Liang Sishun
Liang Sishun was a Chinese poet. The eldest daughter of the Chinese intellectual and political activist Liang Qichao, she is known for Yihengguan Cixuan, an anthology of Ci poetry that she compiled.
Biography
Liang Sishun was born in Guangdong in 1893 to Liang Qichao and Li Huixian. In 1898, when Liang Qichao fled Qing China to Japan due to the failure of the Hundred Days' Reform, Liang Sishun also went there with her mother under the alias Shizuko Yoshida. She studied at, where she became proficient in Japanese. She worked as her father's Japanese translator later in life.Later in her childhood, Liang studied Ci poetry under. In 1908, Liang Sishun published her first anthology of classical Ci, Yihengguan Cixuan. "Yihengguan", the art name of Liang Sishun's study, was chosen by her father Liang Qichao. The five volumes of the anthology contains 676 Ci ranging from the Tang dynasty to early 20th century copied from Liang Qichao's personal library. Mai Menghua assisted in evaluating and selecting historical works. Scholars have highlighted the influence of the on Liang Sishun's anthology.
The scholar Mizuyo Sudo mentioned that around 1915, Liang Sishun believed in wifehood and motherhood as proper social roles for women in Chinese society. In Liang's writings, she mentioned the impact of her grandmother and her mother on maintaining the family and providing education, and advocated for women's education in China to prepare women to become better wives and mothers.
Liang Sishun married Zhou Xizhe, a diplomat and former student of her father. The couple first resided in Canada and took care of Liang Sishun's younger siblings who were studying abroad in the United States: Liang Sicheng, Liang Siyong, Liang Sizhong, and. Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin were wedded in their living room in 1928. The couple returned to China in 1929, where they resided in Tianjin. After the Marco Polo Bridge incident in 1937, Liang Sishun elected to remain at Yenching University in Beiping with her sister Sizhuang, though the rest of the Liang family moved south. Her husband died in 1938.
After the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Liang Sishun became a member of the People's Political Consultative Conference of Dongcheng, Beijing and a researcher at the Central Research Institute of Culture and History. During the Cultural Revolution she was whipped by Red Guards. She died in her own residence in 1966.