Shen Shanbao (沈善宝, 1808–1862) courtesy name Xiangpei 湘佩 and style name Xihu sanren 西湖散人 was a Chinese poet and writer active during the Qing Dynasty. She is the author of the Mingyuan Shihua, which provided biographical material on 500 Qing women poets, including herself.
She was born in Hangzhou, which in the early nineteenth century was a center for women artists and writers. Shen's father committed suicide in 1819 and her mother died in 1832. She sold her paintings and poetry to support herself. In 1837, in a marriage arranged by her foster mother, she married Wu Lingyun 武凌云, a high official and holder of the jinshi degree (the highest civil service degree). She was Wu's second wife; upon her marriage she became stepmother to his children. After her marriage to Wu, she moved to Beijing.[1]
In Beijing, Shen made contact with a circle of women writers, including Liang Desheng, Xu Yunjiang, Xu Zongyan, Gu Taiqing, Gong Zihang (the sister of Gong Zichen) and Li Peijin.[2] She was also important as a teacher; she was known to have more than a hundred female disciples.[3] She was also friends with the writer Ding Pei, who wrote a preface for her first poetry collection in 1836.
Some of her work has been translated into English.[a]
^Ellen Widmer, The Beauty and the Book: Women and Fiction in Nineteenth Century China. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University East Asia Center, 2006, p.191. An important source for Shen's biography is her own poetry, which is discussed in Grace Fong's "Writing Self and Writing Lives: Shen Shanbao's (1802-1862) Gendered Autobiographical Practices," Nannü 2.2 (2000), pp.259-303.
^Women Writers of Traditional China: An Anthology of Poetry and Criticism edited by Kang-i Sun Chang and Haun Saussy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999, pp.552-555
