![]() ![]() Yu Xuanji seems to have genuinely loved and cared for Li Yi unfortunately for her, concubinage was not the same thing as marriage, and Li Yi eventually abandoned Yu while travelling in the south of China.ĭejected and penniless, Yu lived alone in the mountains for a while before returning to Chang’an, where she eventually entered a Daoist convent. ![]() Marriage was one of the few ways by which a woman of the pleasure district could leave it, and courtesans therefore often tried to attract men who would make honest women of them. Poetry was simply one of many means to this end.Īround the age of sixteen, Yu became a concubine to Censor Li Yi. It is her time as a courtesan we have to thank for her poetry: “respectable” women of the period had no need to be literate and were often deliberately kept uneducated, while courtesans needed to keep their guests entertained with every tool at their disposal. ![]() Yu Xuanji managed to fill multiple roles outside of the traditional social order: first as courtesan, then as abandoned concubine, and finally as Daoist nun. Yu’s poems are fascinating in their lyric intensity even as they give us a view into her short, tumultous life. It is likely she wrote more, but this is all we have. The poems we do have with us today, and which I have translated here, are taken from the massive 1703 anthology Complete Tang Poems. One volume of Yu’s poems was supposedly published in her lifetime, but this has been lost. She was executed in her early to mid-twenties for the murder of one of her maids. The Tang Dynasty poetess Yu Xuanji lived roughly between the years 844 and 868 in the capital city of of Chang’an (present-day Xi’an). (This introduction is a greatly abridged version of a longer write-up on Asymptote.) ![]()
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