Xue Tao was born in 768 and died in 832. A poetess in the Tang Dynasty, with a generous personality. Chang 'an people. His father Xue Yun was an official in Sichuan, and when he was young, Xue Tao followed his father in Chengdu. My father died, and my family was poor. 16 was addicted to music. I have never been married since I went abroad. In Wangjiangta Park, Chengdu, Sichuan, there is a couplet circulating: The ancient well is getting cold and sinking day by day. Ask a few words, where is the school gate lane? The river bends over the sill, occupying the first floor of Yanyue, and the thatched cottage of the Ministry of Industry should be divided equally. Wangjiang Building, also known as Chongli Building, was built in the Qing Dynasty to commemorate a woman who was on an equal footing with the poet Du Fu and show her talent. However, since ancient times, beauty has been unlucky and her fate has been quite bumpy. She is Xue Tao, a famous poetess in Tang Dynasty.
Xue Tao's father, Xue Yun, was an official in the imperial court and was knowledgeable. He regards this only daughter as the apple of his eye and has taught her to read and write poems since she was a child. Her talent is very high, which sometimes surprises her father. One summer, Xue Yun rested under the buttonwood tree in the yard. The leaves of buttonwood rustled as the breeze blew. He suddenly realized something and chanted, "Except for an old buttonwood tree, it swelled to the clouds." Then he said to his daughter who was playing by: Can you continue this poem? Without looking up, Xue Tao casually replied, the branches welcome birds from the north and the south, and the leaves send the breeze. That year, Xue Tao was only eight or nine years old. Hearing this, Xue Yun had mixed feelings, both happy and worried. I am glad that my daughter is young, but she is intelligent and eloquent; Worryingly, seeing off is an ominous sign for a girl. Sure enough, misfortune soon came to this family.
Xue Yun is honest and dares to speak. As a result, he offended the powerful people of the dynasty and was exiled to Sichuan. His family moved from the prosperous capital to the distant Chengdu. A few years later, he died of boils in Nanzhao. Xue Taocai 14 years old when his father died. Without the support of the family, the life of the mother and daughter was immediately in trouble. As a last resort, Xue Tao joined the Music Society at the age of 16, and became a prostitute with her beautiful appearance, fluent temperament, eloquent wisdom and artistic poetry.
We prostitutes are financially supported by the state and have a stable salary. Their main job is to pour wine, write poems and play songs to entertain guests when officials have a drinking party. At that time, officials were often born in imperial examinations and had a high cultural quality. To make them pay attention to their eyes, they need not only beauty, but also talent, eloquence and knowledge, which is Xue Tao's strong point. According to the history books, apart from poetry and wine, she only argued when she saw it and was comfortable in the banquet hall.
An anecdote of Xue Tao was recorded in Tang Yulin compiled by Song people. On one occasion, the secretariat of Li Zhou held a banquet and put forward a thousand-word decree. The decree of this wine order is to take a thousand words, which contain the names of birds, fish, birds and animals. The Secretariat took the lead in proving the existence of redundancy. It is estimated that this adult recited thousands of words when he was a child and mistook Yu for a fish. All the guests heard the fallacy, but because the host did so, they had to hide their faces and smile, and no one dared to stand up and say that they would be fined. In a short time, the drinkers' wager game turned to Xue Tao, and she replied, Zuo's Ah Heng. The secretariat immediately recognized the problem and stood up excitedly: there are no fish or birds in your four words, so you should be punished! Xue Tao replied with a smile: Anyway, there is a small fish in the middle of the word "horizontal" in my sentence, and the word "swim" written by the secretariat doesn't even have a small fish. They couldn't bear it any longer, and laughed, which embarrassed the secretariat.
Xue Tao is best at writing poems. Her presence made her associate with many famous poets at that time, including Bai Juyi, Zhang Ji, Wang Jian, Liu Yuxi, Du Mu and Zhang Hu. According to records, Xue Tao wrote more than 500 poems. However, most of these poems have been lost, and only 90 poems have been handed down so far, which is very regrettable.
Poetry is well written, and Xue Tao's calligraphy is also very famous. The evaluation of Xuanhe calligraphy in the Northern Song Dynasty is that her writing style is not feminine, her brushwork is sharp and her calligraphy is beautiful, which is quite similar to Wang Xizhi's method, so she didn't learn much, and she also defended her wife. It means that with a little effort, she can compete with Mrs. Wei, the calligrapher of Jin Dynasty and the first teacher of Wang Xizhi, which shows the beauty of her calligraphy. According to the record of Yuesheng Painting and Calligraphy, Jia Sidao, the right-hand minister in the late Song Dynasty, once collected her Poems of Hemerocallis, but unfortunately she couldn't see them later. Xue Tao has extraordinary talent and can compete with Zhuo Wenjun, the most famous talented woman in Shu. Later generations called her, Yu, and Yu "the four great poetesss of the Tang Dynasty".
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