In the fourth year of the eighth year of Hongzhi, the first assistant Liu Ji and the fourth assistant Qiu Jun retired at the same time. The emperor gave them carriages, horses, servants, gold, silver coins and silk, and sent the two ministers who had worked hard and made great contributions back home.
Although they retired at the same time, they left the capital at different times: Lord Qiu went first, while Lord Liu called his disciples to recite poems and farewell them. They dragged their feet for a while, until they felt that the emperor would get tired of them if they didn't leave, and then they arranged their carriages to leave the capital.
On the way back home, looking towards Qian'an, he still felt a little resentful that Ryan Cui didn't have him in his heart.
If he had been told to write a tombstone or epitaph when the old lady of the Cui family passed away, wouldn't he have been able to borrow Ryan Cui's luck? Moreover, he had always been the Prime Minister in power, and was also a man who was good at poetry and prose. Many people asked him to write these things, but Ryan Cui never asked him for anything. Alas, who told him that he was in the cabinet, with worldly affairs on his mind, and his literary reputation was not as high as Li Dongyang's?
Liu Shoufu returned to Baoding in a depressed mood, following the old path of his predecessor and relative Wan Shoufu, who went up to the stage every day to look out over the capital, hoping that the emperor would remember him and call him back to office. He was younger than Wan when he resigned, and in good health, so he exercised day after day, and from time to time wrote a few poems about missing his lover and sent them to his friends and juniors in Beijing, and occasionally sent them to Ryan Cui's home in Yongping Prefecture next door.
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