Background
Su Hui was born in 360, in Henan province. She was from a literate family. Su Hui was the third daughter of Su Daozhi.
Su Hui with her great palindrome, the Xuanji Tu.
A Simplified Chinese reduction, and the original, of Su Hui's Xuanji Tu palindrome poem.
苏蕙
Su Hui was born in 360, in Henan province. She was from a literate family. Su Hui was the third daughter of Su Daozhi.
When Su Hui was in her sixteenth year, she married Dou Tao. Dou Tao regarded his young wife highly even though, despite her modest and quiet nature, she is said to have been quick-tempered and jealous. He kept his favorite concubine, Zhao Yangtai, a skilled singer and dancer, in a separate residence but Su Hui eventually found out about Zhao Yangtai; she grabbed her and beat her, greatly humiliating her. Not surprisingly, this displeased Dou Tao, and Zhao Yangtai made things worse by exaggerating Su Hui’s weaknesses, making Dou Tao even angrier with his wife.
Dou Tao of Qinzhou was exiled to the desert, away from his wife Lady Su. Upon departure from Su, Dou swore that he would not marry another person. However, as soon as he arrived in the desert region, he married someone. Lady Su composed a circular poem, wove it into a piece of brocade, and sent it to him. Another source, naming the poem as Xuanji Tu (Picture of the Turning Sphere), claims that it was a palindromic poem comprehensible only to Dou (which would explain why none of the Tang sources reprinted it), and that when he read it, he left his desert wife and returned to Su Hui. The piece of brocade is eight cun square (about 26 cm, or 10.5 inches, square) and woven on it are 841 characters from which poems can be made. No matter which way it is read, a poem can be formed. It is so fine that every dot and stroke of every character is clearly visible.
Su Hui is said to have written more than 5,000 words of prose and poetry but all her works were lost during the upheavals of the Sui dynasty; only Xuanji tu survived. Empress Wu Zetian considered her poems the earliest examples of the “boudoir resentment” (guiyuan) genre. Empress Wu Zetian was the first to tell the story of Su Hui and she found more than 200 poems in the brocade. Eight centuries later, the lyric poet Zhu Shuzhen surpassed this, further refining the technique of decoding it, and was able to find poems of three- and four- as well as five- and seven-character (syllable) lines. Finally, the contemporary literary historian Xie Wuliang crowned all earlier efforts by finding over 3,800 poems of different lengths; he has reproduced the Xuanji tu and examples of his readings in his History of Chinese Women’s Literature.
Su Hui is said to have been an elegant beauty of clear and sharp perception. Modest and quiet, she did not seek to stand out among her peers.
Su Hui married at sixteen and went to live with her husband, Dou Tao, to what is now Qinzhou District, Tianshui, Prefecture, in Gansu Province. Su Hui was twenty-one when her husband left her. She wove a brilliant brocade palindrome; it was of five colors and beautiful to look at. When someone complained at being unable to read it, she said, “Only my beloved can understand it.” She then sent it with a servant to Xiangyang. Dou Tao was impressed by Su Hui’s ingenuity when he saw the brocade, but was even more taken with the feelings expressed in the poems. He let Zhao Yangtai go and prepared a carriage with many servants to have Su Hui brought to him. It is said that when they were reunited they loved each other even more than before.
She had no children.