China’s greatest poet was a drunk teenage girl

One of China’s most famous poems was penned by a teenager with a killer hangover. ‘Heavy sleep can’t get rid of the dregs of alcohol,’ she grumbles, sequestered in her darkened room after a night of boozing and bad weather. She has to ask a maid to open her curtains. Here comes one of the quintessential images of classical Chinese poetry: a crab-apple tree stands in the drenched earth, wrecked by the storm. Her maid, who hasn’t been drinking, sees nothing wrong. The poet is full of sorrow. Spring has faded.

Li Qingzhao grew up in 12th-century Shandong, an eastern province around four hours from Beijing. She is practically unknown outside of East Asia, but in her own country she is a household name, renowned for a mixture of literary genius and drunken disarray. In recent years, two major period dramas have retold her tumultuous life story, which involved two marriages and a period in Nanjing, where she fled in refuge from dynastic war.