Emperatriz Zhang Hui (Liang Posterior)

Her husband destroyed the Tang. She was the one person alive who could turn his army around with a message, and when she died in 904 there was nothing left holding him. Her last words to him were six characters, and he managed neither half of them.

Her Story

Her husband ended the Tang. He is the warlord who dismantled Chang’an and floated the timber downriver, who had Emperor Zhaozong killed in his nightclothes, who strangled nine imperial princes at a banquet and threw them in a pool, and who murdered Empress He because she was a loose end.

She was the one person who could stop him.

Zhang Hui came from a good family in Song Prefecture; Zhu Wen was a farm labourer who had joined the Huang Chao rebellion, and by the time he married her he was a defected rebel general with a province. The sources agree, unusually and repeatedly, that he was frightened of her judgement in a way he was frightened of nothing else. On at least one recorded occasion he was already on the march when she sent a rider after him to say the campaign was wrong; he turned the army around.

She died in 904, the same year he had the emperor killed, and three years before he took the throne.

Her last words to him are recorded as six characters — restrain your killing, and keep away from women.

Restrain your killing, and keep away from women.

Empress Zhang Hui’s dying words to Zhu Wen, 904 CE — Xin Wudai Shi, ch. 13

He managed neither.

What followed is genuinely difficult to write about. Zhu Wen took the throne in 907 and, in his final years, made a practice of summoning his own sons’ wives into the palace and sleeping with them — and the sons, competing for the succession, allowed it and used their wives to carry information back.

In 912 one of them, Zhu Yougui, came into the bedchamber at night with soldiers and killed him. He was murdered by his son at sixty-one, five years into the dynasty he had spent thirty years building.

The Later Liang lasted sixteen years. It was destroyed in 923 by the family of the man Zhu Wen had spent his whole career fighting, and its own last emperor asked an officer to cut his head off so that the enemy could not have it.

Zhang Hui was honoured as Empress Yuanzhen after her death. The historians of the Song, who had no reason to be kind to Zhu Wen, are notably respectful about her — and they make the connection explicit. The chronicle of his reign essentially begins to go wrong on the page where she dies.

A note on the sources

Zhu Wen is the most thoroughly condemned founder in Chinese history, and Ouyang Xiu’s New History of the Five Dynasties is a moral argument as much as a chronicle. The accusations about his daughters-in-law come from it and from the Zizhi Tongjian, and some modern historians treat them with caution — though not the murder, which is not in doubt.

Empress Zhang is the exception in that literature: a figure both the Song historians and the Later Liang’s own records agree about. The story of the recalled army is repeated in more than one source and is the strongest single piece of evidence for what she actually was.

• Xue Juzheng et al., Jiu Wudai Shi (Old History of the Five Dynasties) — 974
• Ouyang Xiu, Xin Wudai Shi (New History of the Five Dynasties), ch. 13 — c. 1073
• Sima Guang, Zizhi Tongjian, ch. 262–268 — 1084

The Emperor

Emperor Taizu of Later Liang 后梁太祖
Zhu Wen 朱温 · 852 – 912 · reigned 907 – 912

A farm labourer’s son who joined Huang Chao’s rebellion, defected to the Tang at the right moment, was given a province and the name Quanzhong — wholly loyal — and spent the next twenty-five years proving otherwise.

He is the man who actually ended the Tang: he massacred the eunuchs in 903, moved the court to Luoyang and pulled Chang’an down, had Emperor Zhaozong murdered in 904, killed nine imperial princes at the Jiuqu Pool in 905, and took the throne in 907.

He was also, by the standards of the period, an effective ruler — he reformed the tax system and rebuilt the Yellow River defences. It made no difference to how he is remembered.

His son killed him in his bedroom in 912.

Connections

• The empress he killed Empress He — the last empress of the Tang, executed on his orders in 906.
• The dynasty that destroyed his Empress Liu of the Later Tang — whose husband took Kaifeng in 923.
• The comparison Empress Taimu — the other founding empress who died before her husband took the throne, three hundred years earlier.

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	2020
Subject	Empress Zhang Hui, consort of Emperor Taizu of Later Liang
Collection	The Chinese Empresses Collection
Availability	Original held by the artist · Prints available