Writers › Writer / Poet
Cai Wenji
Daughter of Cai Yong, carried off to the Southern Xiongnu for twelve years and ransomed by Cao Cao, whose Poems of Grief and Anger are preserved in the History of the Later Han
Mural of the event “Cai Wenji Returns to Han”, which this person took part in.
At the end of the Eastern Han, Cai Wenji spent twelve years among the Southern Xiongnu after the Guanzhong upheaval, then returned to Han lands through Cao Cao's ransom and renewed Cai Yong's lost learning through memory, music, and poetry.
Also known as CaiYan
- Roles
- Writer / Poet
Cai Wenji, personal name Yan, came from Yu in Chenliu and was the daughter of the scholar Cai Yong, learned, eloquent and skilled in music according to the *History of the Later Han* (*Hou Hanshu*). Her first husband, Wei Zhongdao, died leaving no children, and she returned to her family. In the turmoil of the Xingping years she was seized by nomad horsemen and passed to the Worthy King of the Left of the Southern Xiongnu, bearing two sons in twelve years there. Cao Cao, her father's old friend, ransomed her with gold and jade and married her to Dong Si, and later won Dong Si a pardon from a death sentence. Her father's four thousand scrolls being lost, she wrote out some four hundred pieces from memory without error. She wrote two *Poems of Grief and Anger* (*Beifen shi*), which the *Hou Hanshu* quotes in full; the *Eighteen Songs of a Nomad Flute* (*Hujia shiba pai*) appears only in Song collections, and its authorship is still debated.
Life and times
Dates Dates unknown; late Eastern Han