Ming Dynasty

Founded by a man who had been an orphaned peasant and then a begging monk, and who built the most autocratic government China had ever had. The Ming abolished the office of chancellor entirely, so that no one stood between the emperor and the administration, and then discovered that this only works if the emperor turns up. Several of them did not — one refused to hold court for over twenty years.

Ming empresses were, by deliberate policy, chosen from ordinary families. The founder had watched consort clans destroy the Han and the Tang, so he made a rule: the emperor’s wife would come from the minor gentry, with no faction behind her and nothing to give her relatives. It worked. There is no Ming equivalent of Lü Zhi or Wu Zetian.

What it produced instead was a run of women of real personal force and no institutional power at all, several of whom held the state together anyway.