Writers › Writer / Poet
Liu Rushi
Late Ming poet and former courtesan who married the scholar Qian Qianyi in 1641 and left the verse collections Wuyin Poems and Poems from the Lake
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 Yang Ai · He Dongjun
Born Yang Ai, Liu Rushi later took the name Liu Yin, with Rushi as her courtesy name; she called herself the Lady of Hedong and spent her youth among the courtesans of Jiangnan. She exchanged poems with Chen Zilong, a founder of the Jishe poetry society, printed the collections Wuyin Poems (Wuyin cao) and Poems from the Lake (Hushang cao) in the 1630s, and left letters to the Hangzhou patron Wang Ranming. In 1641 she married Qian Qianyi, then nearly sixty, as a secondary wife; he received her with the rites due to a principal wife amid criticism and later built the Jiangyun Tower at Changshu for her. Gu Ling's Biography of the Lady of Hedong says that when Nanjing fell she urged Qian to die for the Ming and, when he declined, tried to drown herself. After Qian's death in 1664 his clansmen came to seize his property, and she hanged herself. Chen Yinke devoted his last major work, the Unofficial Biography of Liu Rushi, to her.
Life and times
Dates 1618 CE–1664 CE