Emperatriz Li (Han Posterior)

A farmer’s daughter, taken from her father’s house at night by the soldier who became emperor. When the new dynasty wanted to tax the people to pay the army, she emptied her own treasury instead — and when her son’s killer needed legitimacy, she gave him that too.

Her Story

Her family farmed near Jinyang. A garrison soldier named Liu Zhiyuan saw her, wanted her, and could not afford a marriage — so he went to her father’s house at night with a few other soldiers and took her.

That is how the histories record it, without euphemism and without apparent discomfort. She was perhaps fifteen.

Thirty years later he was the most powerful general in northern China, and when the Khitan sacked Kaifeng in 947 and then withdrew north because they could not hold it, he walked into the vacuum and declared himself emperor.

The new dynasty had no money. His advisers proposed a levy on the population to fund the rewards the army was expecting, and she stopped it.

Her argument, as recorded, is the reason she is remembered: that an army raised on the suffering of the people is not a foundation, and that a dynasty which begins by robbing the households it claims to protect will not last. Then she emptied the palace treasury — her own jewellery, the imperial plate, everything in the inner storerooms — and had it distributed to the soldiers instead.

To raise an army on the people’s suffering is not the way to found a house. Take what is in the palace instead.

Empress Li to Liu Zhiyuan, 947 CE — Jiu Wudai Shi, ch. 104

Liu Zhiyuan died within the year. Her son Liu Chengyou took the throne at seventeen, and in 950 he decided to solve the problem of his father’s senior generals by killing them. He murdered three of them and their families in the capital, and sent orders to kill the fourth.

The fourth was Guo Wei, commanding the northern armies. The messenger was intercepted. Guo Wei marched on Kaifeng, and Liu Chengyou was killed by his own escort while fleeing.

And then the extraordinary part. Guo Wei had the capital, the army and no legitimacy at all. He came to Empress Dowager Li and asked her to make him emperor.

She did it. She issued the edict — the woman whose son his troops had just killed — and the Later Zhou began. She had judged, correctly, that the alternative was another round of fighting over a throne that had already consumed her husband and her child.

Guo Wei kept his side of it. She was maintained in full honour as empress dowager of a dynasty that no longer existed, and she died in 954, three years into the reign of the man who replaced her family.

The Later Han had lasted four years — the shortest dynasty in Chinese history — and she outlived it.

A note on this painting

There are two figures on this silk, and only one of them is an empress. The seated woman playing the transverse flute is Empress Li. The younger woman resting against her is a serving attendant, not a consort — confirmed by the artist. The file name Two empresses is a working label rather than a description.

The Later Han had a single empress of record, and she is the subject of this page.

• Xue Juzheng et al., Jiu Wudai Shi (Old History of the Five Dynasties), ch. 104 — 974
• Ouyang Xiu, Xin Wudai Shi (New History of the Five Dynasties), ch. 18 — c. 1073
• Sima Guang, Zizhi Tongjian, ch. 286–291 — 1084

The Emperor

Emperor Gaozu of Later Han 后汉高祖
Liu Zhiyuan 刘知远 · 895 – 948 · reigned 947 – 948

A Shatuo Turk who rose from the ranks, served Shi Jingtang, and pointedly opposed the bargain that gave the Sixteen Prefectures to the Khitan — he argued that gold and silk would have bought the same alliance without the land. He was overruled, and he was right.

When the Khitan destroyed the Later Jin in 947 and then found they could not govern what they had taken, he waited for them to leave and declared himself emperor in the vacuum. It is the least contested accession of the period, because there was nobody left to contest it.

He reigned eleven months and died at fifty-three, leaving a seventeen-year-old son and four generals who did not trust him.

Connections

• The dynasty before Empress Li (Later Jin) — a different Li, deported north by the Khitan the year Liu Zhiyuan took the throne.
• The dynasty she legitimised Empress Fu the Elder (Later Zhou) — Guo Wei’s successor’s wife.
• The comparison Empress Liu (Later Tang) — asked the same question about paying the army twenty years earlier, and gave the opposite answer. Her dynasty fell in the mutiny.

About this Portrait

Artist	Xiang Li 李湘
Medium	Chinese watercolor on silk, hand-painted on hand-cut silk
Dimensions	approx. 36 × 72 inches (91 × 183 cm)
Painted	2021
Subjects	Empress Li, with an attendant
Collection	The Chinese Empresses Collection
Availability	Original held by the artist · Prints available