The Hairpin's Shadow in Shen Garden: A Love Unfinished for a Thousand Years

In the late spring of Shaoxing, a silver phoenix hairpin bound Lu You and Tang Wan in a childhood love. After they married, they trimmed the lamp wick together and exchanged poems beneath the moon. The glow of the Lu family's gold phoenix hairpin was filled with sweetness.

But the words “unable to bear a son and turning her husband against his family” struck like a blade. Lu You's mother forced him to write a letter of divorce. Before the red candles had even burned out, their marriage was broken, and both were forced to marry someone else.

They met again on a spring day at Shen Garden. Warm huang teng wine could not soothe their old sorrows. On a pink wall, Lu You wrote “Phoenix Hairpin”; when Tang Wan saw it, she answered with “The World Is Thin,” every word soaked in tears. Not long afterward, she died of grief at just twenty-eight.

From his youth to his old age, Lu You kept returning to Shen Garden, his poems filled with thoughts of her. On his deathbed, he said only, “Bury me beside the plum tree in Shen Garden.”

The pain and devotion hidden in that hairpin and those two poems make it easy to understand why Shen Garden's peach blossoms have been remembered for a thousand years.