‘You don’t have to be so modest about that. In fact, you’re the very one in her poem titled “To a Girl in the Neighborhood,” right? That speaks volumes about your friendship. It’s a wonderful poem, which will be read for hundreds and hundreds of years, I can assure you of that.’

‘Yes, that’s the poem she wrote for me after one of her visits to the flower garden.’

‘As a publisher, I believe it’s important to get as much biographical information as possible about the poems. Particularly for a poetess like her. For instance, I can add a note about the inspiration she got from her visit to your garden. About what the two of you discussed. All that can turn out to be so helpful for readers to understand the poem. Some of the earlier annotated editions of her poems may not be accurate or reliable in that aspect, and it’s crucial for a publisher like me to check and double-check.’

‘It’s a worthy project, sir. I’m just a poor, barely educated flower girl. For all her beauty and talent, she has condescended to talk to me occasionally about her poems, and I feel so grateful to her. I’ll try to answer your questions the best I can.’

‘How about telling me whatever you know about her daily life?’

Then the flower girl started giving him a detailed account of Xuanji’s life after she had moved to the nunnery.

It was true that Xuanji frequently came to the flower garden because of the flowers she needed for her parties, but, from time to time, it was also because of their talking about and discussing the problems they had in common. They were young, single, and lonely, and both of them were seen as unorthodox. More so in Xuanji’s case. In spite of the dominant Confucian discourse of arranged marriage, paradoxically, the early Tang Dynasty also happened to be a period when romantic affairs among young people could also be considered fashionable, at least in popular stories and poems. That made things harder for Xuanji, who felt helplessly trapped in the nunnery despite all her fancy parties and celebrated friends. That was not at all what she had dreamed of for her life. She was worried that she would soon lose her youth and beauty. And then everything else. As for those men at the parties, she knew clearly they cared only for her body – and even that only for the moment. She prayed that someone would come to rescue her from her plight, but for her, he had to be a man of higher social status. A knight in shining armor on a white horse, so to speak.

‘A knight or not, has she had a “true-hearted lover” as described in that poem she wrote for you?’ Judge Dee cut in with a question.