Xuē Tāo 薛濤 (768–832)
Zì Hóngdù 洪度. Native of Cháng’ān, daughter of the Táng official Xuē Yún 薛鄖, who was posted to Shǔ (Sìchuān); Tāo grew up in Chéngdū. After her father’s death, the family fell into poverty; she was inducted into the official entertainment register (yuèjí 樂籍) by the Jiédù shǐ Wéi Gāo 韋皋. The chief minister Wǔ Yuánhéng 武元衡 appointed her Xiàoshū láng 校書郎 (Editorial Officer) — a post no other female poet in Chinese history held — and the title “Nǚ Xiàoshū” became permanently attached to her name (whence Hú Zēng’s couplet “Wànlǐ qiáo biān nǚ xiàoshū, pípá huā xià bìmén jū”).
She was famously courted in correspondence by Yuán Zhěn 元稹 (then Censor in Shǔ) and exchanged verse with Yán Wǔ 嚴武, Liú Yǔxī 劉禹錫, Bái Jūyì 白居易, and Dù Mù 杜牧. Her late years were spent in retirement at Huànhuā xī 浣花溪 outside Chéngdū as a nǚguān 女冠 (Daoist priestess). She died ca. Tàihé 6 (832), aged about 64. Her original Hóngdù jí 洪度集 in one juǎn of over five hundred poems is lost; about ninety pieces survive, the bulk of them in the Xuē Tāo Lǐ Yě shī jí KR4h0017.
She is also remembered as the inventor of the Xuē Tāo jiān 薛濤箋, a small format of pink-tinted, plant-coloured letter-paper made at Huànhuā xī, used for her own short verse correspondence and copied throughout the late Táng and Sòng.