Zhang Hao

In 1663, at the age of nineteen, she married the student and poet Hu Daying. She wrote "Orphan Hill, how can you be so cruel / As to turn into my father's grave?" and reportedly did not leave bed for a year. She herself died at the age of twenty-four or twenty-five, her early death inspiring sympathy and poetic inspiration. While Zhang Hao is traditionally numbered among the Banana Garden poets, Ellen Widmer suggests that she never met or corresponded with them and the Banana Garden poets merely admired her work. Hao wrote two books of poetry, Writings Left Behind from Zither Mansion (Qin lou yi gao 䏜㦻怢䧧) and Chants of Rushing through the Courtyard (Qu ting yong 趨庭詠), the latter posthumously published by her husband. The poet and painter Shang Jinglan was so moved by the former book that she provided a preface for Zhang Hao's collected works, Zhang Chayun yishi (張槎雲遺詩). According to Deng Hanyi, Zhang Hao also wrote vernacular fiction, the only 17th century Chinese woman known to have done so. This was two centuries before the publication of the first extant Chinese novel written by a woman in 1877 (Gu Taiqing's Shadows of Dream of the Red Chamber). Her only extant complete work, Writings Left Behind from Zither Mansion, is owned by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Library in Beijing.

Zhang Hao (1645–1668) was a poet.