Lost Dreams in Gold and Stone: Autobiography of Li Qingzhao

This is a literary autobiography written in the first person, strictly based on historical data, to deduce Li Qingzhao's possible life trajectory. Through the dual-line structure of "collection of gold and stones" and "displacement due to war", the whole book presents the survival epic of a talented woman during the overthrow of the Northern Song Dynasty. The story begins in Mingshui Town in 1084, and the details of capturing Zhou Deyan foreshadow the bond between life and words. The acumen of girlhood, the intellectual resonance in marriage, the embarrassment of crossing the South during the war, the lonely lawsuit after losing a spouse, the revision of forgetting on the sickbed in her later years... We not only saw her elegance in writing "A person is thinner than a yellow flower", but also witnessed her heroism in escorting fifteen carts of cultural relics through the war, constructing "Dama Tu" in prison to maintain her mind, and struggling to carve the memory of civilization before the memory collapsed. Beyond the grand narrative of history, this is an intimate record of how individuals preserve the spark of civilization amid the fractures of the times. Li Qingzhao used a pen as a knife to carve her own epitaph on gold and stone: She was not only a poet, but also a night watchman on the eve of the destruction of civilization. In the torrent of forgetfulness and death, she tried to salvage the eternity that was destined to sink.