China. People’s Republic
Founders of Chinese Culture Series
1988 Silver Proof 5 Yuan 36mm (22.22 grams) 0.900 Silver (0.643 oz. ASW)
Reference: KM# 208, Y# 163
Certification: NGC  PF 69 ULTRA CAMEO 2839329-019
中华人民共和国 1988, The emblem of the People’s Republic of China.
Li Qingzhao looking left.

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Li Qingzhao (Chinese: 李清照; pinyin: Lǐ Qīngzhào; Wade-Giles: Li Ch’ing-chao; 1084 – c. 1155, – c., pseudonym Householder of Yi’an (易安居士), was a Chinese poet and essayist during the Song dynasty.She is considered one of the greatest poets in Chinese history.

Li Qingzhao was born in 1084, in Zhangqiu located in modern Shandong province. She was born to a family of scholar-officials, and her father was a student of Su Shi. The family had a large collection of books, and Li was able to receive comprehensive education in her childhood. From a very young age, she was unusually outgoing for a woman from a scholar-official family.

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. They lived in present-day Shandong. After her husband started his official career, he was often absent. They were not particularly rich but shared enjoyment of collecting inscriptions and calligraphy which made their daily life count and they lived happily together. This inspired some of the love poems that she wrote. Li and her husband collected many books. They shared a love of poetry and often wrote poems for each other as well as writing about bronze artifacts of the Shang and Zhou dynasties.

The Northern Song capital of Kaifeng fell in 1127 to the Jurchens during the Jin-Song wars. Fighting took place in Shandong and their house was burned. The couple took many of their possessions when they fled to Nanjing, where they lived for a year. Zhao died in 1129 en route to an official post. The death of her husband was a cruel stroke from which Li never recovered. It was then up to her to keep safe what was left of their collection. Li described her married life and the turmoil of her flight in an Afterword to her husband’s posthumously published work, Jīn Shí Lù (金石錄). Her earlier poetry portrays her carefree days as a woman of high society, and is marked by its elegance.

Li subsequently settled in Hangzhou, where the Song government made its new capital after the war against the Jurchens. During this period, she continued writing poetry. She also kept working on completing the book Jīn Shí Lù, which was originally written by Zhao Mingcheng. The book was mainly about the calligraphy on the bronze and stones: it also mentions the documents Li and Zhao collected and viewed during the early period. According to some contemporary accounts, she was briefly married to a man named Zhang Ruzhou (張汝舟) who treated her badly, and she divorced him within months.She survived the criticism of this marriage.

Only around a hundred of her poems are known to survive, mostly in the ci form and tracing her varying fortunes in life. Also a few poems in the shi form have survived, the Afterword and a study of the cí form of poetry. Her life was full of twists and turns and her poems can be split into two main parts – the dividing line being when she moved to the south. During the early period, most of her poems were related to her feelings as a maiden. They were more like love poems. After her move to the south, they were closely linked with her hatred of the war against the Jurchens and her patriotism. She is credited with the first detailed critique of the metrics of Chinese poetry. She was regarded as a master of wǎnyuē pài (婉约派) “the delicate restraint”.

Modern References

Two impact craters, Li Ch’ing-Chao (crater) on planet Mercury and Li Qingzhao on planet Venus, are named after her.

‘Ru Meng Ling’ and ‘Sheng Sheng Man’ have been set to music as part of the song cycle ‘Chinese Memories’ by composer Johan Famaey in 2011.

In 2017, the composer Karol Beffa wrote Fragments of China (Klarthe), setting four of her poems to music.^{ation needed]} River of Stars, a novel by Guy Gavriel Kay set in Song Dynasty China, features a primary protagonist inspired by Li Qingzhao, as acknowledged by the author in the book.

China, officially the People’s Republic of China (PRC) since 1949, is a country in East Asia and the world’s most populous country, with a population of around 1.404 billion. Covering approximately 9,600,000 square kilometers (3,700,000 sq mi), it is the third- or fourth-largest country by total area, depending on the source consulted. Governed by the Communist Party of China, the state exercises jurisdiction over 22 provinces, five autonomous regions, four direct-controlled municipalities (Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Chongqing), and the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau.

China emerged as one of the world’s earliest civilizations, in the fertile basin of the Yellow River in the North China Plain. For millennia, China’s political system was based on hereditary monarchies, or dynasties, beginning with the semi-legendary Xia dynasty in 21st century BCE. Since then, China has expanded, fractured, and re-unified numerous times. In the 3rd century BCE, the Qin unified core China and established the first Chinese empire. The succeeding Han dynasty, which ruled from 206 BC until 220 AD, saw some of the most advanced technology at that time, including papermaking and the compass, along with agricultural and medical improvements. The invention of gunpowder and movable type in the Tang dynasty (618-907) and Northern Song (960-1127) completed the Four Great Inventions. Tang culture spread widely in Asia, as the new maritime Silk Route brought traders to as far as Mesopotamia and Horn of Africa. Dynastic rule ended in 1912 with the Xinhai Revolution, when a republic replaced the Qing dynasty. The Chinese Civil War resulted in a division of territory in 1949, when the Communist Party of China established the People’s Republic of China, a unitary one-party sovereign state on Mainland China, while the Kuomintang-led government retreated to the island of Taiwan. The political status of Taiwan remains disputed.

Since the introduction of economic reforms in 1978, China’s economy has been one of the world’s fastest-growing with annual growth rates consistently above 6 percent. As of 2016, it is the world’s second-largest economy by nominal GDP and largest by purchasing power parity (PPP). China is also the world’s largest exporter and second-largest importer of goods. China is a recognized nuclear weapons state and has the world’s largest standing army and second-largest defense budget. The PRC is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council as it replaced the ROC in 1971, as well as an active global partner of ASEAN Plus mechanism. China is also a leading member of numerous formal and informal multilateral organizations, including the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), WTO, APEC, BRICS, the BCIM, and the G20. China is a great power and a major regional power within Asia, and has been characterized as a potential superpower.