The love that survived a Chinese labour camp
Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese dissident, has spent years in prison for calling for political change in his country. For more than half of his marriage to Liu Xia he has been imprisoned, and now he is dying of cancer. The BBC's Celia Hatton looks back at how the couple's love survived.
They fought to be allowed to marry each other. But when the government in Beijing finally backed down, permitting one of its unrelenting critics to marry his love, problems remained.
The camera that was supposed to take the couple's official marriage picture wouldn't work. The photographer was left scratching his head. Chinese marriage certificates aren't valid unless they contain an official portrait snapped at the scene.
So, Liu Xiaobo and and his would-be wife, Liu Xia, improvised. They found single photos of themselves and stuck them side by side. The makeshift photo was stamped and finally, they were married.
That was in 1996.
Getting married was a small victory for the couple. It gave Liu Xia the right to visit her new husband in the grim labour camp in north-eastern China where he had recently been imprisoned. Liu Xia made the 1,600km (1,000 miles) round trip from Beijing every month.
"The train to the concentration camp," she wrote in a poem. "Sobbing pass and running over my body/ Yet I still couldn't hold your hand."
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By all accounts, Liu Xiaobo and Liu Xia were inseparable, except when they were forcibly separated.
Days after the silence fell on Tiananmen, Xiaobo was placed in a secret detention centre. He stayed there for almost twenty months. When he was released, he had lost nearly everything, including his prestigious teaching job and his home.
It was then that Liu Xiaobo connected with the light of his life: an exuberant young poet named Liu Xia.
"I found all the beauty in the world in this one woman," he reportedly told a friend.
Six years younger, she was already recognised as a gifted writer. Her close friend, the writer Liao Yiwu, said that back then, she was always giggling. Xia's high tolerance for alcohol was also legendary; she could drink her friends under the table. Xiaobo adored large meals, but would only drink Coca-cola.
Liu Xia came from a privileged background, the daughter of a high-ranking banking official. She was expected to become a civil servant too, but had recently given up that stable life in favour of writing.
Against all odds, Xia's parents encouraged her relationship with Xiaobo, despite his political troubles.
'If someone is in jail, their family's life ends too'
In the early days, the couple tried to establish the resemblance of a normal life. Xiaobo moved into Xia's apartment, not far from Tiananmen Square, and they made a life together.Liu Xiaobo was under near-constant surveillance by security agents, who pressured him to stop writing about the need for democracy, to stop criticising China's one-party state.
"You must understand: If the government persecutes someone, the first thing they try to do is disturb their private life" explains the couple's friend, Tienchi Martin-Liao.
"They will separate the couple. If someone is in jail, their family's life ends too."
The couple never seriously considered having a larger family, Tienchi says.
"I asked him once, 'Hey, why don't you have a child with Liu Xia?'" Tienchi continues.
"Xiaobo told me: 'I do not want that child, a son or a daughter, to see their father be taken away by the police'.
"He told me that. That is the reason why the couple never had children."
'I have never had a peaceful day since I am with you'
Tienchi worked as Liu Xiaobo's editor, spending hours on the phone with him. Xia would sometimes bring him soup while he was on the phone, and Tienchi would listen to him happily slurp it down.Later, when Xiaobo was handed his final prison sentence, the one that would put him behind bars for 11 years, Tienchi switched to speaking with Xia, who often sobbed on the phone.
"Of course she loves him and she is willing to do everything for him," Tienchi explained. "And sometimes she complains. Not really complains but still she says, 'Well, I have never had a peaceful day since I am with you together.'
"Which is true, which is totally true. Which doesn't mean that she wants to leave him or anything like that. She just wants to emphasise how difficult and under what hard conditions their love connection to each other has survived."
Even when Liu Xiaobo was out of prison, the couple was rarely left alone for long.
"Because he has written so many socially critical articles, a lot of underprivileged people would go to his house," Tienchi Liao remembers.
"He doesn't even know them. They just knock at his door and ring the bell at his house and say, 'please help me, some injustice has happened to me'. And mostly, he would help those people."
He once told a Hong Kong newspaper, "at Liu Xia's birthday, her best friend brought two bottles of wine but they were blocked by the police from my home. I ordered a cake and the police also rejected the man who delivered the cake to us. I quarrelled with them and the police said, "it is for your security. Bomb attacks are common these days."
But Xiaobo didn't ever decide to stop his work, even when it interfered with his home life with Xia. And some of that drive he blamed on his concern for her future.
"Liu Xiaobo frankly explained that he wanted to take advantage of the energy that he still has," his biographer and close friend, the writer Yu Jie, wrote.
"So he could save up more money for Liu Xia, just in case one day something happened to him. At least Liu Xia would still be able to live without worrying about food and clothing."
Some intellectuals said he wrote too many articles, and some of them lacked polish.
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