 204–6,
and paintings of male-female interaction 208–10, 217, 220–22, 254–55
10, 80, 113–16, 148, 155, 157 for poetry 6, 14, 165
and paintings of women 30, 77, 79–80, and projection 12–13, 32, 182, 183, 203,
157, 160, 182–83, 205, 207 206–8, 221
in poetry or stories 57, 77–81, 113–14, 116, See also viewership
148, 155, 220 authenticity
Allen, Joseph Roe, III 172n56 and feelings 12, 29n57, 58, 123–25, 144
allusions in painting 22, 33–35, 53, 75, 155

via free access
Index 297
and performance 124–25, 154 See also beauty; figure painting; paintings
in poetry 15–17, 19, 28–29, 64, 75, 81n23, of women; virtue
159 beauty 233, 236
authorship metaphors for 132, 146
female, of paintings 10, 19–28, 53–54, in painting 4–6, 36, 95, 113, 154, 182–83,
75–76 199, 230, 241, 244
female, of poetry or song lyrics 8, 10, in poetry 95, 113, 115, 169, 222–23, 230
14–19, 29, 57–58, 61, 75, 155, 219–20 See also adornment; beautiful women;
and interiority 10, 12–13, 15–16, 29, 203–9 makeup
passim, 252–53, 268, 270–71 bedrooms, in poetry 18, 69–70, 232–33
male, of paintings 10, 12–13, 28, 29, 34, beds 137–38, 250–51
75–76, 158, 160, 164–65, 185, 206–7, 250, in painting 126, 132, 142, 151, 154, 174, 177
252–53 Bian Yongyu, A Study of Paintings of the Shigu
male, of poetry or song lyrics 8, 12–19 Hall 31n62
passim, 28–29, 61, 75, 155, 157, 159–60, Bickford, Maggie 25n43, 164n23, 259n13,
219–20, 250 261n16
and poetic personae 14–17, 19, 28, 70, 81 birds, paired, in painting or poetry 41, 161,
and projection 12–13, 157–58, 180, 182, 241–42, 259, 267–68
185, 206–7 See also ducks, in painting or poetry;
and subjectivity 10, 12–19, 34, 75, 81, 160 geese, in painting or poetry; phoenixes
See also painters; poets Birrell, Anne M. 62–63n109, 66n122, 69n139,
autobiography 19, 29, 81 70n142, 167n34, 226n54
autumn Blanchard, Lara C. W. 21n33, 22n35, 117n52,
in painting 174, 177, 185, 198
137n112, 144n130, 146n136, 161n16,
in poetry or song lyric 18, 168, 180,
183–84n86, 184–85n89, 185n94, 197n101,
185–94
257n6, 268n21
Autumn Mallows (Shandong Provincial
blossoms
Museum) 220, 259
as metaphors 132, 146, 222–23, 247–49
in painting or poetry 24–25, 146, 208,
Bai Juyi 37, 122n81, 123n84
211–14, 220, 247–49, 255, 259–62
“Parrot” 41n78, 214n11
worn in women’s hair 37, 247–49
“Song of Everlasting Sorrow” 24n41
Bodde, Derk 177n72
“Song of the Pipa” 26–27, 40, 124
body 56–57n89, 221
Bai, Qianshen 259n13
Ban Jieyu 175–76, 211 expressive potential of 57–62, 65, 130,
“Rhapsody of Self-Commiseration” 176, 132, 203
198n104 female 15, 68, 130, 132, 141–42, 167, 181,
“Song of Lament” 219–20 196, 197, 226, 230, 240, 254
bamboo 223 male 177–78, 197
in painting 25, 27, 64, 200, 211 in palace-style poetry or song lyric 68,
spotted 62–63, 161, 181, 200, 242 196, 197, 230
banquets. See revelry and size 33, 196–97, 199, 254
Ban Weizhi 144–45 See also eyebrows; sexual organs
Ban Zhao, Instructions for Women 165–66 Bol, Peter K. 2n3
Bao Linghui 169n39 Book of Changes 67n126
Barnhart, Richard 32n65 Book of Rites 55–56, 66, 177n72
barriers 198, 225 Book of Songs 70, 223
bathing, in painting or poetry 15, 37, 41 allegorical or political readings of poems
beautiful women 3, 5, 7n24 in 56–57, 77–78, 79n12, 148

via free access
298 Index
Book of Songs (cont.) Chang, Kang-i Sun 77n1

commentary on poems of 65, 77–78, 116, Changzhou School 79n12
155 Chao Duanli 32n64
“Cypress Boat” 179, 228 character 144, 146, 227, 228, 233–34, 271n27
Great Preface to 28–29, 56–57, 63, 126 of painted figures 59, 119, 137, 141
literal interpretations of poems in 78, chastity 26, 225
155 Chengdi (Former Han emperor) 175, 219
“Please, Zhongzi” 224–26 Cheng Yi 69
books, in painting 214, 225–26, 245, 257 Chen Jiao (Former Han empress) 174
Bossler, Beverly 210n6 Chen, Pao-chen 107n38
boudoir 226–27 children, in painting 40–41, 51, 61, 161, 172,
in poetry 18, 67–70, 226n54, 261 180
boundaries 67, 195, 216, 222, 224–27, 231 Ching, Dora C. Y. 60n101
See also enclosures Ching, Julia 13n4, 123n83
Bo Ya and Zhong Ziqi 40 Chou, Diana Yeongchau 6n22
Bray, Francesca 166n28 Chung, Ling 67n132
bridges, in painting 267 ci poetry. See song lyrics
bronze 211, 214, 228, 245 Classic of Filial Piety for Girls (National Palace
brothels 119–20, 122, 210, 244n114, 247n122 Museum) 3, 166, 208
brothers 114–15 Classic of Filial Piety for Girls (Palace
Brotherton, Elizabeth 269n22 Museum) 3, 208
Bryant, Daniel 120n69, 243n112 cloth 166–67
Buddhism 1n1, 4–5, 130, 144, 148 See also clothing; silk; textile work
clothing 104, 145
Bush, Susan 54n82, 55n84, 184n87, 205n119
making of 168, 176–80, 183, 185–94, 196,
Butler, Judith 8, 10, 12n2, 56n89
201, 202–3, 268
butterflies, in painting or poetry 32–33, 37,
and period style 33, 34, 247n123, 254
150–51, 223, 247–49, 261, 268
and social status 35, 118, 129, 132, 161, 169,
172, 178, 198, 199
Cahill, James 2n2, 7n24, 184n88, 216n18,
See also cloth; textile work
255n2, 268n21
clouds and rain 68–69
Cai Jing 159, 269
collectors
Cai Yan (Wenji). See Lady Wenji’s Return to
of calligraphy or painting 23, 71, 113, 160,
China (Museum of Fine Arts); Liu 208, 216, 252–53
Shang, “Eighteen Songs of a Nomad and seals 23, 164, 208
Flute” women as 23, 116
calligraphers 21–23, 26nn44–45, 94n29, 116, See also art collections; ownership
164, 220 colophons to paintings 71
calligraphy 22–23, 71, 164, 220 Northern Song 73, 116–17n51, 126–28, 130,
capitals 15, 119–22, 145–46, 217–18 139, 142–43, 148, 155, 269–70
Cao Zhi, “Rhyme-Prose on the Goddess of the Southern Song 32–35, 71–72, 184–85,
Luo” 80–81, 94–95, 106–7, 113–15 197–98, 203–6, 253–54, 269
See also Goddess of the Luo River scrolls; undated 73nn155-56, 128
Xue Ying, “Story of the Goddess of the Yuan or Ming 26, 95, 144–45
Luo” See also painting inscriptions
censers 62, 211, 242, 245 color 6n21, 32
See also incense commentary
Center for the Art of East Asia 32n65 painting as 6, 29, 75–76, 161–64, 183, 207,
ceremonies 176–77, 198, 249 250, 269–70

via free access
Index 299
on paintings of male-female interaction independent or private 119–20, 121–23,

73–75, 126–28, 130, 137–40, 142–43, 147 126, 141, 147–48
on paintings of women 71–72, 172–74, as painters 10, 20–21
176, 217 in painting 2, 9, 35, 118–19, 126–39,
on poetry 77–78, 116, 155 145–48, 151–56, 231, 254, 257–59, 268
poetry or song lyric as 10, 79n12, 155 palace 35, 40, 119, 120, 121, 141
on portraits 59–60 and performance 12, 14, 119–20, 124–35,
See also criticism 137, 154–55, 210, 221
concubines 175–76, 206–7 in poetry or stories 8–9, 40, 122n78,
as artists 20, 22–25, 27, 94, 116 125–26, 229, 232, 237, 257–59
and competition with other women 25, and relations with men 119–42, 145,
37, 210, 214, 249–51 147–48, 154–56, 210
in historical accounts 35–37, 175 and romance 121, 123, 147, 257–59
in painting 24–25, 29–30, 35–53, 161, 167, and scholars 10, 116–25 passim, 145, 154,
183, 214, 225–26, 231, 249–50 268
in poetry or stories 24n41, 25, 37, 167, as singing girls 26, 119–26 passim
175–76 Song 16–17, 119, 121–22
as poets 211, 218–20 in song lyric 16–17, 122n78, 124–25, 238,
and relations with men 24, 140–41, 243n109
175–76, 214 Southern Tang 116, 120, 143
See also palace women Tang 20–21, 119–20, 143
Confucianism 6, 65, 77, 114, 168n37, 175, 208 See also entertainers, female; entertain-
See also Book of Changes; Book of Rites; ment; prostitutes
Book of Songs; Zuozhuan court ladies. See palace women
connections, interpersonal 121, 135, 148, 159, Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk (attr.
198, 252, 269–71 Huizong) 10–11
connoisseurship 2, 20, 29, 55, 206 authorship of 161, 164–65, 182, 252
Song dynasty 6, 71, 116, 117n54, 184, as copy of a Tang composition 164–65,
253–54 174, 176, 177, 182
conventions 16n14, 145 female figures in 180–83, 206–7, 239
departures from 16, 17–19 interpretations of 176–78, 181–83, 207,
in palace-style poetry or song lyric 9n33, 253
16, 19, 28, 123, 178, 179 and text-image relationships 171–72, 179,
cosmetics. See makeup 183
courtesans 41n78, 214 See also Huizong (Northern Song
and attachment 9, 10, 21, 123, 129, 135, emperor); Pounding Silk (Zhang Xuan);
154, 271 Zhang Xuan
as composers, lyricists, or poets 12, 14–17, court painters 2, 6, 199, 268
119–20, 125–26n95 Five Dynasties 6–7, 10, 30, 31, 33, 53, 73,
and desire 14–17, 73, 116, 154–55, 210, 221 116, 128–29, 138–4o, 142, 252, 270
education and training of 2, 41, 119–20, Northern Song 1, 6–7, 9, 12, 161–65, 177,
123, 129 254, 269
government 20, 119, 120n69, 121, 123, as painters-in-attendance 33, 128–29,
147–48 138, 214
in historical accounts 120–22, 125, and paintings of ladies 5–7, 33, 34,
137–38, 140–41, 143–44, 146 161–65, 214
household 119, 120n69, 121–22, 123, 126, Southern Song 1, 6–7, 9, 12, 184–85, 205,
138, 141 209, 254

via free access
300 Index
court painters (cont.) Dong Qichang 31, 95, 184n87

Tang 2, 6–7, 59–60, 164–65, 171 Dong Shi 71, 184, 203–4, 252–53
See also court painting; painters Record of Calligraphy in the Imperial Song
court painting 271 184
Five Dynasties 6–7, 31, 33 See also Mou Yi; Pounding Cloth (Mou Yi)
Song 94–95, 116–17, 155, 177–78, 214–16 Dong You 262
Tang 171 Dream Journey over the Xiao and Xiang Rivers
See also court painters (Master Li of Shucheng) 200
courtyards 150, 198, 199, 203, 222 dressing, in painting or poetry 9, 194–95, 197
criticism See also adornment; clothing
of figure painting and portraits 59–60 drinking, drunkenness 24–25, 74, 139, 145
of historical figures 26, 137–38, 140–44 drums, in painting or poetry 128, 130, 148,
literary 71, 115 154
of paintings of male-female interaction ducks, in painting or poetry 64, 180, 181, 267
72–75, 137–40, 142–43, 147, 155–56 Du Fu 64
of paintings of women 2–7, 172–74, 185, “Moonlit Night” 159
206 Du Mu, Iron Net for Coral 53n81
of poetry 3, 10, 63–65, 75, 77–78, 81, 116, Du Wan, Stone Compendium of Cloudy Forest
155 223n41
of song lyrics 16n13, 16n16, 17, 19, 28, 79 Duzong (Southern Song emperor) 184–85
See also commentary
cross-dressing 231–32 Ear Picker, or Collating Texts (attr. Wang
literary or pictorial 28–29, 54, 151 Qihan) 269–70
Cui Hui 20–21, 27 Ebrey, Patricia Buckley 66n125, 122n78,
Cui Lingqin, Records of the Music Bureau 119 123n83, 166n28, 166n30
Edwards, Richard 197n101, 209n4, 261n15,
dancers, dancing 56, 119–20, 130–32 261n16
in painting, song lyric, or stories 125–26, Egan, Ronald 6n21, 9n33, 12n2, 16nn15–17,
130–32, 154, 172, 175 26n44, 26n47, 54nn82–83, 59n99,
Daoism 1n1, 4–5, 24, 40n76, 138, 148 67n132, 70–71n148, 160n14, 181n81,
debauchery 25, 137, 147–48, 154, 155 206nn120–21, 271n27
decadence 3 Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers
deities, in painting or poetry 10, 81–115, 160, 205n119
268 Embroidered Cage, Morning Mirror (National
Delbanco, Dawn Ho 268n21 Palace Museum) 210, 211, 214, 216,
Demiéville, Paul 170n46 224, 226–27, 240–41, 243–44, 254
Deng Chun, More on Painting 146n139, 217 function of 11, 218–19, 250, 254–55
desirability 32, 34–35, 171, 196, 221, 236, 237, screen painting within 64–65, 214n14,
245, 246, 261 241, 244, 247
See also objects of desire See also Wang Shen
devotion 148, 155–56, 182, 207, 220–21, 253 embroidery. See textile work
didacticism 3, 5, 166n29, 233–34, 250 emotions 69
Diény, Jean-Pierre 78–79n10 aroused through painting or poetry
divorce 123, 267n20 63–64, 252
See also marriage and bodily expression 20, 56–62, 65
Doane, Mary Ann 208 expressed through painting 10, 61–66,
domesticity 69, 165, 170, 204 197–98, 220–21, 252

via free access
Index 301
expressed through poetry or song lyric See also sexual relations

9, 56–58, 78, 159–60, 197–98, 219–20, eunuchs 35, 51–53, 269n24
236, 239 Exemplary Women (Palace Museum) 5, 208
manifestation of 1, 29, 56–59 expression
represented in painting 1, 7, 9–11, 55, 56, facial 57–60, 62, 65, 130, 135, 154, 201–3,
58–63, 126, 154, 160, 183, 197, 200–202, 227, 228, 241
240, 252 in musical performance 119, 123–26,
represented in poetry or song lyric 1, 129–32, 135
8–9, 65–66, 170–71 in painting 3, 6, 10, 27, 29, 58–66, 155,
See also attachment; feelings; grief; joy; 159–60, 197–98, 201–5, 209, 219–21, 252,
love; melancholy; sorrow 259–62
emperors. See rulers in poetry 3, 8, 15, 28, 29, 56–58, 69, 81, 119,
empresses 20, 115–16, 174–77 157–60, 197–98, 209, 219–20, 239, 261–62
Southern Song 94, 209, 220 self- 221
enclosures 69–70, 211, 214n11, 216, 222, in song lyric 9, 15–17, 29n57, 70–71n148,
224–27, 249
79, 158
See also boundaries
See also emotions; feelings; mood
entertainers, female
eyebrows 15, 74, 130, 197, 230–31, 233, 237–40
at court 119–21, 174–75
and the literati 14, 79
Fan Qin 35n71
and the male audience 8–9, 124–37,
fans
154–55
functions of 216, 218–21
in painting or poetry 74, 118, 126–37,
and gendered usage 210, 216, 218–19, 221,
154–56, 174–75, 204n116, 257–59
and performance 29, 58, 123–26, 154–55 244, 246, 250, 254–55
See also courtesans; entertainment and interiority 154, 246
entertainment 8–9, 15 painted 11, 209–22, 246, 250, 254–55, 259
musical, and courtesans 40, 119–20, represented in painting 32, 95, 106–9,
123–35, 147, 154 132, 154, 175, 181, 218, 247
in painting, poetry, or song lyrics 74, represented in poetry 175, 211, 218–20
123–37, 147, 154 round 211, 216, 218–20
sexual 118, 147, 154 Fan Shu, Discussions of Friends of Clouds and
See also entertainers, female; music; Streams 21–22
revelry fantasy 35, 75, 157–58, 169, 233
Eoyang, Eugene 37n74 Fan Xiwen, Night Chats Facing My Bed 64
eremitism. See reclusion farewell paintings 159, 204, 269
eroticism feelings 55–56
and musical performance 119, 126 aroused through painting, song lyrics, or
in paintings of male-female interaction music 64–65, 126, 204–5, 252
72, 126, 132, 135, 151, 154, 208 expressed through makeup 236–40
in paintings of women 3, 9, 32, 37, 41, 55, expressed through musical performance
150, 171–72, 174, 177, 181–83, 208, 254, 268 119, 123–26, 129–30, 135
in pictorial arts 1–2, 80, 259–61 expressed through painting 10, 13, 21–22,
in poetry or stories 14–16, 77, 116, 155, 165, 61–66, 158–60, 185, 203–4, 206–7, 209,
167, 208n2 219–21, 253, 257, 259–62
in song lyric 15–16, 79, 123, 155 expressed through poetry 13, 28–29,
and suggestive imagery 25, 41, 72, 126, 63–65, 69, 81, 119, 157, 159–60, 209,
135, 167, 172, 177, 209 219–20, 261

via free access
302 Index
feelings (cont.) and desire 157, 228, 261

expressed through song lyric 9, 15–19, and longing 157, 165, 228, 231
68–69, 159–60, 234–36 models of 30, 40, 51n79, 53, 75–76, 208,
as genuine 12, 16, 29n57, 56, 58 221, 245, 247, 250–52
as inner 1, 56–58, 66, 68–70 and paintings by women 27
represented in painting 6–7, 9–11, 13, performance of 210, 231–32, 246
54–55, 58–66, 72, 113, 179, 197, 199, and space 66–70, 166, 195, 206, 222, 224
201–3, 207 See also masculinity
represented in poetry 9–10, 69, 70, Fenghuatang. See Liu Xi (Liu Guifei)
170–71, 179 fertility 40, 223, 249
represented in song lyric 15–19, 57–58, figure painting 4–5, 6
68–69, 178, 229, 239 and attitudes of figures 7, 59–60, 106–9,
and scenes 63–66, 201, 202, 242
197, 199, 201–3, 205, 244
See also affection; attachment; emotions;
and distinctions between figures 117–18
expression; grief; heartbreak; heart/
expression in 58–66, 197–98, 201–4, 221
mind; joy; love; melancholy; mood;
gendered interaction in 1–2, 77, 118–19,
romance; sorrow
female figures, in Chinese painting 126–37, 145–57 passim, 257–59, 268
activities of 3, 9–10, 202–3, 268 gesture in 58–65 passim, 128–29, 135, 181,
as archetypes 178, 253 201–3, 257
and beauty 5–6, 95, 113, 154, 182–83, 199, and interiority 13, 26–27
230, 241, 244 by women 23–27, 53
as constructions 32, 53–54, 75 See also beautiful women; female figures,
and desire 1, 6, 10–13, 27, 31–32, 41, 66, in Chinese painting; male figures, in
71–77 passim, 116, 126, 157–58, 160, 165, Chinese painting; painters; paintings
177–78, 181–83, 206–10, 247–50, 271 of women; portraiture
eroticized 9, 41, 55, 150–51, 167, 171–72 fishermen, in painting 146
expressiveness of 29, 58, 61–62, 65, Five Dynasties 7, 70, 238
202–3 flower-and-bird painting 23, 259–62, 268
and interiority 201, 227 Flower Morning 37, 41, 247–49
isolated 1–2, 9, 226–27 flowers. See blossoms
and longing 1, 6–7, 11–13, 27, 58, 64, 71–77 flutes, in painting or poetry 7, 41, 125–26,
passim, 114, 126, 157, 158, 165, 174, 132–35, 154, 172
180–83, 202–11 passim, 221, 226–27, 234, Fong, Grace S. 12n2
250–59 passim, 271 Fong, Mary H. 227n55
as models of femininity 3, 4–5, 11, 166, Fong, Wen C. 30n59, 35nn72–73, 61n104
208, 247, 250–51 Foucault, Michel 56n89
and projection 12–13, 62, 75, 157–58,
Frankel, Hans H. 7n25, 41n76, 61n105,
182–83, 185, 206–7, 221, 246
145n135
and romance 20, 75, 80, 126
friendship 40, 71, 130, 145, 184, 201, 204, 271
and subjectivity 12–14, 29–30, 72, 75,
literati 71–72n151, 159, 268–71
157–58, 252
and virtue 3–6, 157, 228, 245 in painting or poetry 159, 268–69
See also figure painting; male figures, in See also connections, interpersonal;
Chinese painting; paintings of women relationships
femininity frontier 69, 119, 185, 204, 205
and conduct 66–67 Fufei 81–107, 113–15
construction of 9, 51, 216, 231–33, 236, Fu Xian, “Rhapsody on the Fan” 220
245–46, 250–51 Fu Yi, “Fan Inscription” 220

via free access
Index 303
Gaozong (Southern Song emperor) 121 authorship of Liaoning Provincial

paintings produced at the court of Museum scroll 23, 115–16, 252–53
22–25, 94, 115–17, 155, 252–53, 259 comparison of extant scrolls 80, 94–113
relationship with Empress Wu 208n3, as copies of earlier compositions 80, 94
220, 259 dates of 80, 94–95
relationship with Liu Guifei 22–23, 116 female figures in 95–113
Gaozu (Tang emperor) 33 gender dynamic in 114, 160
Garber, Marjorie 28, 231 inscriptions on Liaoning Provincial
gardens Museum scroll 23, 94, 95, 106
and enclosure 69–70, 150–51, 214n11, 216, interpretations of 10, 115–16, 155, 253
222, 224–27, 268 male figures in 95–113, 160
gendered elements within 222–24 missing scenes 106, 107n37, 113, 114
and the inner quarters 67–68, 69n139, and patronage 94–95, 115–16, 252–53
200–201, 222 text-image relationships in 95–113
in painting 9–10, 66, 67, 174, 198, 203, See also Cao Zhi; Gu Kaizhi
209–14, 216, 221–24, 245, 249, 268 Gotfrit, Leslie 56–57n89
in poetry or song lyric 66, 194, 200–201, Graham, William T., Jr. 40–41n78
222–26, 232 Granet, Marcel 78n6
women’s enjoyment of 222, 225–27 Grant, Beata 16n16, 166n26, 176n68
gaze grief
of artists or patrons 73–74 in painting 61–62, 202
female 18, 41, 53–54 in poetry or song lyric 18, 22, 159–60,
male 11, 51–54, 71, 73–74, 157–58 170–71, 234–36
object of 14, 74 Guan Daosheng 19
of painted figures 7, 51–54, 59, 128–32, Gu Hongzhong 73n155, 74, 116, 128–29,
135, 147, 181 139–42, 252, 253
of poetic personae 18, 129–30, 236 See also Night Revels of Han Xizai scrolls
of viewers 73n155, 181 Gu Kaizhi 5, 54–55, 59, 80
See also viewership; voyeurism See also Admonitions of the Court
geese, in painting or poetry 135, 147, 241–42 Instructress to the Palace Ladies (British
gender distinctions Museum); Goddess of the Luo River
construction of 1, 166, 206, 232–33 scrolls
and hierarchy 271 Gulik, Robert Hans van 66n124, 117n54
and performativity 8, 231–32 Guo Ruoxu, Experiences in Painting 4–6, 27,
and segregation 40–41, 66n121, 67n127, 60
141, 222 Guo Xi 146
See also inner; outer; yang; yin Lofty Message of Forests and Streams
genuine. See authenticity 223n41
gesture
discussed in painting criticism 58, 60 hairstyles
in painting 60–62, 65, 128–29, 135, 181, and age 35, 51, 118, 161
202–3, 228, 257 and beauty or fashion 33, 95, 230,
See also expression; figure painting 247n123
gifts, paintings as 33, 113, 220, 252, 259, 262, and social status 33, 35, 51, 118, 129, 178,
269 180, 198
Goddess of the Luo River scrolls See also adornment
as allegory 113–16, 155 Hall, David L. 222n38

via free access
304 Index
Hammers, Roslyn Lee 167n31 Huang Tingjian 262

Han dynasty 3, 6n20, 57, 141n124, 155, 177n72, Huarui, Lady 16n17, 182
201–2, 220, 229, 230n68 Huizong (Northern Song emperor)
Former Han 28, 35, 141–42, 167, 168n37, authorship of paintings attributed to 161,
174–75, 218, 219, 242 164–65
Latter Han 165–66 as patron of the arts 164–65, 182, 206–7,
Han Fei, Han Fei zi 227–28 214, 252, 259, 262
Han Gan 59–60 poetry by 16n17, 182, 259
Hangzhou 120–22, 218 wives of 176
Han History 175, 177n72 See also Court Ladies Preparing Newly
Hanlin Academy 33 Woven Silk (attr. Huizong); Mountain
Han Xizai Birds on a Wax-Plum Tree (attr.
as court hermit 116, 142–48 Huizong)
as imperial adviser 74, 116, 138 husbands 77n1, 122, 158, 167n34, 198
paintings of (see Night Revels of Han in painting 61–62, 160, 243n108
Xizai scrolls) in poetry, song lyric, or stories 22–23, 61,
story of 72–73, 116, 118–19, 142 123, 159–60, 233–36, 241n100
textual accounts of 72–75, 137–46, 154, See also divorce; marriage; separation;
155 wives
happiness. See joy Hu Shunchen, Calligraphy and Painting for He
Harrist, Robert E., Jr. 184n87, 261n15 Xuanming upon His Dispatch to Qin
Hartman, Charles 117n54 159, 269
Hawes, Colin S. C. 206n120
Hay, John 217n21, 218n25, 223n41 idealization
heartbreak 23–24n39, 170–71, 221 in images of women 13, 20, 30, 126, 147,
See also attachment; emotions; feelings; 157–58, 160, 208, 221, 228, 236, 245, 246,
grief; love; melancholy; relationships; 250, 257–59, 262
sorrow of women’s behavior 11, 21, 234, 245
heart/mind 28, 56–58, 68, 179 Idema, Wilt 16n16, 166n26, 176n68
reflected in visual imagery 228, 242n106, Imperial Painting Academy 115, 159, 174n62,
244 214, 269
hermits. See reclusion See also academic painting
He Wei, Record of Things Heard on a Spring impropriety 24, 79, 139, 143
Islet 257n8 incense 242n105
Hightower, James R. 68n35, 124n88 See also censers
hills 200, 223, 238–39, 242 inner
See also mountains as aspect of duality 1, 10, 56, 58, 66–67,
Hinton, David 65n119 69–70, 203, 216, 224, 226, 231, 250
histories, dynastic 116, 137–38, 140–41 as feminine 66–70, 166, 224, 233, 246
home 69, 70, 170, 204, 206–7 See also gender distinctions; inner
homesickness 158, 170, 203–4, 207, 219, 253, quarters; outer; yin
268 inner quarters 66–67, 141, 210, 219, 222,
homophones. See puns 232–33
hortus conclusus 225 in painting 7, 9, 31, 51, 67, 150–51, 161, 203
Ho, Wai-kam 30n58, 31n60, 32n65 of the palace 22, 25, 31, 51, 67, 150–51, 161,
Hsieh, Daniel 9n31 181, 250–51
Hsu Wen-Chin 268n21 in poetry or song lyric 67–70, 78–79, 181,
Huai (King of Chu) 78 194–95, 197, 200–201

via free access
Index 305
In the Palace scrolls function of 11, 218–19, 250, 254–55

authorship and date of 30–31, 34, 51, screen painting within 64–65, 211, 226,
53–54 241, 242–43, 247
colophon by Zhang Cheng 30–35, 72, See also Su Hanchen
253–54 Lady Watching a Maid with a Parrot,
as copies 10, 30, 31, 33, 34, 53–54, 253 A (Museum of Fine Arts) 214, 224,
female figures in 29–32, 34–54, 231, 254–55
253–54 female figures in 225–27, 245
male figures in 35, 51–54 as model for women’s behavior 11, 250
section 1 (Berenson Collection, Villa I See also Wang Juzheng
Tatti) 30–31, 35–40, 51 Lady Wenji’s Return to China (Museum of Fine
section 2 (Cleveland Museum of Art) Arts) 60–62, 160
30–31, 34, 35, 40–41 See also Liu Shang, “Eighteen Songs of a
section 3 (Harvard Art Museums) 30–31, Nomad Flute”
40–41, 51 Laing, Ellen Johnston 94n28, 145n134,
section 4 (Metropolitan Museum of Art) 214n14, 226n54, 242n104, 247n123,
30–31, 35, 41–53 257n11, 268n21
Southern Tang original 31, 32–33, 34, 252 lament 8–9, 16–19, 65, 78, 160, 220–21
and subjectivity 29–30, 53–54 Lam, Lap 68n135
See also Zhang Cheng (Danyan Jushi); landscape paintings 1n1, 71, 94
Zhou Wenju; Zhu Zaishang and female artists or collectors 23, 25–27
intimacy 8–9, 160, 232, 246, 261 and feelings or mood 63, 262–68
in relationships 121, 251, 262 and gender 27, 146
Irigaray, Luce 12n2
literati and 269–71
represented in painting 64–65, 116–17,
Jao Tsung-i 170n46
146, 200–203, 211, 227, 244
Jia Sidao 72, 246–47
represented in song lyric 244n114
Jin dynasty 72, 164, 172, 257
Jingzong (Tang emperor) 181 and travel 146, 200–202, 244
Jin History 54–55, 177n72 Last Ruler. See Li Yu (Southern Tang ruler)
joy 20, 26, 65 Latter Shu kingdom 182
Jurchens 164 Layers of Icy Silk (Ma Lin) 259–62
See also Ma Lin
Kaifeng 121 Lee, Hui-shu 94n29, 209n3, 209n5, 261n15,
Kao, Arthur Mu-sen 58n97, 73n156 262n17
Karlgren, Bernhard 228n61 Leung, Irene S. 61n106, 61n108
Khitans 61 Levy, Howard S. 24n41
Knechtges, David 174n63, 176n68, 185n91, Liang dynasty 8, 178
198n104, 220n29 Liang Kai 172n57
Kong Chuan 223n41 Liang Shicheng 269n24
Kracke, E. A., Jr. 141n124 Liao dynasty 61
Li Bai 37, 65
Ladies Adorning Their Hair with Flowers Li Bian (Southern Tang ruler) 247n123
(Liaoning Provincial Museum) 11, Li Cheng 146, 246
199, 246–51, 254–55 See also Verdant Forests, Distant Peaks
See also Zhou Fang (Liaoning Provincial Museum)
Lady at Her Dressing Table, A (attr. Su Li Chi 143n127
Hanchen) 211, 214, 224, 226, 240–44 Liezi 40

via free access
306 Index
Li Gonglin 31–32, 200n106, 205, 218 See also Sima Caizhong’s Dream of the
See also Picture of Yang Pass (Li Gonglin) Courtesan Su Xiaoxiao (Liu Yuan)
Liji. See Book of Rites Liu Zongdao 217
Li Jing (Southern Tang ruler) 147 Li, Wai-yee 94n27, 95n30, 257n8
Li, Master, of Shucheng 200 Li Ye 14
See also Dream Journey over the Xiao and Li Yu (Southern Tang ruler) 35n73, 120, 143,
Xiang Rivers (Master Li of Shucheng) 147
liminality 94n27, 222 as patron of the arts 31, 33, 73–74, 116,
Lin, Shuen-fu 12n2 129, 138–40, 142, 155, 252–53
Li Qingzhao (Yi’an Jushi) 17–19, 25–27, See also In the Palace scrolls; Night Revels
67n132, 70–71n148, 206n120 of Han Xizai scrolls
Tune: “A Cut Plum Branch” 57–58 Lizong (Southern Song emperor) 184–85
Tune: “On the Phoenix Terrace, Thinking locus amoenus 249
of Playing the Flute” 18–19 Loehr, Max 269n25, 270n26
Li Shangyin 37, 115n47 Loewe, Michael 6n20, 29n52
literati loneliness
circles 71, 205n119 in landscape painting 267–68
criticism 2, 3, 53, 59, 60, 65, 77–80, 81n23, in palace-style poetry 179, 195, 241–42
185, 252 in poetry 7–9, 26–27, 69–70, 157, 159–60,
discourse 3, 271 168, 169
families 10, 20, 123, 271 in song lyric 159–60, 214n11, 236, 243
friendships 71–72n151, 204, 268–71 in Song paintings of women 12, 64–65,
painters 6, 9, 12, 31–32, 184–85, 205, 79, 157–58, 203–7, 210–14, 216, 219, 221,
269–71 226–27, 242–46
paintings by 1, 31–32, 71n150, 268–71 in Tang paintings of women 22, 174, 177
poets 8, 9, 79–80, 121 See also abandonment; attachment;
and romance 61, 71, 158, 252, 268–69 feelings; figure painting; grief;
and society 9n31, 271 heartbreak; melancholy; sorrow
See also scholars lotuses, in painting or poetry 95, 267
Little, Stephen 223n41 love 55–56
Liu Chang 221n31 expressed in music 124–25
Liu Shang, “Eighteen Songs of a Nomad Flute” knots 35, 118, 129, 135, 147, 241, 243, 244
61 metaphors for 41, 64, 132, 180n78, 181,
See also Lady Wenji’s Return to China 245, 267
(Museum of Fine Arts) in painting 1, 3, 10, 62, 69, 113, 116, 244
Liu Xiaowei 233 in poetry or song lyric 1, 8–9, 14, 69, 78,
Liu Xie, Literary Mind and the Carving of 79, 81–94, 180, 226, 236, 261
Dragons 57, 77–78 puns for 167n34, 171
Liu Xi (Liu Guifei) 22–25, 27, 53, 94n29, 116 stories 1, 8–9, 24, 257–59
See also Gaozong (Southern Song themes 8–9, 155, 222
emperor); Goddess of the Luo River tokens 35, 81, 106, 113, 221, 229, 244, 245
scrolls See also affection; attachment; emotions;
Liu Yiqing, A New Account of Tales of the feelings; romance
World 35, 145 lovelorn women. See loneliness
Liu Yong, song lyrics of 32n64, 214n11 loyalty
Tune: “Spring in the Brocade Hall” allegories of 113–15, 148, 155–56, 182, 205
68–69 expression of, in painting 23, 114–16, 148,
Tune: “The Auspicious Partridge” 124–25 182, 205, 207
Liu Yuan 257–59 expression of, in poetry 113–14, 220

via free access
Index 307
female 13, 23, 77n1, 220, 221 See also divorce; husbands; relationships;
to rulers 23, 77n1, 113–15, 140, 148, 155–56, wives
182, 205, 207, 220 masculinity 66–67, 75, 166, 222–24, 231–32
of scholar-officials 77n1, 116, 140, 148, 255 and desire or longing 157–60, 207
Lu Ji, “Rhyme-Prose on Literature” 58–59, and space 69, 141, 146, 195, 222
63 See also femininity
lutes 15, 40, 125–26, 128n97 masquerade 218, 233
See also pipa, in painting or poetry; zithers Ma Yuan 209, 259–61
Lu You 123 See also Apricot Blossoms (Ma Yuan); Yang
Meizi (Southern Song empress)
Maeda, Robert J. 217n21 McCausland, Shane 5n16, 234n80
Ma Hezhi 166n29, 172n57 Meifei (Flowering Plum Consort) 25, 214,
See also Classic of Filial Piety for Girls 225–26, 245
(National Palace Museum); Classic of See also Lady Watching a Maid with a
Filial Piety for Girls (Palace Museum); Parrot (Museum of Fine Arts)
Odes of the State of Bin (Metropolitan Mei Yaochen 204n116
Museum of Art) melancholy
makeup 232, 238–39 in painting 58n97, 198, 203
application of 7, 41–51, 74, 141–42, 227, in poetry or song lyric 8, 58, 65, 81n24,
230–40 168, 170–71, 180
as cultivation 233–34, 250 See also emotions; feelings; sorrow
and interiority 227, 236–40 men
in painting 32, 41–51, 161, 210–14, 216, and enjoyment of painting 3, 5–6,
230–31, 240–45, 250 205–6, 208
in poetry or song lyric 8, 178, 196, 230–40, and feelings 13, 69, 122–23, 157–60, 185,
261 207, 221, 233, 234–36
See also adornment; beauty; mirrors interactions with women 1-2, 8–9,
male figures, in Chinese painting 119–26, 138–42, 233
absence of 9, 75, 157–58, 183, 201, 204–7, metaphors for 222–24
209, 240–46 passim See also authorship; male figures, in
experiencing emotions 61–62, 114, 160 Chinese painting; masculinity;
and the gaze 51–54, 95, 128–32, 135 painters; patronage; poets; viewership
and interaction with female figures 35, Meng Chang (Latter Shu ruler) 182
61–62, 75, 77, 94–115, 118–19, 126–37, 145, Meng Jiangnü 168
147–48, 151–55, 268 merchants 8–9, 201, 216–17
and subjectivity 35 metaphors
viewers’ identification with 51 in historical sources 144
See also female figures, in Chinese in painting 40–41, 62–70 passim, 95, 132,
painting; figure painting 146, 181, 211, 214, 220–24, 227n55, 245
Ma Lin 259–61 in poetry 64–70 passim, 95, 167, 168,
See also Layers of Icy Silk (Ma Lin); Wang 178–80, 214n11, 222–25, 228, 229, 238,
Tiju; Yang Meizi (Southern Song 240, 245
empress) metonyms, metonymy 29–30, 62, 195, 229,
Mann, Susan 24n41 250
Mao Wenxi 244n114 Mi Fu 205n119
marriage 9, 26, 77, 122n81, 180n78, 198, 211 Painting History 2, 5n16, 185n92
and attachment or love 122–23, 158, 210, Mi Heng, “Rhapsody on a Parrot” 40–41n78
229, 234–36 military service 168

via free access
308 Index
Ming dynasty 7n24, 16, 26, 95, 171, 218n27, Mulvey, Laura 11, 157–58
220, 222 Murck, Alfreda 271n27
Minghuang. See Xuanzong (Tang emperor) Murray, Julia 5n17, 166n29, 176n68
ministers music
Northern Song 33, 72, 159 and expression 40, 119, 129–32, 135
and rulers 77, 78, 138–40, 142, 147, 148, performance of, represented in literature
253 or histories 40, 125–26, 143
Southern Song 72, 246–47 performance of, represented in painting
Tang or Southern Tang 24, 73–74, 138–40, 9–10, 35, 40, 41, 118, 126–35, 151, 154, 172,
142, 143 268
See also officials and representation of emotions 126, 154
mirrors and stringed instruments 40, 41, 126, 255
and wind instruments 41, 135
as metaphors 227, 229, 234, 244–45, 250
See also entertainment; flutes, in painting
and mirror stands 210–14, 234, 245
or poetry; Music Bureau poetry; lutes;
in painting 41, 51–53, 210–14, 216, 240–44,
pipa, in painting or poetry; zithers
250
Music Bureau 119, 120, 121, 128, 145–46
in poetry or song lyric 21–22, 228–30, 240 Music Bureau poetry 70, 269
reflections and interiority 21–22, 51–53, correspondence to paintings of women
227, 228, 234, 240–44 3–4, 175
See also makeup subjectivity and voice in 12, 13, 28, 29,
mist, in painting 200, 267 165
Mi Youren 214n14 women represented in 12, 37n74, 165,
Cloudy Mountains 268 167–68
monks 138 See also music; Music Bureau; perfor-
in painting 118, 130, 148 mance
mood 9–10, 37, 54–55, 58, 63–65, 194, 198
See also expression; feelings Nan Chucai 21–22
moon narcissi 210
light of, in painting or poetry 180, 195, narrative 80–94, 95–113, 137
199 naturalism 55, 58, 199
in painting or poetry 95, 159, 180n78, naturalness 22, 27, 53n80
219–20 nature 168, 222, 227
imagery of 63–66, 70–71n148, 270
Monthly Ordinances 177
See also birds, paired, in poetry or
morality 2n2, 57, 77
painting; blossoms; landscape
Mountain Birds on a Wax-Plum Tree (attr.
paintings; mountains; trees; water
Huizong) 259, 262
neglect 78–79, 253, 257
See also Huizong (Northern Song See also abandonment
emperor) Nelson, Susan E. 94n28
mountains Neo-Confucianism 69, 148
images of, in makeup 238–40 See also Cheng Yi; Confucianism; Sima
as metaphors 223, 240, 242, 244 Guang; Zhu Xi
in painting 159, 200–201, 211, 227, 244 Nienhauser, William H., Jr 25n43
See also hills night
Mou Yi 10–11, 71, 183–85, 197–207, 252–53, in painting 185, 199
262 in poetry or song lyric 168, 169, 194–95,
See also Pounding Cloth (Mou Yi) 240, 261
Muller, Deborah Del Gais 184n87 Night Revels of Han Xizai scrolls

via free access
Index 309
audience for and reception of 72–75, nostalgia 69, 204, 253, 261
141–42, 147–48, 155 nuns 20, 24
colophons for 73, 116–17n51, 126–28, Nüwa 107
129n102, 130, 139–40, 142–43, 144–45,
148, 155–56, 253–54 objects of desire 8, 158, 178, 210–11, 226
compositional structure of 118, 126, 130, and projection, among male viewers
132, 135, 137 10–11, 32, 75, 158, 182–83, 249
as copies of a Southern Tang composition See also desirability
75, 116–17, 147, 252–53 observers 13, 19, 70–71n148, 154, 176
as court paintings 116–17, 155, 252–53 See also viewership
female figures in 74, 118–19, 126–37, Odes of the State of Bin (Metropolitan
145–48, 154–56, 231 Museum of Art) 172n57
imagery of reclusion in 116, 144–48, 159 officials 141, 220, 223
interpretations of 10, 137, 141–48, 155–56 Northern Song 2, 6, 33, 34, 72, 121, 159,
male figures in 118–19, 126–37, 144–45, 253
147–48, 151–56, 218 in painting or poetry 126–28, 137–40,
patron of Southern Tang paintings 147–48, 159, 201, 268, 269
73–74, 116, 138–40, 142, 155 and retirement 146–48
scroll in National Palace Museum (Taipei) Southern Song 2, 32, 34, 71–72, 75, 121–22,
34n69, 253–54 262
seals on Palace Museum (Beijing) scroll Southern Tang 72–74, 116, 138–42
75, 116–17, 139–40 Tang 2, 20–22, 24, 59, 119
See also Gu Hongzhong; Han Xizai; Li Yu as viewers of paintings 6, 33–34, 71–72,
(Southern Tang ruler); Shi Miyuan; 75
Zhou Wenju; Zu Wupo See also ministers
Ningzong (Southern Song emperor) 209, ornament. See adornment
259, 262 Ortiz, Valérie Malenfer 200n106
See also Yang Meizi (Southern Song outer
empress) appearance 58–60, 216, 227, 234–37,
nomads 61–62, 128n97, 160 240–41, 243–46
Northern and Southern Schools of painters as aspect of duality 1, 10, 56, 58, 66–67,
184n87 69, 70, 203, 216, 224, 226, 231, 250
Northern Song dynasty 34 and emotion 1, 56–58
bureaucrats and officials 2, 6, 33, 34, 72, as masculine 66–67, 166, 224
121, 159, 252–53 spaces 66–67, 70, 140–41, 146, 203, 224,
court 146, 182 226–27
images of women 1, 4–5, 31n60, 204n116 See also gender distinctions; inner; yang
literati 53, 185, 223n41, 262, 269–71 Ouyang Xiu 55, 67n132, 78, 204n116
palace women 176 “Thoughts Revealed in Eyebrows”
painters 4–5, 26–27, 31–32, 53n80, 60, 239–40, 261
177, 214, 254 Owen, Stephen 7n25, 16n13, 124n88, 269n22
painting 31–32, 67, 94–95, 177–78, 182, ownership 71–72, 210, 221, 253, 257
252–53 See also collectors
rulers 10, 16n17, 121, 146n139, 161, 164–65,
174n62, 176, 182–83, 214, 252–53 painters
song lyrics 79, 159–60, 171, 178, 206n121 academic 94–95, 115, 159, 214, 269
Northern Wei dynasty 176n68 compared to artisans 55

via free access
310 Index
painters (cont.) functions of 10–11, 13, 208, 250–51

Eastern Jin dynasty 54–55, 59 and interiority 3–4, 6–7, 10, 12–13, 29–30
female 6, 10, 13, 19–28, 53–54, 75–76 as ladies (shinü hua) 1–7, 10, 20, 27,
figure 54–55, 59–60, 65–66, 94–95, 53–55, 72, 156–58, 161, 185, 198–210
144–55 passim, 160–65 passim, 171–77 passim, 228, 240–51 passim, 255
passim, 185, 197–207 passim, 252–59 romantic themes in 3, 9–10, 12, 75, 185
passim and subjectivity 12–14, 75, 158
Five Dynasties 7, 30–33, 51–54, 73, 116, and voyeurism 14, 73–74, 139
128–29, 138–42, 146, 246, 252, 270 See also female figures, in Chinese
interiority of 10, 203–4, 206–7, 252, painting; figure painting; women
270–71 paintings-within-paintings
Jin dynasty 257–59 and depictions of portrait-making 35,
literati 1, 6, 9, 12, 31–32, 159, 184–85, 205, 51–53
268–71 and interiority 64–65, 200–203, 241–244
male 12–14, 31–35, 53–54, 75, 157–59, 185, and natural scenes 64–66, 146, 200–203,
250, 252–71 passim 214n14, 226, 227
Northern Song 4–6, 20, 25–27, 31–32, and stylistic allusions 205, 262
59–60, 65–66, 94–95, 146, 159, 161, 164, Palace Banquet (Metropolitan Museum of
177, 210, 214, 216, 217, 252, 254, 259, Art) 67, 150–51
262–71 Palace Ladies Tuning the Lute (Nelson-Atkins
portrait 35, 59–60 Museum of Art) 72, 255–57
professional 185, 205, 216, 254, 268 See also Zhou Fang
Southern Song 7, 20, 22–27, 51–54, palace poems (gongci) 16n17, 161, 181, 182
65–66, 71, 94–95, 115–16, 144–55 passim, palace-style poetry (gongti shi)
166, 183–85, 197–207 passim, 210, 214, authorship of 8, 12, 29
252–54, 259–62, 269 correspondence to paintings of women
and subjectivity 10, 12–14, 29–30 3–4, 178, 183, 185, 255, 257–59
Tang 2, 6–7, 20–22, 59–60, 72, 78–79, female personae in 8, 12, 169, 178–80,
160–61, 164–65, 171–77 passim, 199, 246, 225–26, 255
247n123, 253–54 and interiority 8, 66, 70, 165, 228
See also court painters and subjectivity 12, 13, 28
painting history, Chinese 2, 4–7, 19–27, 53 See also Xu Ling, New Songs from a Jade
and paintings of women 2, 4–5, 31n62, 71 Terrace
and representations of emotion 1–2, palaces 31, 161, 174, 175, 178
59–60 palace women 10, 20, 40, 247–50, 271
painting inscriptions 71–73, 164, 184n88, and labor 176–82
201n109, 207, 208, 253–54 in painting 23, 32–54, 150–51, 161–64,
as communication 159, 270 172–78, 181–83, 231, 234, 253–57
in poetic form 159, 185, 209, 220, 261–62 in poetry 161, 176, 178–80, 182, 208
See also colophons to paintings See also concubines
paintings of women parrots, in painting or poetry 33, 40–41, 214,
audience for 10, 71–72, 75–76, 185, 208, 227, 245
210, 250–51 parting 159, 201–2, 221
authorship of 12–13, 71–72, 75–76, in painting 107, 113, 159, 201–2, 204,
164–65, 250 267–68
and connections to poetry 9–10, 13–14, in poetry or song lyric 18–19, 159, 169,
66, 78–79, 185, 197–203 204
criticism of 2–7, 55, 160 paths, in painting 159, 227n55, 267

via free access
Index 311
patriarchy 16n16 pipa, in painting or poetry 26, 126–30, 150,

patronage 154, 172
and commissions 59, 71–74, 115–17, See also lutes
138–40, 142, 182, 252 plain outline style (baimiao) 31–32, 205
court 94–95, 115–17, 138–40, 142, 164–65, plants, potted 211, 226
182, 206–7, 259–62 pleasure 15, 140, 142, 157, 233
and expression in painting 30, 252–53, of viewing paintings 3–6, 74, 185n92,
259–62 205–6, 243n108
female 209, 259–62 plum trees 64, 211, 214, 223, 259–61
male 75, 138–40, 142, 157–58, 182, 206–7 See also blossoms
See also authorship poems-on-paintings 209, 220, 259, 261, 269,
paulownia trees, in painting 150, 174, 177, 270
255–56 poetry collections 8, 17, 245
Pei Jingzhong 20–21 poets
penetration 70, 195, 198–99, 225 and censure 79
perception 55 at court 8, 66n122
performance and feelings 64, 77–78
artifice and 124, 155 female 6, 8, 14–19, 21–22, 27, 28, 169n39,
of desire 41, 154–55, 210, 221 175–76, 209, 214, 218–20, 257–59
and Music Bureau poetry 29, 165, 167 male 8, 14, 16–17, 28, 75
and song lyrics 12, 14, 19, 29, 58, 123–25 and political commentary 77–78
See also audience; music point of view. See authorship; perspectives;
personae 210, 216, 245, 250 viewership
politics
female, in Music Bureau poetry 28, 165,
commentary on, through poetry or
167–68, 170n44, 175, 176
painting 10, 77–78, 79n12, 166, 207,
female, in palace-style poetry 8, 14, 28,
253
168, 169, 180, 220, 228, 229, 236–37, 255
discussed in textual sources 142–44
female, in shi poetry 14–15, 26–27, 166
and functions of paintings 182, 262,
female, in song lyric 9, 14–19, 28, 29n57,
269–70
70–71n148, 82, 170n46, 237–40
and interpretations of literature 77n1,
and interiority 8–9, 15–17, 29n57, 68–69,
155, 182
70, 169–71, 180, 228, 229, 236–40, 245, and interpretations of painting 10, 30,
255 78–79, 115–16, 141–48, 151, 155, 182, 207,
male, in poetry or song lyric 69, 159–60, 221, 252–53, 255
169 and themes of desire 77
and subjectivity 13–19, 28, 75, 78, 154–55, portraiture 20–22, 117, 243n108
157, 159–60 commentary on 53n80, 59–60
perspectives painters of 20–22, 32, 35, 54–55, 59–60
of audiences or authors 10, 13–18, 51, of palace women 35–37, 51–53
53–54 See also figure painting
female 13–16, 53–54, 76, 123 Pounding Cloth (Mou Yi) 10–11, 183n85
male 51, 53–54, 70, 76, 80 audience for and recipient of 184, 203–6,
See also subjectivity 207, 252
phoenixes 241–42 female figures in 65, 197–205, 207
Picture of Yang Pass (Li Gonglin) 269 first version 71, 203, 252
pine trees, in painting or poetry 146, 223 inscriptions on 71, 184–85, 197–98,
Pingkang district, Chang’an 15, 120, 121 201n109, 203–7
Pingkang Ward, Hangzhou 122 interpretations of 203–5, 207

via free access
312 Index
Pounding Cloth (Mou Yi) (cont.) Raphals, Lisa 66n121

presented as gift 71, 184, 203, 252–53 recipients of paintings 117, 159, 262, 269
screen paintings within 64–65, 200–202, reclusion 116, 142–48, 155, 159
205, 262 Red Cliff (Qiao Zhongchang) 159, 269
and stylistic allusions 199, 200–201, See also Li Gonglin; Su Shi
205–6 rejection 80, 106, 113–14, 116
text-image relationship in 185, 197–203 relationships
See also Mou Yi; Xie Huilian heteroerotic 9, 13, 14, 70, 75–76, 121–23,
Pounding Silk (Zhang Xuan) 72, 164–65, 171, 170, 206–7, 229, 236, 247, 250, 268
172–77, 180, 182 and hierarchy 77, 114–15, 271
See also Court Ladies Preparing Newly homosocial 40, 121, 126, 159, 204–6, 271
Woven Silk (attr. Huizong); Zhang Xuan marital 21–22, 77, 122–23, 209
power 24, 114–15, 119, 132 See also attachment; friendship; love;
Powers, Martin J. 53n80, 125n91, 141n124, marriage; romance; sexual relations
205n119 Renzong (Northern Song emperor) 121
repression 157
Prince of Shou 24
revelry
princesses 20
in historical accounts 137–38, 144, 145
printmakers 268
and metaphors 137, 139n118
privacy 8, 141, 183, 244
in painting 73n156, 126–37, 139, 147, 151
and space 67–68, 70, 198–99, 222, 226
See also entertainment; Night Revels of
and viewing of paintings 160, 182–83,
Han Xizai scrolls
206, 219, 246, 250
Rexroth, Kenneth 67n132
projection 62 “Rhapsody on the Tall Gate Palace” (att. Sima
and audience 10–13, 158, 183, 203, 2o6–7, Xiangru) 174, 176
219, 221, 246, 249, 252 rhapsody, rhyme-prose 40–41n78, 81, 174, 176
and authorship 10, 12–13, 160, 180–85 rhetoric 7, 120n66
passim and functions of painting 3, 11, 81, 115,
pronouns 13–14, 81, 107, 124n88, 196 184
propriety 32, 75, 158n9 in painting 198, 203, 227, 244
prostitutes 122 in poetry 63, 64, 66n122, 70, 157, 227, 231
See also courtesans; entertainment rivers 146
protagonists in painting 27, 181, 200, 201, 211, 227, 244
in pictorial arts 137, 158 See also landscape paintings; nature
in poetry or song lyrics 26, 65, 113–14, roads 69, 227n55
154, 179, 194 Roberts, Laurance P. 30n59
public 137–38, 141, 142, 147, 155, 182, 206, 216, Robertson, Maureen 15n10, 28n51
221, 225, 246 rocks 223
puns 167, 171, 174, 177–78, 202, 211, 267 in painting 25–26, 146, 174, 211, 249, 255
romance 1
Qianlong (Qing emperor) 95, 201n109, 207 culture of 8, 9n31, 252
Qiao Zhizhi 169n39 and feelings 9, 29, 72, 129, 135, 242
Qin dynasty 57 and images of women 13, 71, 75, 123, 126,
Qing dynasty 7n24, 20, 79n12, 115, 125– 147, 245, 247–49, 255–59, 268
26n95, 171 in painting 1, 9–11, 13, 20, 27, 62, 71, 75, 80,
“Qingyang Ford” 165, 167–68 126, 247–49, 252–53, 255–62, 268–69,
Qu Yuan, “Encountering Sorrow” 78, 79n12, 271
114 in poetry 9, 13, 14, 27, 61, 121, 158, 261

via free access
Index 313
and relationships 11, 21, 66, 72 as poets (see under literati)

in song lyric 9, 17–19, 123, 158 See also courtesans; literati; reclusion
in stories 8–9, 24, 115, 121, 257–59 screens
See also attachment; love painted 11, 176n68, 209–10, 246, 247,
Rorex, Robert 61n104 250–51, 254–55
Rouzer, Paul 9n31, 28n49, 29n54, 77n1, represented in painting 64–65, 116–18,
81n23, 81n26, 115n47, 120n66, 125n92, 129, 146, 200–203, 211, 226, 227, 241–44,
208n2, 220n29 247
rulers represented in poetry or song lyric
and advisers 73, 138, 142, 147, 175, 207, 220 244n114, 247
and court painters 51, 116, 138–40, scrolls
164–65, 252 handscrolls and panoramic compositions
Former Han 35, 174–75, 219 202
Jin 72, 164 handscrolls and sequential compositions
Latter Shu 182 30–31, 35–51, 118
Liang 8, 178–80 handscrolls and viewing practices 71–72,
metaphors for 223 184n88, 205–6, 255
and ministers 77, 78, 138–40, 142, 148 represented in painting 214
Northern Song 10, 16n17, 121, 146n139, 161, See also colophons to paintings; painting
164–65, 174n62, 176, 182–83, 206–7, 214, inscriptions
252–53 seasons 168, 181, 194, 198, 211, 220, 222, 226
as patrons 138–40, 155, 164–65 Selections of Refined Literature 115
and relationships with consorts 24, 25, self 206, 228
35–37, 94n29, 174–75, 176, 181, 220,
awareness 227–28, 231, 245, 250–51
249–50, 253
cultivation 233–34, 250
Southern Song 22–23, 94, 115–17, 121, 155,
“Sending a Soldier’s Clothes to the Frontier”
184–85, 209, 220, 252–53
170n46
Southern Tang 31, 33, 35n73, 73–74, 116,
separation
120, 129, 138–40, 142, 147, 155, 247n123,
of friends 201, 238
252–54
of husbands and wives 21–22, 160,
and subjects 77, 78, 113–16, 182
168–69, 185, 196–97, 200–201, 211,
Tang 24, 25, 33, 119, 181, 214, 249–50
241–43
Wei 113–15
of lovers 69, 158, 160, 180, 201–2, 221, 238,
Samei, Maija Bell 16n14, 16n16, 28n50, 29n57 262
satire 5, 77–78 in painting 160, 185, 200–202, 211, 262
scholars 2, 8–9 in poetry or song lyric 159–60, 168, 185,
as audience for paintings 32, 71–72, 75, 196–97, 201
184n88, 205–6 in stories 168
and commentary on paintings or poetry sericulture 166–67, 176–77, 182–83
55, 78, 172–76, 184n88, 270–71 See also textile work
and entertainers 10, 14, 73, 79, 118–19, Sericulture (Cleveland Museum of Art)
120–23, 125–37, 140–41, 145, 147–48, 151, 172n57
154 servants, female 121–22, 138
metaphors for 211, 223 in painting 67, 118, 129, 132, 172, 176,
as painters (see under literati) 210–11, 214, 245
in painting 118, 126–37, 145, 147, 154, 172, Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove 145, 148
268, 269–70 Seventh Night 150
poetic tropes for 78–79, 146, 255n5 sewing. See textile work

via free access
314 Index
sexual organs 68–69, 167 Song dynasty. See Northern Song dynasty;
See also body Southern Song dynasty
sexual relations 1, 6, 32, 67, 77, 81, 106, 123, Song Lian, Collection of Song Scholars 26
247 song lyrics 3–4, 137
anticipation of 37, 249 as commentary 79n12, 155
metaphors for 68–69, 247–49 emotions conveyed through 9, 65,
in pictorial arts 72, 126, 132, 137, 154 159–60
in poetry or song lyric 79, 261 of female authorship 1, 10, 12, 14, 15–19,
See also courtesans; eroticism; relation- 27
ships literati 1, 9, 15, 68–69, 79–80, 159–60,
Shaoxing reign. See Gaozong (Southern Song 206n121
emperor) of male authorship 16–17, 68–69, 124–25,
Shen Deqian 65 159–60, 178
Shenzong (Northern Song emperor) personae in 9, 14–17, 28, 159–60
146n139 popular 14, 15
Shields, Anna M. 13n6, 71–72n151, 158n9, and subjectivity 12–19
159n10, 222n35, 271n28 themes or tropes in 1, 12, 70, 79–80,
Shi Hao 117, 140n119 159–60, 165, 169, 171, 183
Shih, Hsio-yen 54nn82–83, 107n37, 234n80 voice in 14–19, 28, 29, 58, 158–60
Shijing. See Book of Songs writers of 65, 79–80, 120, 159–60
Shi Miyuan 75, 117, 140n119 See also performance; singing
See also Night Revels of Han Xizai scrolls “Song of Mulan” 231–32
shinü hua. See paintings of women Songs of Chu 81, 114
Song Yu 68–69
shi poetry 14–16, 29, 79n12, 158, 160n14
“Rhyme-Prose on the Goddess” 81
Silbergeld, Jerome 184n87, 202n11
sorrow 55–56
silk 166–67
in painting 22, 61–62, 183, 200–202, 257,
in painting or poetry 165, 180, 219–20,
262
227
in palace-style poetry 70, 169, 180, 194,
See also cloth; textile work
196
Sima Caizhong’s Dream of the Courtesan Su
in poetry or song lyric 8–9, 18–19, 26, 65,
Xiaoxiao (Liu Yuan) 257–59
70, 159–60, 169, 171
See also Liu Yuan
See also emotions; feelings; grief;
Sima Guang 66, 77n1, 245 heartbreak; melancholy; mood
Precepts for Family Life 233 sounds, in poetry 169–70, 194, 196
Sima Jinlong, tomb of 176n68 “Southeast the Peacock Flies” 123
Sima Xiangru 174 Southern Dynasties 3–4, 8, 169, 229, 230,
Sima You (courtesy name Caizhong) 257–59 233, 236
singing 119, 123–26, 165, 167 See also Six Dynasties
See also Music Bureau poetry; song lyrics Southern Song dynasty 1, 2, 53
Sirén, Osvald 59n99 court painters 184n87, 209, 214, 254
Six Dynasties 33, 254 court painting 3, 94–95, 115–17, 155, 209,
See also Southern Dynasties 214–16, 252–53, 259–62
social status 2 rulers 22–23, 94, 115–17, 121, 155, 184–85,
signs of 70, 114–15, 165, 172, 181, 198, 199, 208n3, 209, 220, 252–53
230–31, 247, 261–62 Southern Tang kingdom 120, 247
Song Di 205n119 court 33, 142–43, 147
Evening Landscape of the Xiao-Xiang court painters 7,10, 30, 31, 33, 51, 53, 73,
Region 270–71 116, 128–29, 138–42, 252, 253, 270

via free access
Index 315
officials 72–74, 116, 138–44, 147, 155 “My Wife, Ms. Wang, Died First, so I Wrote
rulers 31, 33, 73–74, 116, 120, 138–40, 142, This Lyric in Mourning” 159–60,
147, 155, 247n123, 252–54 234–36
Song conquest of 120, 147, 148 and painting criticism 6, 53n80, 59, 60
See also Five Dynasties scholarly circle of 205n119, 214, 262
spaces poetry or song lyrics of 29, 79–80,
exterior 69–70, 203, 222, 226–27 122n78, 159–60, 270–71
feminine 51, 66–70, 195, 206, 222, 247 See also Li Gonglin; Red Cliff (Qiao
interior 66–70, 150–51, 203, 222, 226–27 Zhongchang)
and interiority 66–70, 203 Su Xiaoxiao 257–59
masculine 141, 146, 195, 222 synecdoche 51, 168
private 67–68, 70, 150, 198–99, 222
public 142, 155 tales of strange events (chuanqi) 25
spirit 54, 60n101 Taizong (Northern Song emperor) 121
Spiro, Audrey 3n12, 5n16, 59n100, 60n103, Taizu (Northern Song emperor) 121
129n104, 145n134, 255n5 Tang dynasty 2, 33, 53, 209–10
spying 73–74, 139, 142 court artists 2, 59–60, 164–65, 171, 175
Stewart, Stanley 226n49 culture of romance in 8–9, 61
Sturman, Peter C. 53n80, 117n54, 270n paintings 7, 53–54, 78–79, 80, 171–77, 183,
Su Bai 243n108 247
subjectivity poetry 3–4, 14–15, 37, 70, 115, 166, 170–71,
and authorship or audience 10, 12–19, 34, 175, 218, 229, 236, 238
75, 124 rulers 24–25, 33, 119, 181, 214, 249–50
female 12, 13–19, 28, 34, 53–54, 72, 75 song lyrics 169–71, 238–39
stories 25, 115, 125
and images of women 12–14, 34, 252
women 13n4, 20–22, 27, 119–20, 232
and interiority 10, 12–13, 29–30, 56
See also Tang–Song transition
male 28n50, 75
Tang Hou, Examination of Painting 6–7, 58,
in painting 12–14, 29–30, 34, 35, 55, 75,
66, 75, 80, 117n51, 139–40, 142, 160, 165
151, 252
Tang Shuyu (a.k.a. Tang Souyu), Jade Terrace
in poetry 13–19, 124
History of Painting 19–22, 23n36, 26,
transvestite 28, 29, 54, 75
27, 53n81
See also perspectives
Tang–Song transition 7–9, 20
Su Che 78, 270
Tao Gu, Record of the Pure and Unusual
Su Hanchen 7, 11, 210, 214, 254
118n58
See also Lady at Her Dressing Table (attr.
Taoye 218, 219
Su Hanchen)
Tao Yue, “Han Xizai’s Curtains Are Not
Sullivan, Michael 117n53, 184n88, 243n108 Drawn” 137–38, 142, 154
Sun Chengze, Notes Written in the Summer of taste, in painting 4–6, 252, 254
1660 130n108 textile work
Sun Qi, Records of the Northern Ward 120, embroidery or needlework 23–24n39,
121 165
Sun Yuepan, Peiwen Hall Calligraphy and ironing 161, 177–78, 180
Painting Catalogue 31n62 in painting 9–10, 23, 161, 165–67, 171–74,
superficiality 12 176–78, 180, 199–203
surface 141–42, 230, 232, 240 in poetry 165–72, 175, 179–80, 194–96, 231
and interiority 216, 227, 241 pounding cloth 161, 165, 167–72, 175–77,
Su Shi 179–80, 194–96, 200–201
friendships of 270–71 sewing 161, 166, 175–77, 201, 203

via free access
316 Index
textile work (cont.) and the gaze 181

and social class 166, 176–77, 180 and identification with figures 158, 206,
spinning 161, 165–66 208, 252
weaving 165–66, 172, 231 and interiority 10, 13, 246, 250–53, 271
as womanly work 23, 165–66 literati 6, 71–72, 184n88, 205–6
See also cloth; clothing; sericulture; silk; male 6, 13, 51, 71–75, 154, 158, 183, 204–8,
thread 219, 221, 244, 249–50, 252–55, 269–71
text-image relationships of paintings of women 4, 5–7, 10–11,
and connections between painting and 34–35, 51–53, 71–75, 158, 184n88, 185,
poetry 1, 7, 9, 13, 29, 55, 65–66, 80, 119, 203, 205–6, 219, 221–22, 249, 254–55
255, 270–71 and projection 12–13, 32, 182, 183, 203,
and pictorial interpretation of poetic 206–8, 221, 249, 252
themes 26, 32, 54–55, 64–66, 77, and subjectivity 13–14, 53–54, 72, 75
94–113, 171–72, 174, 175, 183, 185, 197–203, See also audience; gaze; observers;
221 voyeurism
See also painting inscriptions; poems-on- Vinograd, Richard 71n150
paintings virtue 227–28
thread 177–78, 180 in painting or poetry 3, 5–6, 23, 182–83,
Tian Jing 60 207
time, passage of 168, 181, 194, 200, 222, 226, and women 5–6, 24, 123, 165–66, 175,
236, 240 182–83, 207, 228, 233–34, 245
tombs See also figure painting; paintings of
pictorial arts from 145, 177n68, 220, women
243n108 voice
sculpture from 247n123 ambiguity of 81, 220
transgression 141, 146, 154, 195 female, in poetry or song lyric 13–19, 28,
transience 132, 222, 236, 267 29, 58, 123–25, 154, 165, 174, 196, 220, 261
transvestism. See cross-dressing first-person, in poetry 13, 16–19, 29n57,
travelers 21, 26, 146, 201–4, 238, 244, 267–68 58, 81, 159–60, 174, 196
in painting or poetry 158–59, 169, 180, male, in poetry or song lyric 13, 15,
200–201 29n57, 158–60, 234–36
trees 198, 222–23, 267 and performance 14, 58
See also nature; paulownia trees, in of a protagonist, in poetry 65
painting; pine trees, in painting or subjectivity and 14–15, 17–19, 28, 81, 154
poetry; plum trees; willows, in painting transvestite 28
or poetry See also authorship; cross-dressing; song
Tsang, Ka Bo 218n25 lyrics; subjectivity
Tuotuo, Song History 140–41, 144, 146 Volpp, Sophie 17n20
voyeurism
Varsano, Paula 175nn65–66 and paintings of women 5–6, 14, 73–74,
ventriloquism 28 139, 198–99, 200
Verdant Forests, Distant Peaks (Liaoning in poetry 13, 70, 195, 198–99, 232–33
Provincial Museum) 246 See also gaze; viewership
viewership
court 6, 32, 72 Wagner, Marsha 168n38, 267n19
and feelings 55, 58, 64, 203, 252–53 waiting 18–19, 204, 229, 267–68
female 53, 59–60, 72, 208–10, 221–22, Waley, Arthur 29n52, 78n6
246–47, 250–51, 254–55 Wang Bo 171n49

via free access
Index 317
Wang Changling 63–64 in poetry 26, 123, 159–60, 167–69, 185,

“Autumn Song of Enduring Trust” 175, 201, 229, 241n100
176 in song lyric 123, 159–60, 234–36
Wang Fuzhi 64 See also attachment; divorce; husbands;
Wang Jian 161, 181n81, 182, 218 marriage; relationships
“Song of Pounding Cloth” 181 women
Wang Keyu, Coral Net Record of Painting activities of 9, 165–67, 202–3
24–25 as artists 6, 10, 13, 19–28, 53, 75–76
Wang Juzheng 216, 254 as calligraphers 22–23, 26nn44–45, 116,
See also Lady Watching a Maid with a 220
Parrot (Museum of Fine Arts) compared to ministers 77n1, 78–79
Wang Qiang (Zhaojun) 35–37 at court (see palace women)
Wang Qihan 270 education of 2, 123, 208, 214
Wang Shen 210, 214, 254, 270 experiences and daily lives of 3, 11, 16, 19
See also Embroidered Cage, Morning and feelings 13, 158, 160
Mirror (National Palace Museum) ladies (shinü) 2, 5, 156–58, 199–201, 205,
Wang Tiju 262 210–14, 217, 240–50 passim, 255, 261
See also Layers of Icy Silk (Ma Lin); Yang in painting (see female figures, in Chinese
Meizi (Southern Song empress) painting)
Wang Xianzhi 218 in poetry (see personae)
Wang Wei, “Seeing Yuan’er Off to Anxi”/“Song roles in society 13, 165–66, 177
of Wei City” 269 and talent 7–8n26, 25–26, 120–21
Wang Yi 78 views of, in Chinese culture 13, 78, 233
Wang Yun, Catalogue of Calligraphy and as writers 7–8n26, 8, 14–19, 21–22, 158,
Painting 80 209
Wang Yuxian, Notes of Painting Matters 23 See also beautiful women; eroticism; men;
Warring States period 78 paintings of women; virtue; wives
water 18–19, 242–43, 267 Wudi (Former Han emperor) 174
See also rivers; waves, in painting Wudi (Liang emperor), “Pounding Cloth”
Watson, Burton 113n39, 123n82, 145n135, 178–80
194n95, 236n81 Wu Hung 73n155, 117n51, 144n128, 214n14,
waves 211, 242–43 228n59, 241n99, 242n106, 268n21
weaving. See textile work Wu (Southern Song empress) 94, 208n3,
Weitz, Ankeney 23n38, 117n51, 221n32 220, 259
Wen Tingyun 238–39 Wushan, goddess of 68–69
Wen xuan. See Selections of Refined Literature wutong trees. See paulownia trees, in painting
Whiling Away the Summer by a Lakeside Wu Tung 174n62, 176n71
Retreat (Zhao Lingrang) 201, 262–68, Wu Zimu, Dreams of Hangzhou 122
271
See also Zhao Lingrang Xiang River Goddesses 106, 181, 242
wilderness. See nature Xiao Gang (Liang emperor Jianwen) 8
Williams, Nicholas Morrow 185n91 Xiaoxian (Qing empress) 207
willows, in painting or poetry 201–2, 238, Xia Wenyan, Treasured Mirror of Painting
267 22–23, 117n51, 184–85
wind 223–24 Xie Huilian 185n91
wives 20, 21–22, 26–27, 77n1, 122–23, 176, 210, “Pounding Cloth” 185, 194–98, 200–204
233 Xiongnu 35, 61
in painting 21–22, 167, 198, 243n108 Xishanqiao tombs 145

via free access
318 Index
Xuanhe Painting Catalogue 1n1, 5n16, 27, Zhang Chang 74, 141–42, 233
72–74, 139, 141–42, 164–65, 173n59 Zhang Cheng (Danyan Jushi) 32–35, 72,
Xuanzong (Tang emperor) 24–25, 119, 214, 253–54
245, 249–50 See also In the Palace scrolls; Night Revels
See also Yang Yuhuan (Yang Guifei) of Han Xizai scrolls
Xu Bangda 117n53, 140n119 Zhang Hua
Xue Tao 14 “Admonitions of the Instructress”
Xue Ying, “Story of the Goddess of the Luo” 233–34
115 A Treatise on the Investigation of Things
See also Cao Zhi; Goddess of the Luo River 181n79
scrolls See also Admonitions of the Court
Xue Yuan 21–22, 27 Instructress to the Palace Ladies (British
Xu Ling, New Songs from a Jade Terrace Museum)
and female poets 8, 14, 29, 257–59 Zhang Junfang, Record of the Feelings of
images of women in 8, 125, 169, 172n56, Beauties 20–21
178, 185, 228, 230 Zhang Ruzhou 26
preface to 29, 66 Zhang Xuan 7, 160–61, 164–65, 173n59
See also Pounding Silk (Zhang Xuan)
yang 67, 195 Zhang Xuecheng 7–8n26
See also gender distinctions; yin Zhangzong (Jin emperor) 72, 164
Yang Meizi (Southern Song empress) 209, Zhao Feiyan 175–76
224n43, 259–62 Zhao Lingrang 201, 205n119, 262–68, 271
See also Apricot Blossoms (Ma Yuan);
See also Whiling Away the Summer by a
Layers of Icy Silk (Ma Lin); Ma Lin; Ma
Lakeside Retreat (Zhao Lingrang)
Yuan; Ningzong (Southern Song
Zhao Lingzhi 269
emperor)
Zhao Luanluan, “Creamy Breasts” 15
Yang, Xiaoshan 223n41
Zhao Mingcheng 19, 206n120
Yang Yuhuan (Yang Guifei) 24–25, 214, 245
Zhao Xiaohua 247n123
See also Xuanzong (Tang emperor)
zhiyin (sympathetic listener) 40, 124–25, 204
Yan Jidao 243n109
Zhou Bangyan 178
Tune: “Moon over the West River” 240
Zhou dynasty 77n1, 177n72, 230n68
Yan Ming 120n69
Zhou Fang 2, 6–7, 59–60
Yan Rui 16–17
Yashiro Yukio 30n59 figural style of 33, 160–61, 197, 199, 205,
Yijing. See Book of Changes 253–55
yin 67, 69, 78, 220, 242–43 and paintings of women 7, 11, 78–79, 171,
See also gender distinctions; inner; yang 246, 247n123, 253–55
Yingzong (Northern Song emperor) 214 See also Ladies Adorning Their Hair with
Yuandi (Former Han emperor) 35 Flowers (Liaoning Provincial Museum);
Yuan dynasty 6, 19, 95, 137, 139–41, 143–45 Palace Ladies Tuning the Lute
Yuan Haowen 72, 172–76, 180 (Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art)
Yu Hui 117n53 Zhou Mi
Yu Jianwu, “A Beauty Sees Herself in a Guixin Miscellaneous Records 143–44
Painting” 208n2 Old Affairs of Hangzhou 122
Yu, Pauline 77n1, 78n6 Records of Clouds and Mist that Have
Yutai xinyong. See Xu Ling, New Songs from a Passed before My Eyes 117n51
Jade Terrace Words from the Country East of Qi 117n54
Yu Xuanji 14 Zhou Wenju 116, 140

via free access
Index 319
and paintings of women 7, 10, 30–34, Zhu Zaishang 33–34, 253

35n73, 51, 53, 252 See also In the Palace scrolls
See also In the Palace scrolls; Night Revels Ziporyn, Brook 137n111
of Han Xizai scrolls zithers 40, 172, 255
Zhou Xun 247n124 See also lutes
Zhuangzi 227 Zuo Si 51n79
Zhu Jingxuan, Record of Famous Painters of Zuozhuan 168
the Tang Dynasty 1n1, 2, 59–60 Zu Wupo 73, 116n51, 126–28, 130, 139, 142–44,
Zhu Tan (Ming prince), tomb of 220 148, 155
Zhu Xi 66, 242–43n108
commentary on the Book of Songs 78,
116, 155

via free access

(Women and Gender in China Studies) Lara Blanchard - Song Dynasty Figures of Longing and Desire - Gender and Interiority in Chinese Painting and Poetry-Brill (2018)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

(Women and Gender in China Studies) Lara Blanchard - Song Dynasty Figures of Longing and Desire - Gender and Interiority in Chinese Painting and Poetry-Brill (2018)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

﻿ i

Song Dynasty Figures of Longing and Desire

Women and Gender

Grace S. Fong (McGill University)

Louise Edwards (University of New South Wales)

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/wgcs

Lara C.W. Blanchard - 978-90-04-36939-9

Song Dynasty Figures of Longing

Lara C.W. Blanchard

Lara C.W. Blanchard - 978-90-04-36939-9

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov

Copyright 2018 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands.

This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Lara C.W. Blanchard - 978-90-04-36939-9

For Audrey, Steve, Shirley, and Daria

Lara C.W. Blanchard - 978-90-04-36939-9

Lara C.W. Blanchard - 978-90-04-36939-9

1 Gendered Subjectivity and Representing Interiority 12

2 Political Interpretations of Desire 77

Lara C.W. Blanchard - 978-90-04-36939-9

4 The Female Audience: Modeling Idealized Femininity 208

Conclusion: Interiority and the Value of Connection 252

Lara C.W. Blanchard - 978-90-04-36939-9

Lara C.W. Blanchard - 978-90-04-36939-9

about scholars, courtesans, and reclusion in “A Scholar in the Company of

Lara C.W. Blanchard - 978-90-04-36939-9

Lara C.W. Blanchard - 978-90-04-36939-9

Lara C.W. Blanchard - 978-90-04-36939-9

DHGC Dunhuang geci zongbian 敦煌歌詞總編, edited by Ren Bantang 任半塘

Lara C.W. Blanchard - 978-90-04-36939-9

Lara C.W. Blanchard - 978-90-04-36939-9

Who says that heartbreak cannot be painted?

Emotional attachment between men and women is a prominent theme in

Lara C.W. Blanchard - 978-90-04-36939-9

Lara C.W. Blanchard - 978-90-04-36939-9

(gongti shi 宮體詩) of the Southern Dynasties (420–589) as well as Music

In the past, I have looked at masterpieces of ancient painting from the

If one asks how contemporary artists compare to those of ancient times,

Lara C.W. Blanchard - 978-90-04-36939-9

Guo means to demonstrate his superior appreciation of paintings in compar-

Lara C.W. Blanchard - 978-90-04-36939-9

dantly elegant, beautiful, and delicate in form.” (士女宜富秀色婑媠之態。)19

Lara C.W. Blanchard - 978-90-04-36939-9

Lara C.W. Blanchard - 978-90-04-36939-9

women’s talent as entertainment”; Susan Mann, “Presidential Address: Myths of Asian

Lara C.W. Blanchard - 978-90-04-36939-9

merchants.31 Subsequently, the Song literati expanded upon the persona of

Lara C.W. Blanchard - 978-90-04-36939-9

Lara C.W. Blanchard - 978-90-04-36939-9

Lara C.W. Blanchard - 978-90-04-36939-9

Gendered Subjectivity and Representing Interiority

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004369399_003

figures as sites of projection. In this chapter, I explore gendered authorship of

Subjectivity and Authorship

The question of whose subjectivity is represented in romantic images of

Lara C.W. Blanchard - 978-90-04-36939-9

position in painting is inherently unstable and open to interpretation. While

Women Poets, Erotic Personae, and Female Subjectivity

Lara C.W. Blanchard - 978-90-04-36939-9

women sometimes wrote in autobiographical voices in the genre of shi 詩 po-

Powder-fragrant, sweat-slick, a lute’s jade pegs—

Lara C.W. Blanchard - 978-90-04-36939-9

essentially performative genre.13 Though it was possible to inscribe the femi-

i

perspective.24 One song lyric with a relatively reliable attribution to Li Qing

Terrace Painting (Yutai huashi 玉臺畫史) and compiled by Tang Shuyu 唐漱