Guan Daosheng

[4] Guan and Zhao established a home in Wuxing "with the purchase of a town house with gardens in Huzhou, and a country retreat at Dongheng village near Deqing,"[5] where they were later buried.

Because of Zhao's work for the Imperial court, the two traveled widely, giving Guan the opportunity to meet leading artists of the era and see places upper-class women usually did not have access to.

Therefore, Zhao started his career at the highest offices of state, and was honored not only as a great artist but also as “a versatile man of letters” who recorded the emperor's activities.

She died "on board the official boat in Shandong on the way home";[8] her husband had sought permission to return due to his wife's illness.

"The text of his letter informing [a relative] of her death and his painful journey home with her coffin, known as 'Zuimeng tie' ('Alcoholic delirium'), portrays a man devastated by the loss.

Today, their "town house and garden in Huzhou, Lianhuazhuang, and their tomb in the country at Dongheng have been restored"[10] and a small museum has been built in her husband's honour.

"[12] The focus of Guan's work on bamboo painting was atypical for a female artist, as the subject was thought to be imbued with highly desirable masculine qualities, namely its ability to bend without breaking and greenness through the winter, symbolic of steadfast companionship.

[14] Praise such as this undoubtedly helped lead to Guan's 1317 reception of the title "Madam of the Wei Kingdom" from the imperial court in the capital.

This style followed the tradition of an artist of the early Yuan whose name goes unrecorded in China but who is called Tan Zhirui in Japan, where his paintings were brought by Chan Buddhist monks.

[16] She wrote a poem called "Song of Me and You" in response to her husband's desire to have concubines, a common practice in China during that time, especially for those who worked in the government or high-ranking officers.

[18] She is referred to "in the nineteenth century compilation of information on woman painters drawn from many earlier sources by T'ang Sou-yu, the wife of the Hangchow scholar and book collector Wang Yuan-sun"[19] and is "one of the few women who is mentioned in early Western surveys of Chinese painting and whose work has been studied by modern Chinese scholars.