杨花飞去泪沾臆,杨花飞来意还息 || Liu Yin, birth name Yang Ai, courtesy name Rushi, among the Eight Beauties of Qinhuai
Liu Rushi was born in the late Ming Dynasty. She was sold by her family at a very young age to be a concubine, and then sold again at thirteen into a brothel. There, she became a cultivated poet, painter, and calligrapher, and eventually opened a brothel herself. Over the course of her early life, she became involved with several notable literati, but those relationships fell through, often because the men were unwilling to legitimise their relationship through marriage.
At 25, she married the esteemed scholar Qian Qianyi, whom she courted through her poetry. She was fond of dressing in men’s clothing and passing herself as a man, and her habit of wearing her husband’s robes on social calls earned her the nickname “the Confucian Scholar (儒士),” a pun on her name.