Zhou Ehuang 周娥皇

Empress of the Southern Tang and wife of Li Yu, the greatest lyricist in the Chinese language, Zhou Ehuang was a musician of real accomplishment. She played the pipa, designed a new dance, and reconstructed the Rainbow Skirt and Feathered Robe — a great Tang court composition lost for two centuries — from a damaged fragment.

You pour yourself into your work and your people. She and Li Yu were, by every account including his poems, deeply happy; when their four-year-old son died she never recovered, and she died at twenty-nine. Li Yu wrote her a funerary text of more than two thousand characters and signed it not as emperor but as her husband. She shares her silk with her younger sister, who became empress after her.