Biographies of Exemplary Women

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The Biographies of Exemplary Women (Chinese: ???; pinyin: Lièn? Zhuàn) is a book compiled by the Han Dynasty scholar Liu Xiang c. 18 BC. It includes 125 biographical accounts of exemplary women in ancient China, taken from early Chinese histories including Chun Qiu, Zuo Zhuan, and the Records of the Grand Historian. The book served as a standard Confucianist textbook for the moral education of women in traditional China for two millennia.

Video Biographies of Exemplary Women

Description

The idealized biographies are divided into eight scrolls, including the eighth addendum from an unknown editor, as shown below.

This book follows the lièzhuàn (?? "arrayed biographies") biographical format established by the Chinese historian Sima Qian. The word lièn? (?? "famous women in history") is sometimes understood as lièn? (?? " women martyrs"), which Neo-Confucianists used to mean "woman who commits suicide after her husband's death rather than remarry; woman who dies defending her honor".

The online Chinese Text Initiative at the University of Virginia provides an e-text edition of the Lienu Zhuan, including both digitized Chinese content and images of a Song Dynasty woodblock edition with illustrations by Gu Kaizhi ??? (c. 344-405 CE) of the Jin Dynasty.

Maps Biographies of Exemplary Women

Biographies included

1. The mother of Mencius (??)
2. Zheng Mao (??)
3. Consort Ban (???), Scholar and poet
4. Empress Zhao Feiyan (???) (c. 32 BC - 1 BC), empress from 16 BC until 7 BC
5. Empress Wang (???) (8 BC - 23 AD), last empress of the Western Han
6. Empress Ma (???) (40-79 AD), empress from the year 60 until her death in 79

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See also

• Gender studies
• Historiography

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References

• Carlitz, Katherine. (1991). "The Social Uses of Female Virtue in Late Ming Editions of Lienu Zhuan." Late Imperial China 12.2: 117-48.
• Raphals, Lisa. (1998). Sharing the Light: Representations of Women and Virtue in Early China. SUNY Press.
• O'Hara, Albert Richard, tr. (1945). The position of woman in early China: according to the Lieh nu chuan, "The biographies of Chinese women". Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. 1955 reprint. Hong Kong: Orient Publishing Co. 1980 reprint. Westport, CT: Hyperion Press.

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External links

• Lienu Zhuan, University of Virginia E-text
• Lienu Zhuan, ChinaKnowledge
• ???, Chinese Text Project
• Traditions of Exemplary Women: Liu Xiang's Lienü Zhuan, Anne Behnke Kinney
• Chapter 11: Women & Men in Society, Gregory Smits, Topics in Premodern Chinese History

Source of the article : Wikipedia