Li Qingzhao and Zhao Mingcheng: A Marriage Recorded in Objects

Two Cataloguers in a Poor Household

“余建中辛巳，始归赵氏” — “In the xinsi year of the Jianzhong era, 1101, I came as a bride into the Zhao household.” The line, written decades later in her postface to his catalogue of bronze and stone inscriptions, is the one firm date for the marriage. Zhao Mingcheng was twenty-one, a student at the Imperial University; both households were, in her phrase, “族寒,” of thin means. On leave days he pawned clothes for five hundred coppers and walked to the Xiangguo Temple market for rubbings and fruit, which the two studied together. A Xu Xi painting of peonies, priced at two hundred thousand coppers, stayed two nights and went back: “夫妇相向惋怅者数日” — the couple faced each other in dismay for days.

Guilai Hall and the Tea Wager

In Qingzhou, during about ten years of retirement — “屏居乡里十年,” her phrase; the years are a modern reconstruction — the marriage became a method. After meals in the Guilai Hall they brewed tea and wagered on their reading:

“余性偶强记，每饭罢，坐归来堂烹茶，指堆积书史，言某事在某书某卷第几页第几行，以中否角胜负，为饮茶先后。中即举杯大笑，至茶倾覆怀中，反不得饮而起。”

“It happens that I have a retentive memory. After every meal we sat in the Guilai Hall and brewed tea, pointing at the piled books, naming the book, the volume, the page and the line where such and such was recorded; whoever was right drank first. When I won I would lift the cup and laugh until the tea spilled down my front, and get up having drunk nothing.”

The four-character tag “赌书泼茶,” staking books and splashing tea, is a later summary, not her wording: in her text the tea overturns into her lap.

What to Abandon, and in What Order

In the twelfth month of 1127 the Jin army took Qingzhou and the collection stored there ended as ash: “凡所谓十馀屋者，已皆为煨烬矣” — all those ten-odd rooms had become embers. What was moved in time went south by boat, fifteen cartloads ferried across the Huai and the Yangzi. Two years later, on the bank at Chiyang before Zhao left for Huzhou, he set the order of surrender: baggage first, then clothing, then books and scrolls, then antiquities — but the ancestral vessels “可自负抱，与身俱存亡,” to be carried in one's arms, to live or die with their bearer. The instruction is his; later retellings put it in her mouth.

The Summer of 1129

He rode to court through the heat, sickened with malaria; she covered three hundred li in a day and a night to find him dosed with bupleurum and scutellaria, the fever turned to dysentery. “八月十八日，遂不起。取笔作诗，绝笔而终” — on the eighteenth day of the eighth month he did not rise again; he took a brush, wrote a poem, and died. She adds, “殊无分香卖屦之意”: no deathbed dispositions, no dividing of incense or selling of slippers. In the second month of that year, as administrator of Jiangning, he was warned of a mutiny and “弗听,” would not listen; when it broke, he and two officials were lowered over the city wall and fled by night. The record demotes those two and says nothing of any penalty for Zhao.

A Widow, a Lawsuit, and a Quarrel Among Historians

Afterwards the collection kept going. Luggage was abandoned when Hongzhou fell; five baskets were stolen from a wall niche at the Zhong house in Yuezhou; by the time she wrote, “十去其七八,” seven or eight parts in ten were gone. In 1132 she was involved in a marriage to Zhang Ruzhou, a military auditor, and a lawsuit that ended it. The official record says Zhang was convicted after his wife, Lady Li, accused him of inflating the examination attempts by which he had obtained office; the same entry names her as Li Gefei's daughter, who wrote lyrics and styled herself Yi'an. Her letter to the Hanlin academician Qi Chongli says she was “强以同归,” forced to go with him, calls him “驵侩之下才,” no better than a broker, and asked only “求脱去,” to be free — parallel prose addressed to a patron, and arguing. Song writers repeated the story; Qing scholars held the letter had been tampered with; most modern historians accept the marriage. The quarrel is about testimony, not a hidden truth.

What the Poems Can and Cannot Tell Us

Two famous lyrics sit near this story without belonging to it. “莫道不销魂，帘卷西风，人比黄花瘦” — do not say no one is pining; when the west wind rolls back the curtain, the person inside is thinner than the yellow chrysanthemum. The text is secure, but no Song source dates it, and reading it as a poem of separation sent to Zhao is later interpretation. The same holds for “声声慢,” usually read as a work of her southern exile: secure text, no contemporary date, and calling it a mourning poem for Zhao is a modern reading some scholars reject. What she left is the postface, dated 1132 in its colophon, offered as a warning to later collectors. Its subject is custody: what two people thought worth carrying, and in what order they let it go.