Hello and welcome to Queer as FACT. The podcast bring you queer history from around the world

and throughout time. I'm Alice. I'm Irene. And today we're talking about the 19th century

Chinese poet Wu Tsau.

Before we begin, I just have one content warning for this episode, which is that there will be a brief mention of suicide.

If that's something you don't want to hear, feel free to check out any of our other episodes.

All of them have content warnings at the start.

Also, just a quick disclaimer that I don't speak Chinese.

I speak Chinese, but I'm definitely not a native speaker, so my pronunciation's probably not perfect

either. But Irene is going to be offering me pronunciation advice during this episode, and we're

going to be doing our best. But that also means not all the sources on Wuzao's life were

available to me, but I've done the best I can with the English sources that do exist.

I also just wanted to mention that U is her family name and Tzal is her given name.

So that's backwards how we do it in English.

So I'm going to be referring to her as Tzal throughout this episode.

In terms of biographical detail, we don't actually know that much about Utsal's life.

She was born probably in

1799, though I couldn't find an English specific source for that fact, and that was sometimes

written as circa 1799. When I started researching this before I handed it off to you, I read a

Chinese academic article. The whole article was literally just like

speculation on the birth date of Utsal. Okay, so that date is up for debate, but we're talking

about around that time. Yeah, like the speculation was within like five years, sort of. Okay.

Zal was born in Ren He, which is near the town of Hongzhou on China's central east coast.

...