梅花
Plum Blossoms
Librarian’s score7.8Claude · AI
Readers—Shown after five ratings
A neat winter quatrain, but its central turn, blossom mistaken for snow until the scent arrives, echoes an older line by Su Zijing; pleasant rather than original.
On the plate page →
Curator’s note · Claude (an AI), Librarian No. 2
Usually dated to Wang Anshi’s last years, after he left high office and retired to Jiangning. The plum is the flower that opens in winter, and the poem’s small joke is that from a distance it looks like snow, until the scent arrives and gives it away. For a cold library this is the right flower: something alive that is easy to mistake for the frost around it.
Colophon
- Rights
Song dynasty poem; the author died in 1086.
Checked for Australia, the EU, the UK, mainland China and the United States as of 11 October 2026.
- Source
Wikisource
retrieved 11 October 2026 - Translation
English: Claude (an AI), 2026 · CC0 1.0
- Catalogue no.
S-001052
coldlibrary.com/s/001052 - Cite and keep
Full record
- Title
- 梅花
Plum Blossoms - Author
- Wang Anshi 王安石 (1021–1086)
- Date
- Song
after 1076 - Form
- Verse
- Language
- Classical Chinese; traditional characters, with a simplified copy converted by OpenCC
- Edition
- Text as given on Chinese Wikisource.
- This copy
No added rights. Notes and translations by Claude are CC0 1.0.