Tang Dynasty
唐朝皇后
fourteen paintings · the century when women ran China
No other dynasty comes close. For roughly a hundred years — from the 650s to the 750s — the Tang empire was governed, in succession, by a woman who declared herself emperor in her own name, a daughter-in-law who tried to repeat the trick, and a princess who nearly managed it a third time. Then it produced the most famous love affair in Chinese history and very nearly died of it.
The Tang was also the most cosmopolitan state in the world at the time. Chang’an was a city of a million people with Persian merchants, Sogdian musicians, Nestorian churches and Japanese students. Women rode horses, played polo, and appear in the tomb figurines of the period wearing men’s clothes.
It ends badly. The An Lushan rebellion of 755 killed a catastrophic share of the population and broke the tax base permanently; the last century and a half is a long managed decline under eunuch generals and provincial warlords.
The Founding Century
The Li family took power in 618 and spent the next fifty years consolidating. It is at the end of this stretch that a junior concubine of one emperor becomes the empress of his son, and then something no woman had been before or has been since.
After Wu Zetian
Two women tried to do what she had done, within a decade of her death, and both were killed for it. The reaction that followed shaped Tang politics for the rest of the dynasty.
The Long Decline
After 755 the empresses stop being the story and become its casualties. Several of these women were never formally empress in life; the title came afterwards, from sons who had survived.
More
- Before The Sui.
- After The Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms.
- The whole collection All 205 empresses
Bring the Tang 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