Li Qingzhaothe ArenaENTP

In 1132, at about 48, Li Qingzhao answered a court in shackles, standing beside the husband she had accused.

She was already a celebrated poet. Born in 1084 in Zhangqiu, in northern China, she was the daughter of a scholar in the circle of the great poet Su Shi. In 1101 she married Zhao Mingcheng, and together they collected books, inscriptions and antiquities.

Years later she remembered a game they played over tea. One would name a passage, and the other had to say which book, which chapter, which page, even which line. The winner drank first, and someone laughed so hard the tea spilled. For two quick minds, the contest was the love.

War ended it. In 1127 invaders from the north drove them south, and in 1129 Zhao Mingcheng died. She carried what was left of the collection south.

By 1132 she was in Hangzhou, so ill that, as she later wrote, her coffin was ready. Her household was a trusting younger brother and an old soldier at the gate. An army official named Zhang Ruzhou talked his way in, and that summer, ill and half aware, she married him.

As soon as she could think clearly, she wrote, living with him was impossible. In her account he wanted the last of her antiquities, and he beat her every day.

Under Song law, divorce belonged to the husband, and a wife who accused her husband of any crime faced two years of penal servitude herself, even if the charge was true.

So she left the beatings out of it and charged him with something the state cared about more: getting into office by inflating the number of times he had sat the civil examinations. Arenas have a gift for this. Look at a system built to keep you quiet, and find the one clause that makes it speak.

It worked. A court chronicle records that Zhang was found guilty, struck from the official rolls and sent under supervision to distant Liuzhou. It adds a note about his wife: the daughter of Li Gefei, who could write song lyrics. So the record described the greatest woman poet in Chinese history.

She went to prison, as the law required, and stayed nine days. A senior scholar, Qi Chongli, spoke for her, and she was freed. In her letter of thanks she asked what harm there was in pleading her own case, when outside help was so hard to find. She also knew what was coming: ridicule for ten thousand ages.

She was right. Within her lifetime a critic noted that everyone who passed the story on laughed at her. Nobody seems to have laughed at Zhang. Later scholars, unable to bear a great poet marrying twice, insisted it had never happened.

She kept writing. In one song lyric she thinks of taking a light boat out on Twin Creek in spring.

She died around 1155, at about 71. The chronicle said she could write song lyrics. She could also read a law well enough to find the one door out, and she walked through it knowing it would lock behind her.