Writers › Writer / Poet
Tang Wan
First wife of the poet Lu You, forced apart from him by his mother; their later meeting in the Shen Garden is told in Southern Song notebooks
In a study at night, a desk holds a brush pot, a porcelain vase with a plum branch, a lit red lantern, a folded fan and an unrolled blank scroll, with no one seated there, while through a round window the moon rises over a lake with a sailboat.
Also known as Tang Shi
- Roles
- Writer / Poet
Tang Wan is the name later tradition gives to Lu You's first wife, whom Song writers call only Madam Tang. According to Zhou Mi's *Qidong yeyu*, she was the daughter of Tang Hong and a niece of Lu You's mother; the couple were devoted, but his mother disliked her and forced a divorce, and she remarried Zhao Shicheng, an imperial clansman. Chen Hu and Zhou Mi both relate that one spring Lu You met her and her husband in the Shen Garden south of the Yuji Temple in Shaoxing, that she sent him wine and food, and that he wrote the lyric *Chaitou feng* on the garden wall. Zhou Mi adds that she died soon afterwards. A reply to the same tune ascribed to her surfaces only in fragments after the Ming, and the full text later still, so most scholars treat it as a later composition. Lu You returned to the Shen Garden in many late poems, including a pair written at seventy-five.
Life and times
Dates Dates unknown; Southern Song