Song Dynasty
宋朝皇后
three paintings · the most literate court in the world
The Song never controlled as much territory as the Han or the Tang and spent its entire existence paying off or fighting northern neighbours it could not defeat. It was also, by almost any measure that is not military, the high point of Chinese civilisation — printing, paper money, gunpowder, the compass, the mature examination system, landscape painting, and a court where the emperor argued with his ministers in writing and usually lost.
Its empresses reflect that. Nine Song dowagers held formal regencies, more than any other dynasty. They were literate, they read memorials, and several of them governed for years at a stretch without anyone seriously proposing they should not.
In 1127 the Jurchen took the northern capital and carried the entire imperial family into captivity — an event the Chinese tradition calls the Jingkang Incident and still discusses with visible pain. The court re-formed south of the Yangtze and lasted another hundred and fifty years, until the Mongols.
Northern Song 北宋
From the general who took the throne in a staged mutiny and then spent his reign making sure no general could ever do it again, to the aesthete emperor who painted birds while the Jurchen crossed the Yellow River.
The empresses of the Late Northern Song
1063 – 1127 · one painting
On this silk
The painting in fullSouthern Song 南宋
The exile court at Hangzhou, which everyone including its own officials described as temporary for a hundred and fifty-two years. It ends with a dowager surrendering the seal to the Mongols and a chancellor jumping into the sea with the last child emperor on his back.
The empresses of the Southern Song
1127 – 1279 · one painting
On this silk
- Empress Xing, Empress Wu
- Empress Guo, Empress Xia, Empress Xie
- Li Fengxiang
- Empress Han, Empress Yang
- Xie Daoqing
- Empress Quan
More
- Before The Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms.
- After The Yuan — the Mongol dynasty that finished the Song in 1279.
- The whole collection All 205 empresses
Bring the Song era home
Canvas prints, scarves, puzzles and more — from $14.
Two full-color hardcovers — 217 empresses, 413 painted characters.
Questions? Write to xiangliart@gmail.com