Today’s audience
Seven questions.
Portraits, dynasties and stories from two thousand years of the palace. Answer all seven and you are Empress for the day.
Seven questions, twenty seconds each while the incense burns. A new audience every day at midnight.
New portraits, new questions and exhibition news from Xiang Li’s studio — a few emails a year. Unsubscribe any time.
Seven questions a day about the empresses of China — the same seven for everyone, twenty seconds each. Answer them all and you are Empress for the day.
The ranks are borrowed from the Qing palace, where a woman chosen in the palace draft entered at one of the lower grades and could — as Cixi did — rise.
A few from the question bank, with answers. The daily game draws on hundreds more — every portrait and empress in the collection.
Zhou. She named it Zhou, after the ancient royal house she claimed descent from — and became the only woman ever to rule China as emperor.
A seven-metre stone tablet left blank. The Wordless Stele. Nobody has ever established whether she ordered it left empty, or whether the court that followed could not agree on what to write.
Taizong. She began in Emperor Taizong's palace. After his death she was sent to a Buddhist convent — and his son Gaozong brought her back.
Empress Wang. Empress Wang had helped bring Wu back to the palace to use against a rival. Within four years Wang was deposed.
Paper and ink. Paper and ink. She took up Cai Lun's new paper for the imperial administration — there is a case that the world uses paper because a Han empress preferred it to jade.
Ban Zhao. Ban Zhao, who had finished her brother's Book of Han and was the most learned person in the empire.
Flying Swallow. Flying Swallow — given by the other servants for how lightly she danced. It outlived her real name, Zhao Yizhu.
Legend — from an erotic novella written centuries later. The Book of Han account is brief and political. The palm dance, the crystal dish and most of the famous details come from a much later work of fiction.
Yang Guifei. “Huan is plump, Yan is slender” — Yang Yuhuan and Zhao Feiyan, eight hundred years apart, as the two poles of beauty.
Never to have a child by another woman. He kept it: every one of his children was hers — the only emperor in Chinese history of whom that is true.