Lü Bicheng

Lü Bicheng was born in Taiyuan, Shanxi in 1883 during the late Qing dynasty, but is considered a native of her ancestral home of Jingde County, Anhui by Chinese convention. Her father , who earned a jinshi degree in 1877, served as Educational Commissioner of Shanxi Province. Her mother Yan Shiyu (嚴士瑜) was an educated gentry woman. Lü Bicheng was the third of four daughters in the family, and her elder sisters Lü Huiru and Lü Meisun were also known for their literary achievement. When she was four, her father retired to Lu'an, Anhui. She lived a life of comfort until the age of 12, when her father died in 1895. Because Lü Fengqi had no male heir, relatives of the Lü lineage contested for his inheritance, and Yan Shiyu and her four daughters were forced to move to Lai'an County to live with her natal family. When she was nine, Lü Bicheng was betrothed to a Wang family, but as her own family fortune declined, the Wang family broke off the marriage contract, giving the young Bicheng the stigma of a "rejected woman". The resulting emotional scar is often considered a major factor in her later decision to never marry. Her widowed mother and the Lü girls were not well treated at the Yan family in rural Anhui. When Lü was 15 or 16, Yan Shiyu sent her to live with her maternal uncle Yan Langxuan (嚴朗軒), who was the salt administrator in Tanggu, the port city outside the northern metropolis of Tianjin. Her sister Huiru also joined her later. Lü Bicheng studied at Columbia University in New York in 1920, and she returned to Shanghai in 1922. She went to America again in 1926, ending her Shanghai period she travel to Europe, but finally Lü Bicheng settled in Switzerland between 1927 and 1933. ==Career==

During her stay in Tanggu, Qing China went through the tumultuous period of the failed Hundred Days' Reform of 1898, which brought about increasing awareness of women's education, and the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. In 1904, Mrs. Fang, the wife of her uncle's secretary, invited Lü Bicheng to visit a girls' school in Tianjin, but her uncle prevented her from going and severely reprimanded her. The next day, she ran away from her uncle's home, and took the train to Tianjin with no money or luggage. She wrote a letter to Mrs. Fang, who was staying at the dormitory of the Ta Kung Pao newspaper. Ying Lianzhi, the Catholic Manchu nobleman who founded the newspaper, read the letter and was so impressed by it that he made her an assistant editor. Lü Bicheng wrote a "progressive" ci that she had previously written, set to "A River Full of Red" ("Manjianghong") usually used to express heroic emotions. Ying transcribed the whole song in her diary and published it in ''L'impartial two days later. At the time, it was sensational for a woman to write for an influential national newspaper such as Ta Kung Pao. She was 21 years old. She used Ta Kung Pao to promote feminism and became a well-known figure. Lü Bicheng not only wanted to combine traditional Chinese learning with western natural science, but also wanted to let the world see the elegant style of Chinese women, so that women have a free life. She may have been introduced to Buddhism as early as 1917, but until 1930 she really became a committed practitioner and using the Buddhist name Baolian (Precious Lotus). In 1930 Lü became a Buddhist and ceased to publish any more of her works. There is a book about vegetarianism and animal rights that has an unusual theme and presentation called Light of Europe and America'' (Oumei zhi guang). She later died in 1943 in Hong Kong. ==Legacy==

Lü Bicheng has been listed as one of the top four women "geniuses" of the early Republic of China, together with Eileen Chang, Xiao Hong, and Shi Pingmei; Lü's biography was published in 2012. == See also ==