Following the examples of Song-Ming loyalists, a group of Qing loyalists in Tianjin during the Republican era formed a ci poetry society called Xushe. They expressed their collective memories of the fallen Qing through writing corresponding ci poems (changhe) in the same prosodic patterns and shared themes. This article first examines the social objectives, functions and features of traditional literary societies, pointing out that forming a she is a way to construct and strengthen group identity and, with collaborative effort, to promote and transmit the group's literary and political ideologies. On the one hand, as we have noted, regulations of a she and its rituality may govern the members' authorial practice and activity, and responding compositions may weaken or eclipse the writers' individuality; yet on the other hand, writing in shared forms, themes and even rhymes is perhaps the most effective way of projecting the members' collective identity. It is probable that without the publication of the group collection Yangu yuchang, some members' individual writings may have been lost. The second part of the article illustrates how Xushe was formed and disbanded, what constitutes the members' aesthetics of ci, followed by intertextual analysis of corresponding poems composed in several gatherings of the society.