SOURCE: Almberg, Shiu-Pang E. “Li Qingzhao: Letter to the Academician Qi Chongli.” Renditions: A Chinese-English Translation Magazine, nos. 41 & 42 (spring & autumn 1994): 79-84.

In the following excerpt, Almberg discusses and then reproduces a letter from Li Ch'ing-chao to Qi Chongli, a relative of her first husband and a respected senior academician. The critic contends that this letter confirms the theory that the poet married for a second time.

Despite the very limited number of her extant works (some seventy lyrics out of six volumes together with other poems and a few prose pieces), Li Qingzhao, alias Yian (1084-1155), is undeniably a major Chinese poet.

Born into a learned family from Ji'nan, the once cultural metropole of Shandong, (her father, Li Gefei, being a well-known literary figure as well as an official of some importance in his day) Li Qingzhao established herself in early youth as a talent to be reckoned...