The Empresses of the Ming

明朝皇后

1368 – 1644 · three paintings · early, middle and late

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.

  • DynastyMing 明 (1368 – 1644)
  • CapitalsNanjing, then Beijing from 1421
  • Paintings3 — early, middle and late period
  • Policyempresses chosen from commoner families
  • The endthe Chongzhen Emperor on Coal Hill, April 1644

The Three Paintings

Each covers a period of the dynasty, and each holds several empresses. Every woman has her own anchored section within the page.

The empresses of the Early Ming — Chinese watercolor on silk by Xiang Li
The empresses of the Early Ming
1368 – 1487 · Hongwu to Chenghua
The empresses of the Middle Ming — Chinese watercolor on silk by Xiang Li
The empresses of the Middle Ming
1487 – 1572 · Hongzhi to Longqing
The empresses of the Late Ming — Chinese watercolor on silk by Xiang Li
The empresses of the Late Ming
1572 – 1644 · Wanli to Chongzhen

More