Background
Liu Shuying was the daughter of a former prefect of Yangzhou, Lio Duo, who died when she was six years old. Her mother was nee Xiao.
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Liu Shuying
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also known as
Jingwan, Liu Shu
leader military swordswoman poet
Education
Liu Shuying was educated by her mother using her father's books, including Sunzi's Art of War, works on swordsmanship, and Buddhist scriptures.
Career
After the Ming dynasty collapsed in 1644, Liu declared that, even though she was not born a man, she was determined to resist the invading Manchu enemy. Using her own money, in 1646 she sponsored a troop of soldiers, personally undertaking their swordsmanship training. She approached Zhang Xianbi, a general of the fallen Ming dynasty who had quartered his army in the district of Yongxin, and proposed that she and her soldiers join forces with him. However, instead of a military merger, Zhang Xianbi proposed marriage, but Liu Shuying immediately and in high dudgeon refused his proposal. So indignant was she at Zhang Xianbi's disrespectful behavior towards her, and possibly at the implied insult to her military ambitions, that she concluded he lacked both the courage and the determination to resist the Manchus. She, therefore, disbanded her troop of soldiers and bid them return to their plots of land. Together with her aged mother and a young son she traveled to present-day Hunan and Sichuan to escape persecution by the new Qing government. Five years later she returned to Jiangxi, where she built the Lotus Boat Convent. She lived there as a recluse, caring for her mother, educating her son, and meditating and studying Buddhism.
Achievements
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Liu Shuying is famous for her literary works, which were long thought to have been lost. They were not published in the Quing regime and references to the Manchus as "barbarians." In 1914 Wang Renzhao, a descendant of her husband's Wang family edited her works and published them as 'Works Bequeathed from Geshan.'
Religion
Until her death, Liu Shuying was said to have been a devotee of the Buddhist faith.
Connections
Liu Shuying married a man named Wang Ai, of Luling, but he died soon after theit marriage, leaving her, at eighteen, a widow with a son.
