Adulthood:

As a teenager she traveled through China a had a front row seat to all the problems (not enough resources, people fighting about farmland) there. Zhenyi was agonized from all this and expressed her feeling via poems. One example of her poems is:

"Village is empty of cooking smoke,

Rich families let grains stored decay;

 In wormwood strewed pitiful starved bodies,

Greedy officials yet push farm levying."

Her protesting poetry was more than just a hobby, it led her to meet other intelligent women from the nearby cities to countrywide. She even named herself Jiangning Nushi, which meant "female intellectual from Jiangning." However, she was soon going to prove her title in a big way. Many astronomical principles were still revolutionary, but Zhenyi managed to write papers about the rotation of the sun moon, and planets. Key math principles like trigonometry and the Pythagorean theorem, and how the world was round. The most revolutionary paper was a treatise called The Explanation of a Lunar Eclipse which was the first on the subject that anyone had written yet. Before, everyone thought that a Lunar Eclipse was a sign that the gods were angry but Zhenyi proved them wrong with an experiment. All the research didn't stop her passion for believing all people were equal. She believed all people should have access to the same books and texts so she rewrote the ancient texts into simpler words. Sadly she died at age 29 in 1779.