#xuanji tu

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Muslims be like ‘the Qur’ān is clearly miraculous’

and I’m like

Su Hui (poet) - Wikipedia

Su Hui >>>>> Muḥammad

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An interview with Jen Bervin - Asymptote

When we write poems, the history of poetry is with us, pre-inscribed in the white of the page; when we read or write poems, we do it with or

[orientallyyours]

Above is a facsimile of the lost original, "Xuanji Tu" (璇玑图), a poem by the female poet, Su Hui 蘇蕙 (Fourth Century CE). Su is said to have created thousands of literary compositions, but as was typical for women poets in ancient China, they were virtually all lost, except for the Xuanji Tu. This poem was never included in the canon of great Chinese poetry, no doubt because its creator and concerns were female. In fact, the text was lost for several centuries and only recently reconstructed. Although the poem itself was generally neglected, the story of its composition is legendary appearing in poems, novels, plays, and paintings over the centuries.

Su conceived and embroidered this poem for her husband, a major government official who was in another city and had taken a concubine. She composed the poem expressing her love and had the Xuanji Tu sent to him.  Su Hui's husband understood her meaning, sent the concubine away, rejoined Su and they spent the rest of their lives together.

Su Hui's text is the grandest example of a genre in Chinese poetry of "reversible poems" (hui-wen shih). Since Chinese can be read in any direction, these poems that can be read forward (from top right reading down) or in reverse. Su's poem is made up of a grid of 29 characters by 29 characters (841 in total), which is more complex than the simple "reversible poems," for it allows readings in all directions: horizontal, vertical and diagonal. The Xuanji Tu was originally embroidered in five colors which mapped out the poem's complex structure telling us how to read the text. Since her time onward, the Xuanji Tu has fascinated readers, from the Tang Empress Wu Zetian who made 200 poems out of it, to a Song Dynasty scholar who worked out 10 diagrams and deciphered 3,752 poems, to a Ming Dynasty scholar who worked out 12 ways of reading to get 4,206 poems. The poem is especially striking and original in that it is not only a literary text, but a piece of visual art as well. 

Source: Welling Out of Silence