Li Qingzhao
Still Fifteen Carts of Books
When you cannot carry it all, decide the order of what goes first
Li Qingzhao, Postface to the Records on Metal and Stone
Too much to carry and no time to choose. What do you give up first? How did Li Qingzhao shed twenty years of collecting?
What actually happened?
In the spring of 1127, with the Jin armies coming south, her husband Zhao Mingcheng hurried south for his mother's funeral. Twenty years of books, paintings and bronzes could not go with them, so they cut layer by layer: first the bulky printed books, then the multi-scroll paintings, then the bronzes without inscriptions, then the common editions, the ordinary paintings, the heavy vessels. After several rounds it still filled fifteen carts. The ten rooms left locked in their old house in Qingzhou burned when the city fell that December.
Shed what can be replaced
The first to go were bulky printed books, which could be bought again anywhere. Multi-scroll paintings and uninscribed bronzes went next. What stayed to the end was the unique: the rare editions, the inscribed vessels, the pieces they had written on.
Moving with one suitcase: give away books any shop sells, and pack the handwritten notes and old family letters.
Set the order before the crisis
Two years later, leaving for a post, he called his instructions across the water: baggage first, then bedding, then books and scrolls, then bronzes; the ritual vessels she should carry herself and never part from. In a panic there is no time to think, only to follow an order.
Before cash runs short, write the list: which spending stops first, and which never stops.
What you keep will scatter too
The fifteen carts reached Jiankang and still scattered: stolen, swindled, swapped by those keeping them. By the time she wrote, seven or eight parts in ten were gone. An order cannot save everything. It lets you know what you are losing.
A project cut to one feature still failed. In the review, first ask whether the earlier cuts were the right ones.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: too much to carry, too little time, and you must give something up though you want to keep it all.
Ask first: what could I buy or make again? What is gone for good if I lose it? Am I setting the order now, or choosing in the moment of panic?
Where it goes wrong: treating an order as a way to save everything. She cut carefully and still lost most of it. The order decides what goes first, not whether anything goes.
Lines to keep
After cutting again and again, there were still fifteen carts of books.
Whatever is gathered must scatter. That is the way of things.
Same situation, other people are asking
I built this line and I can't be the one to end it.Pulling out would look like admitting I was wrong.Too much to carry. What do I drop first?I can't cut something I built · all 3 questions →If this one named what you are going through,
send it to someone who needs it, or keep it somewhere you will find it again.