According to Confucius, an educated woman is a worthless woman.

In 15th century China, one such educated woman breaks with tradition.

Her story, that of one of China's earliest female physicians, is brought to life in "Lady Tan's Circle of Women."

Lisa See is a number one "New York Times" bestselling author of historical fiction.

Her beloved novels include "The Island of Sea Women," "The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane," and "Snow Flower and the Secret Fan."

Her latest novel is inspired by the true story of a remarkable woman physician in 15th century China, a determined woman who dared to break tradition to care for and protect other women.

Please welcome Lisa See, author of "Lady Tan's Circle of Women."

Hi, Lisa, it's so nice to see you again.

Yes, it's wonderful to be here.

Thank you so much for having me again.

Let's get into the book.

Lady Tan, and I hope I'm pronouncing this correctly, Tan Yunxian, is that correct?

Yunxian, it's hard to pronounce, but that's Yunxian.

How did you find her, and what was it that fascinated you the most?

Well, thank you, such a great question to start off with.

No, this was right after the pandemic started and I thought I was going to be writing a different book, but I couldn't write that particular book.

It was going to require a trip deep, deep, deep into the interior of China.

Couldn't possibly do it then.

And so that book got way over on the back burner.

And many months went by where I was just here at home, like, now what?

And there was a day all the way, not until October, 2020.

So a long time went by when I was kind of at loose ends and I was walking through my office where I have along this wall, a huge... All of my research books and the spine of one of them kind of jumped out at me.

I don't know why.

Gray, it was slightly darker gray letter, jumped off the shelf and into my hands.

"Reproducing Women: Pregnancy and Childbirth in the Ming Dynasty.

And I thought to myself, well, here we are in the middle of a global pandemic.

My life is kind of over.

I've never read that book, even though it'd been on my shelf for 10 years.

So I decided to sit down right that minute and start reading.

And I looked at page 19 and there was a mention of, as you said, a woman doctor in the Ming dynasty, so 500 years ago, who, when she turned 50, published a book of her medical cases.

And I said, "Well, that's interesting."

And I went over to my computer, I looked her up, and it turned out that her book was available not just in Chinese, but also in English.

And so I ordered it, I had it 24 hours later.

And although I typically think about what the next book will be for 5, 10, 15, even 20 years, this one was all of 26 hours.

You are a master at historical fiction.

So I have to pick your brain.

What is the secret sauce?

How do you balance the history and engage and entertain at the same time?

Well, the research is my absolute favorite part of the whole process.

To me, it's kind of like a treasure hunt.

I never know what I'm going to find.

I do it all myself.

There are a couple of scenes in the book, you'll recognize them, the story of the worm, the story of the message that's written on the baby's foot, and then also what happens in front of the empress and the consequences of that.

All of those are real stories that happened to real women.

And so when I'm doing the research and I find, come across that story of the worm, there's a part of me that's just like, "Woo, I've gotta use that."

And then for me, it becomes a matter of where is it in the story?

Is it in the beginning, the middle, the end?

Why is it there?

What's the ripple effect?

So that's part of it.

But the other thing is I do, especially if you have something set 500 years ago, this is not in our consciousness of how people lived, of how people dressed, of how people got from here to there, whether they were going next door or traveling 1,000 miles.

So I really had to do just a ton of research just to kind of build out what life would've been like.

So the last piece of this that I wanna tell you is that I do think of it a little bit like that game Jenga, if you've ever played where they put the pieces and then you start pulling them out.

And so when I write the first draft, it's very long.

I want to include everything that I found.

Pulling out these pieces, I want there to be enough information there that people can be immersed in that world, but not so much that they just stop dead and have to like, "Oh my God, there's a...

Here's the history lesson."

So it's...

I want that structure to still be there and feel like it's strong, but it's not gonna collapse either.

I quoted from Confucius at the beginning, and it was, "An educated woman is a worthless woman."

Well, this woman is anything but uneducated and she's far from worthless.

Tell me about her upbringing, please.

Well, she was from a very elite family, a highly, highly educated family.

Her father, her grandfather, her uncle were all imperial scholars.

Her grandfather was very, very high up in the government.

He was in the seventh tier of Imperial Scholars, so just two levels below the emperor.

When she was eight, she went to live with her grandparents.

And her grandfather, I think, was hugely influential on what happened to her in life.

So he apparently liked to have a little bit of wine at night and have this little girl, eight years old, recite poetry to him.

And apparently one night he said, "This girl is very smart.

She's too smart to confine her to reciting poetry and doing embroidery.

We should teach her my medicine."

And so he was, in addition to being an Imperial Scholar who had worked for the Board of Punishments, on his retirement, he became what was known as a literati doctor, a doctor who learns how to be a doctor by reading books.

But his wife, Tan Yunxian's grandmother was a hereditary doctor.

She had learned from her parents, who learned from their parents, who learned from their parents and so on.

And so it's really from her grandmother that she learned how to become a doctor.

But that never would've happened if her grandfather hadn't decided that this little girl had something special about her.

When we look at the historical setting, wealthy women and girls from important families had a totally different path than girls that were not from such fortunate families.

And you see this with the two children in this childhood relationship that probably should never have existed.

Could you give us a little bit of the storyline and tell us how this works?

So Tan Yunxian is from this elite family, she's studying to be a physician.

And over here you have her friend Mei Ling, who is the daughter of a midwife.

She's now studying to become a midwife.

And one of the interesting things about traditional Chinese medicine, particularly in those days, was that doctors were not allowed to touch blood.

Now you had talked about Confucius earlier, he also created a kind of hierarchy of all of the professions in China.

At the very, very, very bottom were people who came in physical contact with blood.

So these would be coroners, midwives, and butchers.

This was really interesting me, because you have doctors who are all about healing and yet they can't touch blood.

So they can't really...

They can't help a woman in childbirth.

And over here, you have these midwives seen as polluted at the very, very bottom of the social ladder, and yet they're the ones who are bringing life into the world.

So to me, this was really interesting, that you'd have healing over here, but bringing life into the world over here, You talk about something that happens after childbirth, and this is the...

It's a postpartum tradition, which they called doing the month.

And I thought this was lovely.

It talks about the importance of the wellbeing of both the mother and the child, something that I think in today's time, in Western Times, that we've forgotten.

Yes, and so what would happen is that the mother and the baby are really well taken care of.

That maybe we wouldn't agree necessarily with total bedrest for that time period, it's a long time.

But to be really secluded, to have all of your meals provided, to be really taken care of so that your body can heal, so that you can connect with your baby.

The other thing are some of the foods that you're supposed to eat at that time.

And when I had my children, my grandmother and great aunt prepared what was called mother's soup.

And it has all these special ingredients in it that are there to help rebuild your blood, rebuild your system, but also some alcohol in there to help bring in your milk.

And I can tell you, it worked.

There are so many elements in the book that truly are relevant today.

One would be, as we touched on, the control of women's bodies, women's decisions for their selves.

The other that jumped out for me was there is a smallpox epidemic.

And they were using a medical technique variolation, which would prevent and protect the population.

So when you were writing this, did you see the parallels, the relevance to now?

Absolutely.

And the thing is that we were living in the height of the pandemic at that point.

There was so much discussion going on.

This was, when I started was even before they had a vaccine.

But all of those discussions, pro and con, and should you do it?

What are the lasting effects?

Will this have an effect on your future children?

All those kinds of things.

What really struck me was that 500 years ago, people were having that exact same conversation about variolation.

And as you said, it's an early form of vaccination.

They had someone called the smallpox planting master who would come to town.

And what he would do is he would grind up the scabs of someone who had had smallpox and then blow it through a tube into your nose.

And so obviously, there were some problems with this.

Some people got very, very sick, some people were very badly scarred, some people even died.

But if you made it through, you were effectively vaccinated for the rest of your life against smallpox.

And I have had readers say, "Well, did you take the language of today and apply it to what was going on back then?"

And it's exactly the opposite.

It's just what people were saying 500 years ago was exactly the same arguments again, pro and con.

And that was so apparent to me as I'm reading the book.

There's something else, and I don't know that I've ever actually focused on any interview on a piece of furniture, but we're gonna do it now.

And it's the marriage bed.

It's this large, intricate carved piece of furniture.

The way you describe it, I really think that my first apartment was probably smaller than this piece of furniture.

And tell me about it.

And I know that you also have a piece of this furniture that I assume has been in your family for generations.

Right, we have it in our family antique store.

And this is something that my great grandparents brought over from China.

And if you were from an elite family and you were going into your marriage, you went with a beautiful dowry that included clothes and jewelry and furniture and all kinds of things, including a marriage bed.

And the way to think of them is a sleeping platform surrounded on four sides by high carved walls that allowed the married couple to have some real privacy in one of these elite family homes where you have servants and people wandering in and out all the time.

So you gave them privacy.

Well, the one that we have in our family, ornately carved out of about 20 different types of wood, not a single nail, all fitted together, this beautiful carved canopy at the front, these wooden tassels hanging down.

And when you first enter, you're entering into a room where the servant would sleep on the floor in case you needed anything in the night.

And then the next room was a dressing room.

And then finally, you'd step through this kind of moon gate, again, very, very elaborately carved onto the sleeping platform.

And then this particular bed has paintings on silk all the way around the interior that show these scenes of domestic bliss.

A young couple walking by a stream, he's writing poetry to her, she's playing an instrument for him.

So this bed was our playhouse when I was a kid.

That's where I played with my cousins.

It's where my sons played with their cousins.

And of course, now we're all waiting to have grandchildren who are old enough to play there.

Lisa, in previous novels, especially "Snow Flower and the Secret Fan," I learned a lot about foot binding.

And I know that it's primarily for the upper class, it was a status symbol.

It happens to be a very important element in this book.

So if you would take a little time and explain what it is and why was this so important?

Right, so when a girl was about five years old, and you're right, this was really exclusively for elite women, except for certain periods in history.

So a mother would take her little girl when she was about five.

She would roll her toes under her foot, wrap them in these long strips of binding cloth.

And then the little girl would spend days, sometimes weeks, sometimes months, walking on these toes that are rolled over.

Eventually those toes would break, the toes would be pulled down even further.

The bindings tightened every four days, and still walking back and forth until the bones in her midfoot broke.

Obviously, unbelievably painful, 'cause she still had to walk to get all those bones to break.

The goal was for the toes of the foot to come back and meet the heel of the foot.

So that basically what a little girl, and then later as a woman, was walking on was her big toe.

So the way to visualize an ideal size bound foot is just to look at your own thumb, about three inches long and one inch wide.

This was something that was passed from mother to daughter, generation after generation for 1,000 years.

And it's something that I think is very hard for us to imagine doing that to our own daughters.

And yet this was the one thing that a mother could do to possibly give her daughter a better chance at life.

If she could give her daughter a pair of perfectly bound feet, then her daughter might be able to marry into a better family and have a better life.

And yet, some people had terrible infections and died, actually.

Right, yeah, so little girls who were going through the process, about one in 10 died from some type of infection.

But this was something that continued throughout a woman's lifetime.

She had to take care of her feet until the day she died.

And there was a whole process about that.

But every four days and how you did this, but there were so many ways that you could get an infection, a little piece of bone could break through, or your toenails could break through your skin.

So women were susceptible to infections, susceptible to gangrene all the way through their lives.

And if you think about it, there could be times when a woman might choose not to care for her feet or might forget to take care of her feet.

And then there were really severe consequences to that.

Forensics plays an interesting part in this story, and that really surprised me.

You have a female character that dies, they do an autopsy, there's an inquest and an examination, which I found totally fascinating.

And you discovered this in your research?

Yes, so here I was doing research about medicine in general, women's health, very in particular.

But this other book kind of kept coming across my view, "The Washing Away of Wrongs."

This is the oldest book of forensic medicine in the world, published in 1247.

And it is still used in China today, because how we look at death hasn't changed over time.

The ideas of it, the markers for it.

I'm sure you have at some point watched "CSI:Miami" or Las Vegas, one of those.

And I tell you that this one book, you could probably have a "CSI" that would last 10 years based on all the cases in this one particular book.

Anyway, those markers of death, again, they don't change over time.

Does this look like it was natural?

Does it look like it was an accident?

Does this look like something else was going on, a murder?

And when I was on book tour this year, there was a woman who came to an event in Colorado who had studied forensic medicine here in this country, an American woman, and that book, "The Washing Away of Wrongs" was one of the textbooks, not just because, again, look how you identify death, hasn't changed over the centuries, but also because of the respect that forensic coroners in China were taught of how to take care of a body, how to respect a body.

And so this was one of her texts here.

Lisa, whenever I read your book, there are stories about female friendships, strong female friendships, and generally these friendships are tested and there's no exception in this book.

But if you would give me an idea about using the bond of female friendship throughout your novels.

Yes, well, this is a unique relationship that we have in our lives.

We will tell a friend something that you wouldn't tell your boyfriend, your lover, your husband, your mother, your children.

It's a very, very particular kind of intimacy.

And of course, whenever your heart is open, you are vulnerable to being hurt.

And so as much as we get from friendship, whether it's one friend or a circle of friends, the strength, the support, the laughter, the sharing of tears, all of those things that are so wonderful in friendship, there are those dark shadow sides of what can happen.

Because again, your heart is open and you're vulnerable.

And so wherever I see those little dark shadows, that's where I wanna go.

Well, I'm gonna quote from you because as you said in the book, it takes a lifetime to make a friend, but you can lose one in an hour.

And that's part of this story.

Here's something I've never asked anyone before, and I just would love you to comment on the concubines and eunuchs during the Ming Dynasty, because how they were treated... And for instance, if a concubine had a male son, her status is elevated.

Yes, well, a concubine was someone who was brought into a household to be one of the...

Entertain the husband of the household.

And so maybe he would have his wife, sometimes some secondary wives, but also concubines.

There was typically a lot of jealousy among the concubines and the wives, who gets to spend the evening with the husband in question.

And as you said, so much status on whether or not you have had any children, but particularly a son.

And now we can kind of look at that and think, well is a woman's status entirely... What would that feel like to have a woman's status be entirely reliant on whether or not she gave birth to a son?

And then with eunuchs, these are typically boys who are sold by poor families.

They're not the first son, they might be the third, fourth, or fifth son.

And they undergo this process, which is, I don't think anybody would really wanna sign up for, if you're honest, this isn't just a Chinese tradition.

There are traditions of eunuchs in different cultures around the world.

In China, they were there specifically to work in the Forbidden City.

And the emperor could have many concubines, many wives.

There were some emperors who had as many as 10,000 women living in the Forbidden City who were there just for him.

And of course, the emperor, and I suppose the government in general was very concerned that whatever sons were born were the actual sons of the emperor.

And because that is someone who could become an emperor in the future.

And so one way to guarantee that there was no messing around was to have eunuchs who worked in the Forbidden City.

And some of them became very, very powerful, wielded tremendous political power, became very wealthy.

There was a lot of corruption around it as well.

But it was not a life that I would wanna choose.

But on the other hand, this did give a pathway to an elevated position in life that was typically unavailable for families that had no money or education.

The new book is "Lady Tan's Circle of Women."

Lisa, it is always a pleasure when I can spend time with you.

I want to thank you so much.

Thank you so much for having me.

I hope we get to do it again.

I am Ann Bocock, please join me on the next, "Between the Covers."