Lucy Chao or Zhao Luorui (simplified Chinese: 赵萝蕤; traditional Chinese: 趙蘿蕤; pinyin: Zhào Luóruí; Wade–Giles: Chao Lo-jui; May 9, 1912 – January 1, 1998) was a Chinese poet and translator.

Chao was born on May 9, 1912, in Xinshi, Deqing County, Zhejiang, China.^[1]

She married Chen Mengjia, an anthropologist and expert on oracle bones, in 1932.^[2] In 1944 Chao and Chen were awarded a joint fellowship by the Rockefeller Foundation to study at the University of Chicago in the United States.^[3] Chao earned her PhD from the institution in 1948, for a dissertation on Henry James.^[4][5] Afterward, she returned to China to teach English and North American literature at Yenching University, Beijing.^[2]

Chao's husband Chen opposed the government's proposal to simplify Chinese writing in the 1950s and was labeled a Rightist and an enemy of the Communist Party. He was sent to a labor camp in 1957.^[6] After he returned, he was banned from publishing research and committed suicide after denunciation and persecution during the Cultural Revolution.^[7]

After Chen's death, Chao developed schizophrenia. In spite of this, she created the first complete Chinese translation of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, which was published in 1991.^[8] That same year, she was awarded the University of Chicago's "Professional Achievement Award".^[4]

Chao translated T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1937), Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha and eventually saw a mass publication of her translation of the whole of Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1991). She was a co-editor of the first Chinese-language History of European Literature (1979).