Text/Chen Shibao
It has been more than 800 years since the death of Li Qingzhao, a talented woman. For 800 years, the question of Li Qingzhao's remarriage to someone else after her husband Zhao Mingcheng died of illness in Huzhou has been a topic of debate and heated discussion. The crux of the controversy over Li Qingzhao's remarriage is how to view the issue of his "remarriage." Because as a talented woman, if you look at her remarriage with the feudal traditional concept, then remarriage means "out of touch." In feudal society, people adhered to the principle of "a woman starving to death is a small matter, and a loss of moderation is a big thing". Because of this, the issue of Li Qingzhao's remarriage is a very sensitive topic. Regardless of whether Li Qingzhao remarries or not, it is impossible for either side in feudal society to take off the colored glasses on a woman's "chastity". Assuming that if Li Qingzhao were a talented man, her remarriage would not have attracted so much attention.
Li Qingzhao is a talented woman. She was born in Jinan (now Jinan) in the Northern Song Dynasty and called herself Yi'an Jushi. She is the most famous female lyricist rarely seen in the mainland literary circle. She grew up in a family with a strong literary atmosphere, and her parents were quite literate. Li Qingzhao is intelligent, knowledgeable, talented, poetry, good at writing, good at writing, can draw ink and bamboo, and his style is clear and handsome. When he was eighteen years old, he married Zhao Mingcheng, a scholar of gold and stone research, and the husband and wife had similar interests. Poetry and harmony, research of gold and stone, proofreading of ancient books, life is calm and beautiful. Later, the Jingkang Change, the Northern Song Dynasty perished, and Zhao Mingcheng died of illness in Huzhou. After Zhao Mingcheng's death, Li Qingzhao in his later years was lonely and helpless, and was repeatedly attacked. Passed away in the upheaval.
As the number one female lyricist of the Wanyue faction, while Li Qingzhao is shining in the Chinese literary world, people are also paying attention to her other problem: "Li Qingzhao's remarriage in his later years." "The earliest record of Li Qingzhao's remarriage is the book "Yunlu Manjian" by Zhao Yanwei in the Song Dynasty. This book includes the article "Shangnei Hanqi Gong (Chongli) Qi" written by Li Qingzhao. This is a letter written by Li Qingzhao to Qi Chongli. recorded that Li Qingzhao was deceived by Zhang Ruzhou during his serious illness, and after marriage, she saw through Zhang Ruzhou's philistine face, and felt that it was difficult to spend her old age with him, so she wanted to break free from the net of this unfortunate marriage as soon as possible and end her unhappy marriage.
In the autumn of the same year, Li Qingzhao and Zhang divorced. According to the provisions of the Song Law, although the situation of the wife suing the husband is true, it is still required to be sentenced to two years in prison. She was saved from prison by Qi Chongli, a distant relative of her husband Zhao Mingcheng and who had shared hardships with Gaozong during the Jianyan period. Li Qingzhao's "enlightenment" is a letter to Qi Chongli expressing his gratitude for "Hong En." Wang Zhuo's "Biji Manzhi", written in Shaoxing for 19 years, said that Li Qingzhao "remarried a certain family, sued and divorced, and wandered away in the evening." Around the twenty-first year of Shaoxing, Hong Shi's writing for "Zhao Mingcheng Jinshi Lu" also mentioned that after Zhao Mingcheng's death, Li Qingzhao remarried someone else.
Scholars who support the theory of remarriage believe that in the works that record Li Qingzhao's remarriage, in terms of time, Hu Zai, Wang Zhuo, Chao Gongwu, and Hong Shi are all contemporaries of Li Qingzhao; in terms of region, there is no difference between Hu Zai's book being written in Huzhou and Hong Shi's book being written in Yuezhou. Therefore, the matter of Li Qingzhao's remarriage will not be spread by falsehood. Li Qingzhao was still alive when these people wrote the book, and these scholars did not attack her with rumors before her death.
Later, some people continued to raise objections to Li Qingzhao's remarriage. Among them, Xu Bo, a scholar of the Ming Dynasty, believes that Li Qingzhao's remarriage is not credible for four reasons: one is that women from official eunuchs at that time were not allowed to remarry. Remarriage is "out of line." Second, as a well-educated Chinese woman with a good family education, Li Qingzhao will not violate traditional etiquette. The third is that Li Qingzhao is old and seems to have no possibility of remarrying. Fourth, Li Qingzhao and Zhao Mingcheng are heart-to-heart, life and death, coupled with Li Qingzhao's love for gold stones and scrolls, she will not take the road of remarriage. Although these reasons seem reasonable, after all, they are just speculations of later generations, and they obviously do not have as much weight as the aforementioned historical records to prove Li Qingzhao's remarriage.
Regarding the issue of Li Qingzhao's remarriage, if we use a historical point of view to objectively evaluate it, Li Qingzhao, as a woman in feudal society, has made her a historical celebrity who shines in China. However, in the feudal society where a woman's lack of talent is virtue, as a woman, she has to accept the constraints and judgments of traditional Chinese moral values. Literati who had apparently become Xi to using Confucian ethics to evaluate others did not support Li Qingzhao's remarriage in any case. Those who try to prove that she is not married also want to use traditional Chinese values to maintain her image as a woman of a good family who abides by women's morals and does not lose her chastity. Whether she marries or not, as today, we should get rid of the influence of the concept of "chastity" brought by traditional Chinese literati, and first restore Li Qingzhao to a real person.
As a normal person, it is her personal will to marry or not. This is a normal thing that seems to people today. It's just that she lived in the Song Dynasty, where Cheng Zhu's science was popular, and her personal wish not only could not be met normally, but also attracted people's criticism. Fortunately, the first female lyricist in ancient China used her elegant and unique aesthetic vision to create a well-known and gorgeous lyrics, so that every latecomer retained the beautiful image of an oriental talented woman in the process of reading, thus forgetting the humiliating fate of her later years. Li Qingzhao's tragic fate was given to her by that era, because there were thousands of women with similar fates, and it was only because of Li Qingzhao's extraordinary artistic achievements that people were particularly concerned about her personal fate.
Submission email: [email protected]