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~ ~ t · Z~nJ'reJJe" N"un" ant(A'ctreJJeJ Empresses and Palace Ladies As mentioned before, up until the end of the Tang dynasty the women of the Inner Palace played a central role in the tradition of women's litera ture. Following the spread of literacy and the increased availability of books from the Song dynasty onwards, though, the Inner Palace lost its privileged position. While the palace ladies remained as literate as before, few of them made a name for themselves in literary history. There was, however, still one genre of poetry in which empresses and palace ladies were at an advantage: the ''palace songs" (gongci). The genre was invented by the mid-Tang poet Wang Jian (766-ca. 835), who composed a series of a hundred quatrains on the topic of life in the Inner Palace. These poems were very much appreciated, but suffered in the eyes of traditional Chi nese critics from one major weakness: Wang Jian had no personal access to the Inner Palace and had derived his information secondhand from palace eunuchs. As poems should be based on personal experience, only a resident of the Inner Palace was truly qualified to write authentic palace songs. In due time, emperors, empresses, and palace ladies obliged. The art-loving Emperor Huizong (r. IIOI-n26) is credited with a series of no less than three hundred palace songs (of which many may actually have been written by his courtiers). The popularity of the genre at Huizong's court may have been spurred on by the discovery in the archives a few Empresses) Nuns) and Actresses 293 decades earlier of a set of palace songs attributed to Lady Huarui. Em press Yang of the Southern Song dynasty was also credited with a series of palace songs, although this attribution was not made until much later, during the Ming dynasty. The number of palace songs ascribed to Lady Huarui and Empress Yang tended to increase over time. Empresses and palace ladies did not limit themselves to the genre of palace songs, how ever; in the early Ming dynasty, Empress Xu, the formidable principal wife of the Y ongle emperor, made a name for herself with the composi tion of a moral handbook for women and the publication of a Buddhist sutra that had been revealed to her. Lacfy Huarui and Her Palace Songs Following the collapse of the Tang dynasty, the Chinese world was di vided into a number of opposing states. Whereas most of northern China remained unified under one central authority (although five different dy nasties followed one another in quick succession), southern China was divided among both large and small, more or less long-lived, kingdoms constantly at war with each other and with whichever northern dynasty was in power at the time. The area of what is today the province of Si chuan remained independent for most of this period. It was first .ruled by the Former Shu dynasty (907-926) founded by Wang Jian, and subse quently by the Later Shu dynasty (930-965) of Meng Zhixiang (r. 930- 934) and Meng Chang (r. 935-965). The courts of both these local dynas ties were centers of culture, especially known for their patronage of scholarship, painting, and the art of song. When in 965 the territory of the Later Shu dynasty was conquered by the troops of the newly established Song dynasty, they hauled all the treasure of the vanquished dynasty (including books and palace ladies) off to the Song capital at Kaifeng. When, more than a century later, Wang Anguo (ca. 1028-ca. 1076), a younger brother of the famous statesman Wang Anshi (1021-1086), went through the remnants of the palace collection of the Later Shu dynasty, he discovered two manu scripts containing palace songs ascribed to Lady Huarui. Originally the manuscripts had included "s()me eighty or ninety quatrains but only thirty-two were preserved." A few examples from this series may suffice to provide a sense of the themes and style of this genre of poetry: .

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