From Talented Poet to Jealous Wife: Reimagining Su Hui in Late Tang Literary Culture

Abstract

Su Hui was a late fourth century Chinese woman who is famed for her creation of brocade palindromic poems. Due to an account of her life story, attributed to the female emperor Wu Zetian, that highlighted her jealous disposition, Su Hui is remembered today primarily as a talented but jealous wife, which is in contrast with how she was viewed in the period prior to the Wu version. Tracing the genealogy of Su Hui’s narrative in pre-Tang and Tang literary and visual materials, this article demonstrates that the definitive version of Su Hui’s story is misattributed to Wu Zetian and, more importantly, that the image of this well-known figure of early medieval China underwent a transformation that reflects important aspects of Late Tang literary culture. In ‘boudoir lament’ poetry of the Southern Dynasties period, Su Hui is the stock image of a melancholy wife longing for her absent husband. In ‘frontier’ poetry of the Tang dynasty, she is a worrying wife concerned with her military husband fighting on the borderlands. It is in a Late Tang prose account misattributed to Wu Zetian that we finally see her as a jealous woman competing for her husband’s affections. The transformation of Su Hui’s image across three major literary genres over a period of half a millennium offers readers a window into the literary and cultural changes that took place in medieval China.