Writers › Writer / Poet
Li Ye
Mid-Tang Daoist nun and poet from Wuxing who exchanged verse with Lu Yu, Jiaoran and Liu Changqing and was put to death in 784 for having sent poems to the rebel Zhu Ci
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 Zi Jilan · Li Jilan
- Roles
- Writer / Poet
Li Ye, courtesy name Jilan, came from Wucheng in Wuxing and became a Daoist nun; her birth year is unknown. She exchanged poems with Lu Yu, the monk-poet Jiaoran, Liu Changqing and Zhu Fang, and the Biographies of Tang Poets (Tang caizi zhuan) tells how, at a gathering in Wucheng's Kaiyuan Temple, she teased the ailing Liu with a line of Tao Yuanming and he capped it with another. Gao Zhongwu included her in his anthology Superior Spirits of the Restoration and noted that Liu called her a hero among women poets. When rebels took Chang'an in 783 and Zhu Ci declared himself emperor, she presented poems to him; according to Zhao Yuanyi's Record of Fengtian, Emperor Dezong, back in the capital in 784, questioned her and had her beaten to death. About a dozen and a half of her poems survive, strongest in five-character lines; her Eight Extremes, calling husband and wife the closest and most distant of all, is the most quoted.
Life and times
Dates c. 730 CE–784 CE