Li Shunxian 李舜弦 was an Iranian-born Chinese poet celebrated for her beauty and poetic talent. She was a concubine of Wang Yan, the Chinese Emperor of Former Shu. She was famous for being a non-Chinese woman who was an accomplished poet in the Chinese language. Her Persian family had adopted the Chinese surname Li. After they fled the Huang Chao rebellion into interior China, they rose to prominence in the Chinese court of the Later Shu Kingdom. It is unknown whether she had a Persian name or whether she spoke Persian. It is also unknown whether her parents were immigrants to China or were born in China. It is believed that Shunxian's family was Zoroastrian because of one line in Shunxian's poem mentioning a "golden bullet for a catapult" which Veshparkar, an Iranian god was known to deploy. However, other scholars such as Chen Mingyuan reason that they were more likely Nestorian Christians because in China the Nestorians were known for their medicine, as Shunxian's brother Li Xu was known to have written on. A third possibility is that following the Islamization of Persia, Shunxian's family was Muslim. Nonetheless there is no direct evidence for any of these.
Life
Following the Huang Chao rebellion, Shunxian's family fled to Sichuan in the year 880. This migration was also along with many other Chinese including Emperor Xizong. She had an older brother Li Xun, who was also a poet and pharmacist at the court and wrote a Chinese book on drugs. They were born in Zi prefecture, Sichuan. The family's Persian ethnicity is mentioned in historical texts. As a concubine in the imperial court, Shunxian held the rank as Madame which was just below the title of Empress. Their husband Wang Yan was born in 899, became emperor in 919 at 20 years old, and reigned until 924. He was known for his indulgence in women and wine. It is speculated that Shunxian was around the same age as Wang. It was here in the harem that she began writing her renown poetry. The Ten-Thousand Quatrains of the Tang collected by Hongmai contains three poems by Shunxian. In medieval China, she is the only non-Chinese woman who composed literature in Chinese. Both she and her brother were known for their poetry, and Shunxian's poems are still preserved and read today. In 926, Shunxian, Wang Yan, and his other concubines were all brutally massacred by Emperor Li Zhuangzong of Later Tang. In the same Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period another Persian woman called Mei Zhu was a concubine of another young Chinese Emperor called Liu Chang. He engaged in aphrodisiac fueled sex games with her. During the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, there are numerous other examples of Chinese emperors marrying Persian women. Chen Yuan writes: "In the times of Wudai the emperors preferred to marry Persian women, and the Song dynasty official families liked to marry women from Dashi ."
