I removed the makeup in deep night
- Poetry of Li Qingzhao

Composed around 1127 shortly after the fall of Northern Song and the first Southern Song emperor was throned. It was a period of turmoil due to the Jin’s invasion. With the loss of their capital, the new court became mobile from place to place in the south. Jiangning ( later Jiangkang, today’s Nanjing) was one of the temporary court venues. Qingzhao’s husband was appointed the Mayor of Jiangning, so the couple had to leave their Qingzhou home ( in today’s Shandong Province) to the mercy of the Jin army who burned everything to ashes in the same year, so she was told later on. For our poet, it’s the home where they had over ten years’ happy marriage life, the home with ten households of their valuable collections, and ultimately the best memories of her lifetime. And this is only the beginning of her miseries, and the starting point of a dividing line in her literature topics and intellectual sentiments, which offers a glimpse of the shifting among the intellectuals and officials. It’s a song of a collective voice illuminating not only the war’s tragedies and their irreparable effects, but the hopes and disappointments of generations onwards.