The longest narrative poem among the Music Academy (yuefu) folk songs of the Eastern Han Dynasty (25 – 220), The Peacock Flies Southeast is of great importance Chinese literary history. Deriving from a tragic love story during the reign of Emperor Xian, the last Emperor of the Eastern Han Dynasty, the poem tells the story of a young man named Jiao Zhongqing and his wife Liu Lanzhi. The newlyweds were first forced to separate by Jiao's mother, then Liu was pressured to marry someone else. In protest, the couple took their own lives to fulfil their vow to live together in the other world. As an elegy of the couple's true love and emancipatory struggles, the poem condemns the oppressive Chinese feudal ethics.