Zhuo Wenjun: A Widow Who Loved Music, Made a Poet by Later Ages —Memories of Hanshu Figures, No. 13

Today Zhuo Wenjun is counted, with Cai Wenji, Li Qingzhao and Shangguan Wan'er, among the "Four Great Talented Women" of ancient China.

Yet open the Shiji and the Han Shu, and she has left not a single poem or essay.

Her literary fame was written onto her, layer by layer, over the next thousand years and more.

1. Her in the histories

Zhuo Wenjun appears only inside the biography of her husband, Sima Xiangru. The Shiji and the Han Shu describe her in nearly identical words.

The histories introduce her in a handful of characters: Zhuo Wangsun "had a daughter, Wenjun, newly widowed, who loved music."

The night flight to Chengdu and the wine shop in Linqiong were told in the previous installment. Here we look at one thing only: what words the histories record from her, and what writings they do not.

She speaks twice. Once in the empty house in Chengdu: "Why make ourselves suffer like this?" And once after Xiangru's death, when Emperor Wu sent an envoy for his writings and "his wife" answered: Changqing left no books; what he wrote was often taken away; he left only one scroll, saying that if an envoy came for it, it should be presented.

Both times she speaks about making a living and about her husband's papers, not about writings of her own.

"Loved music" is the only accomplishment the histories mention. Whether she could write poetry or prose, they do not say a word.

2. The Miscellaneous Records of the Western Capital: first a face, then a poem

The first text to give her a face and a poet's name is the Xijing zaji (Miscellaneous Records of the Western Capital). Traditionally attributed to Liu Xin or Ge Hong, it is generally thought to have been compiled well after the Han Shu, and it is mostly anecdote.

Its second chapter describes her looks: "Wenjun was lovely; the color of her brows was like distant hills seen from afar, her cheeks were always like lotus blossoms, her skin as smooth as fat." It adds that she was "widowed at seventeen, uninhibited and romantic by nature."

"Distant-hill brows" later became a stock allusion in Chinese poetry. This is where it begins.

The same entry says that after Xiangru's death "Wenjun wrote a dirge for him, which circulated in the world."

The third chapter has a more important sentence: "When Xiangru was about to take a woman of Maoling as a concubine, Zhuo Wenjun composed the 'Song of White Hair' to break with him, and Xiangru gave up the idea."

Notice that both entries give only titles, not texts. How the dirge read, what the "Song of White Hair" said, the book does not record.

The talented woman's name came first with the titles of her works attached. The works themselves were still empty.

3. A poem with no name on it

The "Song of White Hair" everyone later memorized, "White as snow upon the mountain, bright as the moon between the clouds... I wish for one whose heart is single, who will not leave me when my hair turns white," does exist in early collections.

But it does not carry Zhuo Wenjun's name.

The New Songs from a Jade Terrace (Yutai xinyong), compiled by Xu Ling of the Southern Chen dynasty, places it among "Six Old Yuefu Poems" in its first chapter, under the title "White as Snow upon the Mountain."

The music treatise of the Song shu, which records lyrics performed in the yuefu repertoire before its time, also preserves a longer "Song of White Hair," labeled "old lyric," again with no author.

When Guo Maoqian of the Northern Song compiled the Collection of Yuefu Poetry (Yuefu shiji), he listed the poem as an "old lyric," and in his headnote quoted the Xijing zaji line that "Zhuo Wenjun composed the 'Song of White Hair' to break with him."

So the two pieces came to sit side by side, and readers easily took an anonymous yuefu song for Wenjun's poem.

The Tang poet Li Bai, in his own "Song of White Hair," simply wrote the story into verse: "One morning he meant to wed the Maoling girl; Wenjun therefore sent him the 'Song of White Hair.'" Once poets wrote it, the story sounded ever more like fact.

Whether the poem is really hers remains unsettled. Many scholars, past and present, have doubted it; a common argument is that five-character verse this mature could not have been written in the mid-Western Han.

4. "The Phoenix Seeks His Mate": his song was supplied later too

Of the night with the zither, the histories say only that Xiangru "stirred her with the heart of his zither." They do not record what he played or sang.

The lyrics "Phoenix, O phoenix, returning to his homeland, roaming the four seas in search of his mate" first appear, among surviving texts, in chapter nine of the extant Yutai xinyong, as two "Zither Songs" by Sima Xiangru with a short preface.

The Yuefu shiji includes them among its "zither lyrics," citing an account from a work called the Qin ji, far removed from the Han.

If even the hero's song had to be supplied by later writers, so much more the heroine's poems and letters.

5. More and more "works"

From the Ming and Qing onward, works under Zhuo Wenjun's name kept multiplying.

One is the so-called "Letter of Farewell": "In spring the flowers vie in fragrance, the five colors outshine the plain... The Brocade River flows on and on; with you I part forever." The Xijing zaji says only that she wrote a dirge, without the text; the full text of this piece appears only in a late Ming anthology, its origin unclear, and it is generally regarded as written by someone else in her name.

Another is the "number poem," also called "Lament for My Husband," beginning "Once we parted, two places far apart." Its accompanying story has Xiangru sending a letter reading "one two three four five six seven eight nine ten hundred thousand ten-thousand," missing only "hundred million" (yi), which Wenjun read as "no feeling left" (wu yi) and answered with this poem. Neither the story nor the poem can be found in any book before the Song. Phrases in it such as "utterly bored" (bai wu liao lai) and "in the next life" sound like the popular songs of the Yuan and Ming.

The stage was rewriting her too. According to scholars, the earliest surviving plays about Xiangru and Wenjun are early Ming zaju, among them Zhu Quan, Prince Xian of Ning's "Zhuo Wenjun Elopes with Xiangru." There, from her first entrance, Wenjun is already "of peerless beauty, skilled in poetry, versed in music."

In the Wanli era of the Ming, Sun You of Changshu wrote the chuanqi drama "Record of the Zither's Heart," arranging the zither seduction, the elopement, the wine shop and later partings and reunions into a full-length play.

The two words "loved music" in the histories had become, on stage, a woman who could do everything.

6. "The Four Great Talented Women"

So where does the label "Four Great Talented Women" come from?

We checked the common premodern sources and found no origin for it. It looks more like a phrase that has circulated and been repeated in popular usage in modern times. In which book or which year it first appeared, we cannot yet say.

Nor is the list fixed. The most common version is Zhuo Wenjun, Cai Wenji, Li Qingzhao and Shangguan Wan'er. Another replaces Shangguan Wan'er with Ban Zhao. There is also a "Four Talented Women of Shu": Zhuo Wenjun, Xue Tao, Lady Huarui and Huang E.

Set beside the other three, the difference is plain. Cai Wenji's "Poems of Grief and Indignation" are preserved in her biography in the Hou Han shu; Li Qingzhao's lyrics survive in collections; Shangguan Wan'er's poems are in the Complete Tang Poems. Of the works under Zhuo Wenjun's name, not one can be confirmed as hers.

7. Coda

This is not to say she does not deserve the place.

People want her on the list because of her story: a woman who decided for herself whom to follow, who proposed a way out in hard times, and who turned and said no when her husband's heart wandered.

To tell that story, later ages needed a heroine who could write. So the Xijing zaji gave her a poet's name, the yuefu gave her a poem, Ming writers gave her letters, and the stage made her "skilled in poetry."

In the histories, she only "loved music."

Two thousand years later, she is a "talented woman." The thousand years and more in between are the history of people writing on her behalf.