An extraordinarily skilled poet, musician, and playwright, Wu Zao occupies a liminal yet luminous place in the history of Chinese literature—and increasingly, in the evolving narrative of China’s LGBTQ+ cultural heritage. Born at the turn of the 19th century, Wu Zao emerged as a singular voice in a literary canon typically dominated by men, and carved a space for herself within intellectual and artistic traditions that rarely welcomed women, let alone those who dared to defy gender and sexual norms. While many of the particular details surrounding her existence remain uncertain, Wu Zao’s surviving writings subtly but powerfully permeate with erotic ambiguity and convey the deep emotional bonds she forged with other women throughout her lifetime. Through careful translation and scholarly interpretation, Wu Zao has emerged in more recent years as a figure who, with quiet defiance, charted her own path on the margins of Qing Dynasty society to challenge socio-cultural constraints placed on gender and sexuality. Today, Wu Zao’s creative legacy not only enriches the canon of classical Chinese literature but also expands the landscape of Chinese queer history, offering a rare glimpse into the complexities of queer desire and expression from a time and place where such notions were seldom recorded.
Making Queer History has a vague title because it has a rather vague purpose. We are not alone in our aim to tell the queer community’s history. What defines us is our focus not only on the past, but toward the future.
