The Jurchen Jin dynasty's conquest of the Northern Song capital Kaifeng in 1127 — known as the Jingkang Incident — resulted in the capture of Emperor Huizong and his son Emperor Qinzong, along with thousands of court officials, artists, and scholars. The catastrophe forced the surviving Song court to flee south of the Yangtze, inaugurating the Southern Song dynasty. This traumatic rupture between north and south, between imperial glory and exile, became the defining emotional and political experience for an entire generation of Chinese poets.

The Jingkang catastrophe produced one of the richest bodies of exile and lament poetry in Chinese literary history. Li Qingzhao, widely regarded as the greatest woman poet in the Chinese tradition, lost her home, her husband, and her priceless antiquarian collection in the upheaval; her late ci lyrics are saturated with grief and displacement. The patriotic poetry of Lu You and the prose-poems of Xin Qiji a generation later continued to mourn the lost north, making this event a wound that shaped Chinese verse for over a century.