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.
To her, drunkenness was always beautiful, even when it led to disaster
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. Since 1959, fans have flocked to a memorial in her birthplace of Qingzhou, built to look like a Song dynasty residential compound. There is a marble statue of her inside.
Of Li’s 70 extant poems, around a third mention drink. In one, she’s sailing around an idyllic pavilion and, in her stupor, forgets her route home. She ends up stuck in a bed of lotus flowers, disturbing the herons nesting nearby as she tries to row her way out. It reads as more of a treasured memory than a cautionary tale. In another, she’s outside in the biting cold, drinking by a hedge. An article posted on the Chinese internet asks whether Li had a drinking problem. It concludes, with considerable sympathy, that she had got into the habit of ‘using alcohol to water down her sorrows’ (借酒浇愁), an idiom dating back to the 16th century that translates almost seamlessly to its English equivalent. Perhaps our cultures are more similar than we think.
Traditional Confucian teachings discouraged female drunkenness. In the Analects for Women, a famous guide to propriety written around the turn of the 9th century, it’s advised that readers not ‘drink so much that your face turns red and you get sloppy in the handling of your chopsticks’. Li didn’t listen. The drinking culture to which she subscribed was both unrestrained and highbrow, the domain of an elegant lettered class.
‘We drink together as the flowers bloom on the mountain,’ said Li Bai, arguably China’s most famous classical poet. ‘One cup, and another cup, and then another cup.’ Drinking games (jiuling) were an established tradition in Li Qingzhao’s Song dynasty, and even they were literary in character – there’s an 11th-century record of a visiting Korean diplomat being coaxed into one involving historical figures and elaborate puns. Later, in the influential Qing novel The Dream of the Red Chamber, teenage aristocrats mix pleasure and verse. One game they play hinges on their knowledge of classical poetry: if a player can’t recite a Tang-era poem from memory, and with all the decorum it commands, he must drain his cup. (This would never work in a British pub).
Nowadays, canny distillers take advantage of Li’s glamorous background to sell their own wares. In her home province, a popular baijiu (distilled grain alcohol) company is named after her: Qingzhao Jiu. Beijing-based spirits brand Hongse Yi dedicate some of their online advertising space to ‘a reappraisal of one of China’s greatest female poets’, complete with analyses of her most famous work. Elsewhere, her image has been used to sell plum wine. Chinese consumers apparently want to drink like they’re in the Song dynasty.
The phenomenon is the inevitable hybrid between a domestic craze for classical poetry and an already-extreme drinking culture, a direct descendant of its dynastic precursor. China’s spirits market is valued at around £126 billion, with 98 per cent of the market share taken up by traditional baijiu. Reported rates of underage drinking sit just below those in America, and were apparently unaffected by the government’s introduction of a minimum drinking age in 2006. Xi Jinping has struggled to tame the drinking culture within the ranks of his own party. Businessmen buy off politicians with expensive baijiu: Wang Xiaoguang, the jailed ex-vice-governor of Guizhou, managed to amass enough of the stuff to start his own resale business. In 2017, just ahead of the CCP’s 19th National Congress, a legacy of corruption led to a temporary drinking ban for party members on official business. A surreal state report from that year details an alcohol-free party dinner: cadres toast each other with cups of juice.
If you asked Li, she’d probably oppose such a ban. Alcohol opened her up to the liveliness and tragedy of her natural surroundings. To her, drunkenness was always beautiful, even when it led to disaster. She remembers, despite being lost and stuck in her boat, to make a note of the sunset. Her western female contemporaries of the 12th century seem awfully buttoned-up by comparison. Hildegard von Bingen was a polymath and a literary genius, but never seemed to have much fun. Like Héloïse on the Seine, she wrote most of her life’s work from the inside of a convent. There’s something comforting about the idea of Li Qingzhao, hungover halfway across the world.
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