Xiangling Learns to Write Poetry

Xiangling (Xiānglíng) was stolen from her family as a small child and sold. She belongs now to a rich young man — bought, not married — and he beats the people in his house. Nobody ever taught her to read properly.

Then he goes away on business for the better part of a year, and his sister Baochai (Bǎochāi) takes her into the family's great walled garden, where the unmarried girls of the house live and write poems for fun. These are almost certainly the only free weeks Xiangling will ever have. What she asks for is not rest. She wants Daiyu (Dàiyù), the finest poet in the garden, to teach her to write verse.

It is a hard place for a beginner to start. A poem of this kind is eight short lines; the middle lines have to be matched in pairs, word against word, the tones have to fall in a fixed pattern, and the rhymes come from numbered official categories with names — the fourteenth, hán; the fifteenth, shān — so a teacher hands out a subject and a rhyme number together, and a poem that strays out of its category is simply wrong. Xiangling has never written a line. She asks anyway.