Hồ Xuân Hương

Hồ Xuân Hương (; 1772–1822) was a Vietnamese poet born at the end of the Lê dynasty. She grew up in an era of political and social turmoil – the time of the Tây Sơn rebellion and a three-decade civil war that led to Nguyễn Ánh seizing power as Emperor Gia Long and starting the Nguyễn dynasty. She wrote poetry using chữ nôm (Southern Script), which adapts Chinese characters for writing demotic Vietnamese. She is considered to be one of Vietnam's greatest classical poets. Xuân Diệu, a prominent modern poet, dubbed her "The Queen of Nôm poetry".

The facts of her life are difficult to verify, but this much is well established: she was born in Nghệ An Province near the end of the rule of the Trịnh lords, and moved to Hanoi while still a child. The best guess is that she was the youngest daughter of Ho Phi Dien.

According to the first researchers of Hồ Xuân Hương, such as Nguyen Huu Tien and Duong Quang Ham, she was a daughter of a Ho Phi Dien (born in 1704) in Quynh Doi Village, Quynh Luu District, Nghệ An Province (*). Ho Phi Dien acquired the baccalaureate diploma at the age of 24, under Le Bao Thai's Dynasty. Due to his family's poverty, he had to work as a tutor in Hai Hung, Ha Bac for his earnings. At that place, he cohabitated with a girl from Bac Ninh, his concubine – Hồ Xuân Hương was born as a result of that love affair.

Nevertheless, in a paper in Literature Magazine (No. 10, Hanoi 1964), Tran Thanh Mai claims that Hồ Xuân Hương's hometown was the same as mentioned above, but she was a daughter of Ho Si Danh (1706–1783) and a younger stepsister of Ho Si Dong (1738–1786)"

She became locally famous and obtained a reputation of creating poems that were subtle and witty. She is believed to have married twice as her poems refer to two different husbands: Vinh Tuong (a local official) and Tong Coc (a slightly higher level official). She was the second-rank wife of Tong Coc, in Western terms, a concubine, a role that she was clearly not happy with ("like the maid/but without the pay"). However, her second marriage did not last long as Tong Coc died just six months after the wedding.

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