dumbfoundry

Outside her remarkable poems, we know very little about Yu Xuanji. Her surname, Yu, which means "fish," is unusual. Her given name, Xuanji (Hsuan-chi in Wade-Giles romanization), means something like "dark secret" or "mysterious luck." She was born around 844 and died around 871, at the age of twenty-eight.

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We owe the survival of these poems to the ancient Chinese anthologists' urge to be complete. To their comprehensive period anthologies of what they thought counted most--the poems of men who were also government officials of varying degrees of importance--they couldn't resist adding curiosities: poems by ghosts, poems by monks, priests, and foreigners, even poems by women "and others whose efforts," as The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature notes, "might provide amusement."

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