Tang poetry has traveled through time. I only had half a copy of "Shuowen" and a piece of dry food left with me.
In the seventeenth year of Yonghe's reign in the Great Zhou Dynasty, women were superior to men. Women wear swords and girdle their crowns and take imperial examinations to become officials, while men wear hairpins and bow their heads and are forbidden to enter the inner house. Tang poetry has no household registration and no origin. The only thing that makes it good is the skills honed after five years of working as a copy editor - an extreme sensitivity to words and an almost paranoid insistence on logic.
She was taken in by Zhou Min, the magistrate of Qingjiang County, for proofreading old official documents, but she started a half-year-long debate with the people behind a bamboo curtain on the back of the waste paper in the county government office. The person behind the curtain is Shen Qinghe, the son of the former county magistrate Shen Duan. He recited "Shuowen" silently at the age of five, but because he was a man, he could not take part in the imperial examination. His presence made Tang Shi realize for the first time: The problem in this world is not just that women once had no way out, but that a new group of people continue to have no way out.
She went from third place in the county examination to first place and first place, from proofreader to editor in Hanlin Academy. She wrote the "General Guide to Phonology" to challenge the official version. She signed the name for those who could not sign, and she let "There are no female or male doctors" engraved on the title page of the medical book. She refused to copy poems or borrow light, and every word was written by herself - from the waste paper in Qingjiang to the strategy of Jinluan Palace, there were ten thousand miles of road and three hundred years of sound in between.
