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Wang Fu
Su Shi's first wife from Qingshen in Meizhou, remembered for her intelligence and prudence and mourned in his dream lyric written a decade after her death.
Before a thatched village house stands a stone well with a wooden bucket, beside a pole with plain cloth drying, smoke rising from a hearth inside and a dog sleeping at the left; a woman carries two buckets along a path by rice fields, with green hills beyond.
Also known as Lady Wang (Su Shi's late wife)
Wang Fu, from Qingshen in Meizhou, was the daughter of the provincial graduate Wang Fang and married Su Shi at sixteen. Su Shi's epitaph for her records that she never claimed to be learned, yet could recall the books he read, and that she listened from behind a screen to his visitors and warned him about whom to trust. She died in the capital in 1065 at twenty-seven and was buried in Meizhou the next year. In 1075, while serving in Mizhou, Su Shi dreamed of her and wrote the lyric 'Jiang Cheng Zi: Dream on the Night of the 20th of the First Month' in her memory.
Life and times
Dates 1039–1065 CE