Cao E was a filial daughter of the Eastern Han. The Book of the Later Han, in its biographies of exemplary women, calls her the filial daughter Cao E of Shangyu in Kuaiji. Wikidata gives her Chinese label as Cao E and records her as born in 130 and dead in 143, with her birth place at Shangyu, so the title stays the personal name.[1][3][2]
Her father's drowning and her death
The Book of the Later Han says her father, named Xu, could play and sing and served as a ritual invocator. On the fifth day of the fifth month of the second year of Han'an, he drowned in the county river while going against the waves to meet a spirit, and his body was not found. Cao E was fourteen. She followed the river weeping day and night without a break, and on the seventeenth day she threw herself into the river and died.[3]
The Chinese Wikipedia article tells it a little differently. It says Cao Xu was a shaman who, at the Dragon Boat festival, took a boat out on the Shun River to meet the tide god Wu Zixu and was drowned. After Cao E drowned herself, five days later her body surfaced holding her father's body. In memory of her filial virtue the villagers renamed the Shun River the Cao E River and made her a water spirit. This is the later account. The Book of the Later Han does not mention the bodies surfacing together or the renaming.[2]
The stele and remembrance
The Book of the Later Han records that in the first year of Yuanjia the county magistrate Du Shang reburied Cao E beside the road on the south side of the river and set up a stele for her.[3] The Chinese Wikipedia article adds that Du Shang first built the Cao E temple and had his pupil Handan Zili, that is Handan Chun, write the inscription. The inscription was praised for its fine phrasing, with the words jue miao hao ci, and is built as a riddle. According to the Shishuo xinyu, Cao Cao once tried to guess it together with Yang Xiu. In 1110 she was granted the title Lady of Spiritual Filial Piety, in 1808 Lady of Blessed Response, and in 1865 the title of Lady of Spiritual Response was added.[2]