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lnhammerThis Mirror Lake: three-hundred li
Of lotus buds blossoming forth.
Xi Shi once plucked them in the Fifth Month
With watchers packed, like a slender creek.
She turned round her boat, not waiting for moonrise,
Returning to the Yue king’s palace.
子夜四时歌夏歌
镜湖三百里，
菡萏发荷花。
五月西施采，
人看隘若耶。
回舟不待月，
归去越王家。
This harkens back to an episode from the Warring States period, about a thousand years before Li Bai’s time. Xi Shi (“Shi of the West”) was a famous beauty, the first of the Four Beauties of China, who was given as a gift-cum-concubine by the king of Yue to the king of rival state Wu as a ploy to distract him and so weaken the kingdom. (Spoiler alert: It worked—literally kingdom-wrecking beauty.) There are many Mirror Lakes in China, but the one here is in what was the capital of Yue, modern Shoaxiang in Zhejiang.
—L.
Of lotus buds blossoming forth.
Xi Shi once plucked them in the Fifth Month
With watchers packed, like a slender creek.
She turned round her boat, not waiting for moonrise,
Returning to the Yue king’s palace.
子夜四时歌夏歌
镜湖三百里，
菡萏发荷花。
五月西施采，
人看隘若耶。
回舟不待月，
归去越王家。
This harkens back to an episode from the Warring States period, about a thousand years before Li Bai’s time. Xi Shi (“Shi of the West”) was a famous beauty, the first of the Four Beauties of China, who was given as a gift-cum-concubine by the king of Yue to the king of rival state Wu as a ploy to distract him and so weaken the kingdom. (Spoiler alert: It worked—literally kingdom-wrecking beauty.) There are many Mirror Lakes in China, but the one here is in what was the capital of Yue, modern Shoaxiang in Zhejiang.
—L.
no subject
Date: 18 March 2020 16:21 (UTC)