南朝诸皇后

Twenty empresses across four dynasties and a hundred and sixty-nine years, all of them on a single silk. Between them they saw a crown prince murder his father, an emperor smothered with a sack of earth, a boy who wished never to be born into an imperial house again, and one woman who held a dynasty together by concealing a death.

The Twenty

Zang AiqinLiu SongSima MaoyingLiu SongYuan QiguiLiu SongWang XianyuanLiu SongHe LingwanLiu SongWang ZhenfengLiu SongJiang JiankuiLiu SongXie FanjingLiu SongLiu ZhirongSouthern QiPei HuizhaoSouthern QiHe JingyingSouthern QiLiu HuiduanSouthern QiChu LingquSouthern QiWang ShunhuaSouthern QiXi HuiLiangWang LinbinLiangXu ZhaopeiLiangZhang Yao’erChenShen MiaorongChenLiu JingyanChen Liu Song

Zang Aiqin 臧爱亲 — Empress Wujing 武敬皇后

c. 360 – 408 · consort of Emperor Wu (Liu Yu)

She married Liu Yu when he was a poor man selling straw sandals in Jingkou, and she died in 408 — nine years before he took the throne and twelve before he founded the dynasty.

He never appointed another empress. She was honoured posthumously, and their daughter carried the line.

Sima Maoying 司马茂英 — Princess of Yingyang

c. 393 – 439 · consort of Emperor Shao

She was a daughter of Emperor Gong of Jin — the last Jin emperor, whom her father-in-law smothered with a blanket in 421.

So she was married to the son of the man who had killed her father and taken her family’s throne. Her husband was deposed after two years and murdered; she was demoted to princess and lived another fifteen years.

Yuan Qigui 袁齐妫 — Empress Yuan 元皇后

405 – 440 · consort of Emperor Wen

Her mother was a concubine of such low standing that her existence was concealed for the first four or five years of her life.

She married Liu Yilong before he was emperor and bore him Liu Shao. She lost his affection to a Consort Pan and died in 440, embittered. Her son murdered his father in 453 — the first patricide by a Chinese crown prince — and was executed for it three months later.

Wang Xianyuan 王宪嫄 — Empress Xiaowenmu 孝武文穆皇后

427 – 464 · consort of Emperor Xiaowu

A great-great-granddaughter of the Jin chancellor Wang Dao, married in 443, and the mother of at least six children including the next emperor.

Her son Liu Ziye took the throne at fifteen and turned out to be one of the most violent rulers in Chinese history. She died within months of him inheriting; the histories say that when she fell ill and sent for him, he refused to come, saying there were ghosts in sick rooms.

He Lingwan 何令婉 — Empress Xianyuan 献愍皇后

d. c. 464 · consort of the Deposed Emperor Qianfei

Married to Liu Ziye, the boy who refused to visit his dying mother. She died very young, before or shortly after his accession.

He was assassinated at seventeen by his own attendants after a reign of eighteen months.

Wang Zhenfeng 王贞风 — Empress Gongming 恭明皇后

436 – 479 · consort of Emperor Ming

Her husband could not father children, and solved it by taking the pregnant concubines of his own brothers into the palace and claiming the babies. Wang Zhenfeng raised one of them as her son.

She lived to see the dynasty end. When Xiao Daocheng took the throne in 479 she was demoted, and died the same year.

Jiang Jiankui 江简圭 — Empress of the Deposed Emperor Houfei

consort of Liu Yu (Houfei), r. 473 – 477

Married at about ten to a boy emperor who by thirteen was going out at night with a spear to kill people in the streets of the capital for entertainment.

He was murdered in his sleep at fifteen by his own guards. Almost nothing else about her is recorded.

Xie Fanjing 谢梵境 — Empress of Emperor Shun

consort of the last Liu Song emperor

Married to Liu Zhun, who came to the throne at ten and abdicated at thirteen.

He is recorded saying, as they came to take him away: I only wish that in every life to come, I may never again be born into an imperial house. He was killed within months. Her fate is not recorded.

Southern Qi

Liu Zhirong 刘智容 — Empress Zhao 昭皇后

423 – 472 · consort of Emperor Gao (Xiao Daocheng)

She married Xiao Daocheng at about ten and ran a famously disciplined household for forty years.

She died in 472, seven years before he founded the Southern Qi, and was made empress posthumously.

Pei Huizhao 裴惠昭 — Empress Wumu 武穆皇后

d. 480 · consort of Emperor Wu (Xiao Ze)

Estranged from her husband for much of the marriage, she became crown princess in 479 and died the following year, before he took the throne.

She was the first crown princess in Chinese history to have her spirit tablet enshrined in the imperial ancestral temple.

He Jingying 何婧英 — Empress of the Prince of Yulin

482 – 494 · consort of Xiao Zhaoye

Her affair with an attendant named Yang Min was open knowledge at court while she was crown princess and continued after she became empress. Her husband knew and did not mind.

In 494 he was assassinated by his granduncle Xiao Luan, who then killed most of the imperial family. She was demoted to Princess of Yulin. She was twelve years old at her marriage and twenty-two when it ended; nothing further is recorded.

Liu Huiduan 刘惠端 — Empress Jing 敬皇后

d. 489 · consort of Emperor Ming (Xiao Luan)

She died before her husband seized the throne, which spared her the reign that followed — Xiao Luan came to power by murdering two emperors and then systematically exterminated every surviving descendant of the dynasty’s founder.

She was honoured as empress posthumously.

Chu Lingqu 褚令璩 — Empress of the Marquis of Donghun

consort of Xiao Baojuan, r. 498 – 501

Her husband is remembered for having gold lotus flowers set into the floor so that his favourite consort could walk on them — the origin of the phrase about lotuses blooming at every step, and, less charmingly, one of the images later attached to footbinding.

He killed his ministers at a rate that provoked a general to march on the capital. His own guards cut off his head and sent it out over the wall in 501.

Wang Shunhua 王舜华 — Empress of Emperor He

consort of the last Southern Qi emperor

Married to Xiao Baorong, who was made emperor at thirteen by the general who had just taken the capital, and required to abdicate fifteen months later.

He was killed immediately afterwards. The Liang dynasty began.

Liang

Xi Hui 郗徽 — Empress De 德皇后

468 – 499 · consort of Emperor Wu (Xiao Yan)

She was known for calligraphy and history, married Xiao Yan in the 480s, bore three daughters, and died at thirty-one — three years before he founded the Liang.

He reigned forty-seven years, the longest of the entire period, and never appointed another empress. He became a devout Buddhist, gave himself to a monastery four times and made the treasury ransom him back each time, and starved to death at eighty-five when a rebel general besieged his own palace.

Wang Linbin 王灵宾 — Empress Jianwen 简文皇后

d. 540 · consort of Emperor Jianwen (Xiao Gang)

She was crown princess and died before her husband became emperor, and was honoured posthumously.

He was made emperor in 549 by the rebel Hou Jing, held for two years as a figurehead, and then smothered with a sack of earth.

Xu Zhaopei 徐昭佩 — consort of Emperor Yuan

d. 549 · consort of Xiao Yi

She is the origin of two phrases still in use. Her husband had lost an eye, and when he was due to visit she would make up only half her face — the half-face makeup, 半面妆 — and let him find it. He would leave in a fury and not return for a year.

She drank, she took lovers openly, and she said of one of them that a thin monk was fragrant and a fat one was not. Her husband eventually ordered her to drown herself in a well, then had the body pulled out and returned to her family as a divorce.

The other phrase is Xu’s daughter, half old — 徐娘半老 — used to this day of a woman past youth who is still striking. It is her.

Chen

Zhang Yao’er 章要儿 — Empress Xuan 宣皇后

506 – 570 · consort of Emperor Wu (Chen Baxian)

She was captured and held hostage by an enemy commander during her husband’s rise, and released only when he won.

When he died in 559 the heir was a prisoner in the north, so she and a minister concealed the death, ran the government between them, and summoned his nephew to the throne. She was empress dowager for eleven years and is credited with holding the new dynasty together at the moment it could most easily have ended.

Shen Miaorong 沈妙容 — Empress Wen 文皇后

d. 573 · consort of Emperor Wen (Chen Qian)

Her son Chen Bozong inherited in 566 and was deposed within two years by his uncle. She was made to issue the edict removing her own son.

She lived on in the palace under the man who had done it, and died in 573. Her son had been killed the year before.

Liu Jingyan 柳敬言 — Empress Xuan 宣皇后

534 – 615 · consort of Emperor Xuan (Chen Xu)

A great-granddaughter of a Liang emperor, she was held hostage in the north for years while her husband was a prisoner of the Western Wei, and came south only when he was released.

Her son Chen Shubao was the last emperor of the Chen — a poet who spent the invasion writing verse and hid in a well with two consorts when the Sui army came over the wall in 589. They pulled all three of them out on a rope.

She was taken to Chang’an and lived there another twenty-six years, dying in 615 at eighty-one, three years before the Tang. She had outlived her dynasty, the one that conquered it, and very nearly the one after that.

A note on the sources

The Southern Dynasties are unusually well documented for a period of chaos — each of the four had its own official history written within a century or so of its fall, by historians who were often the grandsons of the men involved. The result is intimate and score-settling in equal measure.

The violence on this page is not exaggerated for effect. Between 420 and 589 the south had twenty-four emperors; roughly half were murdered, several by close relatives, and two dynasties ended with the systematic extermination of the founder’s entire line. The women here were married into that at ten, eleven, twelve years old.

• Shen Yue, Song Shu (Book of Song), ch. 41 — 488 CE
• Xiao Zixian, Nan Qi Shu (Book of Southern Qi), ch. 20 — c. 537
• Yao Silian, Liang Shu (Book of Liang) and Chen Shu (Book of Chen) — 636
• Li Yanshou, Nan Shi (History of the Southern Dynasties), ch. 11–12 — 659
• Sima Guang, Zizhi Tongjian, ch. 119–177 — 1084

The Dynasties

The four dynasties

Liu Song (420–479) — founded by Liu Yu, a soldier who had sold straw sandals as a boy and became the best general of the age. Nine emperors in fifty-nine years; the third was murdered by his own crown prince, and the family destroyed itself so thoroughly that the general who ended it had almost nothing left to kill.

Southern Qi (479–502) — twenty-three years, seven emperors. Its fifth emperor took the throne by murdering two of his predecessors and then exterminated every descendant of the founder he could find, which is why the sixth was overthrown so easily.

Liang (502–557) — dominated by one man, Emperor Wu, who reigned forty-seven years, wrote poetry and Buddhist commentary, abolished the death penalty for a time, gave himself to a monastery four times and had the treasury buy him back, and starved to death at eighty-five when a rebel he had personally welcomed besieged his palace.

Chen (557–589) — the smallest and shortest, holding only the lower Yangtze. Its last emperor was found hiding in a well with two consorts when the Sui came over the wall.

What all four shared was the south: Jiankang, the largest city in the world for part of this period, and a court culture that produced some of the finest poetry, calligraphy and Buddhist scholarship in Chinese history while the throne changed hands by assassination roughly every eight years.

Connections

• The other half of the period The Northern Wei empresses and the Northern Qi and Zhou empresses — the rival courts north of the Yangtze.
• What came before The eleven empresses of the Eastern Jin — the court the Liu Song replaced in 420.
• What ended it Empress Wenxian — whose husband’s armies crossed the Yangtze in 589 and reunified China after two hundred and seventy years.

About this Painting

Artist	Xiang Li 李湘
Medium	Chinese watercolor on silk
Subjects	Twenty empresses across four dynasties, on one silk
Painted	2019
Collection	The Chinese Empresses Collection
Availability	Original held by the artist · Prints available

More

• The Northern Wei Empresses
• The Northern Qi and Zhou Empresses
• The Eleven Empresses of the Eastern Jin
• The Sui empresses