CHAPTER ELEVEN XUE SHAOHUI AND HER POETIC CHRONICLE OF LATE QING REFORMS* Nanxiu Qian Xue Shaohui 薛紹徽 (1866–1911), courtesy name Xiuyu 秀玉 and styled Nansi 男姒, was an outstanding poet, writer, translator, and educator of the late Qing period. Her life journey, though brief, took place in some of the most sensitive locales of the eventful late-Qing reform era, and intersected with almost all the important aspects of political, social, and cultural changes of the time. Xue, her husband Chen Shoupeng 陳壽彭 (1857–ca. 1928), and Shoupeng’s older brother Chen Jitong 陳季同 (1851–1907) were from gentry families in Minhou 閩侯 county (present-day Fuzhou 福州), Fujian province. All were well educated in the Chinese tradition, but the two Chen brothers also received a substantial amount of West- ern education at both the Fuzhou Naval Academy and in Europe. Through them, Xue Shaohui absorbed a good deal of fresh foreign knowledge.1 During the Reform Movement of 1898 and thereafter, Xue Shaohui, Chen Shoupeng, Chen Jitong, and Jitong’s wife, a well-educated French woman known by her Chinese name Lai Mayi 賴媽懿, all played extremely important roles. Together, for example, they participated in * This chapter draws from my Hsiang Lecture, titled “Poetic Reform Amidst Politi- cal Reform: The Late Qing Woman Poet Xue Shaohui (1866–1911),” published in Hsiang Lectures on Chinese Poetry 3 (2005): 1–48. My special thanks to Grace S. Fong, Ellen Widmer, and Wai-yee Li for their detailed critique and editorial help. Unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own. 1 See Chen Shoupeng, “Wangqi Xue gongren zhuanlue” 亡妻薛恭人傳略 (A brief biography of my late wife, Lady Xue), and Chen Qiang 陳鏘, Chen Ying 陳瑩, and Chen Hong 陳葒, “Xianbi Xue gongren nianpu” 先妣薛恭人年譜 (A chronologi- cal record of our late mother, Lady Xue), both in Daiyunlou yiji 黛韻樓遺集 (Post- humously collected writings from Daiyun Tower), including Shiji 詩集 (Collected poetry), 4 juan; Ciji 詞集 (Collected song lyrics), 2 juan; Wenji 文集 (Collected prose), 2 juan (each collection with its own pagination); by Xue Shaohui, ed. Chen Shoupeng (Fuzhou: Chen family edition, 1914). 340 chapter eleven a wide-scale campaign for women’s education in Shanghai.2 After the abrupt termination of the 1898 reforms, Xue and her husband began another collaboration, translating and compiling a number of West- ern literary, historical, and scientific works, and editing newspapers.3 In accordance with her reform activities, Xue, a prolific and highly regarded poet, produced about 300 shi 詩 and 150 ci 詞 poems during her lifetime. With these poems, Xue literally chronicled the changes of China’s reform era and modified old (male) literary forms to express fresh ideas and sentiments arising during this period. Through examining Xue’s poetic response to late Qing socio-polit- ical changes, this study intends to show that late Qing women poets continued the work of their precursors, but also differed from them in various ways. First, as Susan Mann points out in her contribution to this volume, “Increasingly after 1840, political factions, military strug- gles, social problems, and even statecraft policies, became poetic sub- jects for women writers.”4 Xue and her fellow women reformers shared this common political awareness with their poet-mothers, but further expanded the boundaries of their domain of political interest when the reform era opened the Chinese elite to the outside world. Second, sev- enteenth- and eighteenth-century elite women and men “shared many assumptions about Confucian virtue and its proper representation in 2 This campaign was for establishing the first Chinese school for elite young women, the Nü xuetang 女學堂 (Chinese Girls’ School, established May 31, 1898). The reform- ers also organized as their headquarters the first women’s association in China, the Nü Xuehui 女學會 (Women’s Study Society, founded on December 6, 1897), and pub- lished as their mouthpiece the first Chinese women’s journal, theNü xuebao 女學報 (Chinese Girl’s Progress) (twelve issues, July 24 to late October 1898). This first girls’ school differs from the first school for women, established in Ningbo in 1844 by the English woman missionary, Miss Aldersey. See Margaret E Burton, The Education of Women in China (New York and Chicago: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1911) and Xia Xiaohong 夏曉虹, Wan Qing wenren funü guan 晚清文人婦女觀 (Late Qing literati view of women) (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 1995) for detailed discussions of women’s life and women’s rights movements during the 1898 reform era. For a detailed account of the 1898 reformers’ efforts toward establishing the first girls’ school, see also Xia Xiaohong, “Zhongxi hebi de Shanghai ‘Zhongguo nü xuetang’ ” 中西合璧的上海 “中 國女學堂” (Combination of the Chinese and the West: the Shanghai Chinese Girls’ School), Xueren 學人 14 (1998): 57–92. For women reformers’ functions and their differing attitudes as compared to male reformers in the 1898 campaign for women’s education, see Nanxiu Qian, “Revitalizing the Xianyuan (Worthy Ladies) Tradition: Women in the 1898 Reforms,” Modern China 29.4 (2003): 399–454. 3 See Chen Qiang, Chen Ying, and Chen Hong, “Xianbi Xue gongren nianpu,” 10a–12a. 4 Susan Mann, Chapter 9, “The Lady and the State,” 283..