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life and writings of xu hui paul w. kroll The Life and Writings of Xu Hui (627–650), Worthy Consort, at the Early Tang Court mong the women poets of the Tang dynasty (618–907) surely the A.best known are Xue Tao 薛濤 ( 770–832), the literate geisha from Shu 蜀, and the volatile, sometime Daoist priestess Yu Xuanji 魚玄機 (ca. 844–870?). More interesting strictly as a poet than these two fig- ures are Li Ye 李冶 who was active during the late-eighth century and whose eighteen remaining poems show more range and skill than either Xue Tao or Yu Xuanji, and the “Lady of the Flower Stamens” (“Hua- rui furen” 花蕊夫人) whose 157 heptametric quatrains in the “palace” style occupy all of juan 798 in Quan Tang shi 全唐詩, even though she lived in the mid-tenth century and served at the court of the short-lived 後蜀 1 kingdom of Later Shu . Far more influential in her day than any of these, though barely two dozen of her poems are now preserved, was the elegant Shangguan Wan’er 上官婉兒 (ca. 664–710), granddaughter of the executed courtier and poet Shangguan Yi 上官儀 (?–665) who had paid the ultimate price for opposing empress Wu Zhao’s 吳曌 ( 625–705) usurpation of imperial privileges.2 After the execution of Shangguan Yi and other members of his family, Wan’er, then just an infant, was taken into the court as a sort of expiation by empress Wu.3 By the end I should like to thank David R. Knechtges, Anna M. Shields, and Xiaofei Tian for their help- ful comments on earlier versions of this article. I am especially indebted to Professor Shields for insights and phrasing at several points. 1 Her extant works greatly outnumber those of any woman prior to her times, doubtless owing something to the increasingly widespread development of private libraries, as well as the advent of printing, under the following Song dynasty. 2 Note that the date of 664 given in a