Li Yu — the Last Ruler of Southern Tang

He inherited a kingdom already paying tribute to the Song and surrendered it in 976 without much of a fight. Taken to Kaifeng as a marquis with a mocking title, he wrote the ci lyrics that made him immortal, and was poisoned in 978 — reportedly for a line asking how much sorrow one man can hold.

No one else in Chinese literature turned a political catastrophe into that kind of poetry, and the form he wrote in was never the same afterwards.

Both of his empresses were sisters of the Zhou family and share one silk: the elder reconstructed a piece of Tang court music that had been lost for two centuries; the younger came to the palace as a girl while her sister was dying.