宋皇后与 Ling 皇后

A woman destroyed by the same witchcraft charge that had destroyed her ancestor a century before, and a butcher’s daughter who held the empire for four months, refused to sign the eunuchs’ death warrant, and watched the dynasty end in a single September.

Their Story

The Han has twenty-one years left. One of these women is destroyed by the eunuchs; the other is destroyed by refusing to destroy them.

Empress Song — 171 to 178

Her father Song Feng was a grandnephew of the Consort Song whom Empress Dou had framed for witchcraft in 82 CE.

Ninety-six years later, his daughter was made empress, and then destroyed by a witchcraft accusation. It is the same family and the same charge, twice, across a century.

She became Emperor Ling’s empress in 171 and was never favoured. What made her dangerous was an accident of kinship: her aunt had been the consort of a prince whom the eunuch Wang Fu had forced into suicide in 172. Wang Fu worked out that if the empress ever had a son, or ever acquired influence, he was a dead man.

So in 178 he and another eunuch told the emperor she was practising sorcery against him. There was no investigation. She was deposed, sent to the Drying Room — the punishment quarters where deposed women were held — and died there. Her father and her brothers were executed.

The Hou Hanshu records that Emperor Ling afterwards dreamed of Emperor Huan, who reproached him for killing an innocent woman, and that he woke frightened and asked an official whether the dead could be honoured again. He was told they could. He did nothing.

Empress He — 180 to 189

She came from a butcher’s family in Nanyang and got into the palace, the sources say plainly, by bribing the right people.

She was tall and striking, she bore Emperor Ling a son in 176 — Liu Bian — and she was made empress in 180. Three years earlier a consort named Wang had also borne him a son, Liu Xie. Empress He had her poisoned.

Emperor Ling was furious enough to order her deposed. The eunuchs, led by Zhang Rang, went down on their knees for her and offered their own money as surety, and he relented. Remember that: the eunuchs saved her life.

Emperor Ling died in May 189. Her son took the throne as Emperor Shao, aged thirteen. She became empress dowager and regent, and her half-brother He Jin — a butcher’s son now commanding the imperial armies — became the most powerful man in the empire. She also had the old empress dowager, Emperor Ling’s mother, poisoned within weeks.

Then He Jin and the young aristocrat Yuan Shao came to her with a plan: kill the eunuchs. All of them.

She refused.

Her reasons were not lofty. The eunuchs had saved her when her husband wanted her gone, and they were the only faction at court that owed her anything personally. But the answer was the same one Dou Miao had given in the same palace twenty-one years earlier, and it produced the same catastrophe on a larger scale.

Since antiquity, palace attendants have always managed the affairs of the inner court. This is the ancestral institution of the Han, and it cannot be abolished.

Empress Dowager He, 189 CE, refusing He Jin’s demand to destroy the eunuchs — Hou Hanshu, ch. 69

Unable to move her, He Jin summoned provincial armies to march on the capital and frighten her into consent. The eunuchs understood what that meant. On 22 September 189 they called him to the palace on the empress dowager’s authority and cut him down inside the gate.

Yuan Shao burned the palace gates and went in. Over two thousand eunuchs were killed — the sources say beardless men were murdered in the streets by mistake. The eunuch establishment that had run the Han court for a hundred and twenty years was annihilated in a day, and so was the government.

Into the resulting vacuum rode Dong Zhuo, the frontier general He Jin had summoned. He took the boy emperor, deposed him, and installed his younger half-brother Liu Xie as Emperor Xian — the son of the consort Empress He had poisoned.

Then he had her poisoned too. It was still September.

Everything that follows — Cao Cao, Yuan Shao, Liu Bei, Sun Quan, the Three Kingdoms — begins in that month.

A note on the sources

These are the best-documented empresses in the collection and the least reliably described, because the events of 189 became the opening chapter of the most retold story in Chinese literature. Much of what most readers know about Empress He and He Jin comes from the fourteenth-century novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, not from the histories. The dated record is narrower and stranger than the fiction.

• Fan Ye, Hou Hanshu (Book of the Later Han), ch. 8, ch. 10 pt. 2, ch. 69 — 5th century CE
• Chen Shou, Sanguozhi (Records of the Three Kingdoms) — 3rd century CE
• Sima Guang, Zizhi Tongjian, ch. 57–59 — 1084
• Rafe de Crespigny, Fire Over Luoyang: A History of the Later Han Dynasty 23–220 AD — Brill, 2017

The Emperor

Emperor Ling of Han 汉灵帝
Born Liu Hong 刘宏 · 156 – 189 CE · reigned 168 – 189 CE

Chosen at twelve by Dou Miao because he was obscure and manageable. He grew up owing everything to the eunuchs who had destroyed her family, and he called two of them, Zhang Rang and Zhao Zhong, his father and mother.

He is the emperor who put government offices on sale. There was a published price list; a provincial governorship cost more than a ministry because it could be recouped faster; men who won posts on merit were still billed. He built a mock marketplace inside the Western Garden and played at being a shopkeeper in it while the provinces were taxed to pay for the palace.

In 169 he renewed the ban on the scholar-officials and hundreds were killed or exiled. In 184 the Yellow Turban rebellion broke out across eight provinces, and putting it down required arming the regional commanders — who then had armies. He died in May 189 at thirty-two, having created every condition for the collapse that followed within months.

Connections

• Her ancestorConsort Song, mother of the crown prince deposed in 82 CE, destroyed by Empress Dou on a witchcraft charge. Empress Song’s father was her grandnephew.
• The same refusal Dou Miao (Empress Huansi) — asked in 168 to authorise the extermination of the eunuchs and refused; her family was destroyed that autumn. Empress He was asked the same question in 189 and gave the same answer.
• The woman she poisonedConsort Wang, mother of Liu Xie — who became Emperor Xian, the last Han emperor, and outlived her by forty-five years.
• What comes next Empress Xianmu (Cao Jie) — Cao Cao’s daughter, married to Emperor Xian, and the woman who threw the imperial seal on the floor when they came to take the dynasty away.

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	2015
Subjects	Two empresses — both consorts of Emperor Ling
Collection	The Chinese Empresses Collection
Availability	Original held by the artist · Prints available