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Wu Cailuan
Tang woman of legend said to have lived by copying the rhyme dictionary Tangyun in small regular script
A desk holds an unrolled sheet bearing three bold black ink strokes, with a rack of many brushes above it, a stone ink slab and ink stick, a porcelain bowl, a red lacquer box, a dish of red seal paste and a paperweight; a small seated figure shows through a round window onto bamboo.
Also known as Cailuan
Wu Cailuan is a Tang woman known only from later accounts, said to have come from Yuzhang, today's Nanchang, and absent from the official histories. The Xuanhe Catalogue of Calligraphy (Xuanhe shupu) relates that she married a poor scholar, Wen Xiao, and kept the household by copying Sun Mian's rhyme dictionary Tangyun in small regular script, tens of thousands of characters a day, before the couple rode away on tigers as immortals. The tale belongs to the world of immortals, but it spread widely from the Song onward. The National Palace Museum in Taipei holds a Tang manuscript of the Tangyun, once in the Xuanhe palace collection and mounted in the rare dragon-scale binding, that bears her name. Museum scholars note that many surviving Tang rhyme manuscripts were ascribed to her, so the attribution is traditional rather than proven.
Life and times
Dates Dates unknown; said to have lived in the Dahe and Huichang eras (827-846)