Liu Ying Rushi

She was a courtesan, a poet, a Ming loyalist, and a wife. She was Liu Rushi. In the forty-sixth year of the Wanli reign, a baby girl was born into a poor family in Jiaxing, without a name or family name. Sold at four, she entered a brothel at nine and became a chancellor's concubine at fourteen. At sixteen, she was cast out of the great household. She chose the name Liu Rushi for herself, inspired by the line: “The green hills are so enchanting to me; I imagine they must see me the same way.” Disguised as a man, she made her way into literary circles, held poetry contests, and published collections of her poems, winning the admiration of scholars across the land. She fell in love with Chen Zilong, a hero who fought against the Qing, but he abandoned her because of their difference in status. At twenty-three, she married Qian Qianyi, the sixty-year-old leader of the literary world, as his lawful wife, putting on a red wedding dress amid the rubble of a ruined city. When the Jiashen catastrophe struck, she urged her husband to die for his country. He replied, “The water is too cold.” She threw herself into the water, and after she was rescued, she never wore Manchu clothing for the rest of her life. When her husband surrendered to the Qing and headed north, she stayed in Jiangnan and secretly funded resistance efforts. When he was imprisoned on a criminal charge, she sold her jewelry and traveled a thousand miles to save him. After his death, his relatives tried to seize the family estate, and she hanged herself. Told in the first person by Liu Rushi in her later years, this book looks back on her life. Her poems are woven into the narrative, and her passions run through it from beginning to end. This is the story of a woman who spent her life writing her own “Thus Have I Heard.”