Yuan Dynasty

The Yuan is the only dynasty in this collection whose empresses were not, for the most part, Chinese. They were Mongol — overwhelmingly from one clan, the Khongirad, which had supplied wives to the house of Genghis Khan for four generations and went on doing so for four more. Marrying a Khongirad woman was not a preference. It was close to constitutional.

That gives the Yuan empresses a different kind of standing from anyone else on this site. A Mongol khatun ran her own household, her own herds and her own revenues, sat in the assembly that elected khans, and could hold a regency without anyone reaching for a precedent. Chabi advised Kublai on policy and is credited with persuading him to spare the surrendered Song imperial family. Budashiri and Babukhan both governed outright.

The dynasty lasted ninety-seven years in China and fell apart in factional violence — seven emperors in the twenty-six years after 1307. In 1368 a Chinese rebel army took Beijing and the court rode north to the steppe, where it continued to exist for another two centuries.