Background
Li was blessed with a family of scholars and administrators. She was not only taught to read, but was instructed in Chinese history and literature, calligraphy, painting, and music. Before she got married, her poetry was already well known within elite circles. In 1101 she married Zhao Mingcheng, with whom she shared interests in art collection and epigraphy. After he started his official career, her husband was often absent. This inspired some of the love poems that she wrote. Both she and her husband collected many books. Her husband and she shared a love of poetry and often wrote poems for each other.In 1126, the Tartars, or Jin, invaded the Northern Song region of China, destroying homes and remnants of the Song. As the fighting reached the Shandong province, Li and Zhao were forced to flee their home, knowing they could not take all of their vast collection of antiquities with them. In the chaos, they lost almost all of their priceless collection of inscriptions, bronzes, rare books, painting and other artefacts. Then Zhao Mingcheng died, in the summer of 1129.Li finally arrived at the new capital of Hangzhou in 1132. Around this time, she was determined to finish the work Zhao had begun compiling their vast collection. She collated his manuscripts into an antiquarian manual entitled Chin Shih Lu. Not only did Li collate the book, she wrote an epilogue to it, which served as a memoir of her life and poetry, known as the "Hou Hsu."Li Qingzhao quickly remarried, but she then exposed her new husband’s fraudulent curriculum vitae, which he had used to obtain his government appointment. She demanded a separation and then paid the price: a two-year prison sentence, because she had violated the Confucian code forbidding a wife to inform against her husband. She was released from prison after nine days, thanks to the intervention of a highly placed cousin of her first husband.
After the divorce, Li lived a lonely life for more than twenty years.