王皇后（新朝）

Her husband ordered three of her four sons to die. She wept until she went blind. She was empress of a dynasty that lasted fourteen years and had exactly one emperor, and the Han historians who wrote the record hated him so completely that they left her almost the only sympathetic figure in it.

Her Story

The woman in the short dress

The story everyone told about her comes from before any of it happened, when her husband was still an ambitious young man performing modesty for an audience that mattered.

The Wang clan of Yuancheng was the most powerful family in the Han empire. Wang Mang’s aunt was Wang Zhengjun, empress of Emperor Yuan and grand dowager for decades; her brothers and nephews held the regency almost continuously. Wang Mang, whose own father had died young, grew up poor within a family of enormous wealth, and built his entire career on a reputation for austerity that the rest of his relatives could not match.

The Book of Han records that when senior officials came to call on his mother, they were met at the door by a woman in plain cloth whose skirts did not reach the ground, and took her for a servant. They were told afterwards that she was Wang Mang’s wife.

The anecdote is repeated in every account of him and it is always told to his credit, or to expose his hypocrisy. It is almost never told as being about her.

Empress of a new dynasty

She was the daughter of Wang Xian, Marquis of Yichun, a kinsman rather than a close cousin. The marriage kept the clan’s alliances inside the clan.

In 9 CE Wang Mang took the throne outright, ending two hundred and fifteen years of the Western Han. His aunt Wang Zhengjun, then over eighty, refused to hand over the Han imperial seal; when his messenger insisted, she threw it on the ground and chipped a corner off it. The Xin dynasty began with a broken seal and one empress.

The state she presided over was the strangest experiment in Chinese history — Wang Mang nationalised land, abolished private slavery, restructured the currency five times, renamed nearly every office and city in the empire on the authority of texts a thousand years old, and provoked, within a decade, a famine, a change in the course of the Yellow River, and a peasant rising whose members painted their eyebrows red so they could tell each other apart.

Four sons

This is what actually happened to her, and it is worth setting out plainly, because the earlier version of this page said her life illustrated the use of marriage as a political tool, which is true of almost every woman in this collection and explains nothing about her.

Wang Huo, the second son, killed a household slave. In the Han this was a fineable offence for a man of his rank. Wang Mang, whose reputation was built on being the one aristocrat who did not do such things, forced him to commit suicide. That was before the usurpation.

Wang Yu, the eldest, opposed his father’s treatment of the boy emperor’s maternal relatives, whom Wang Mang had confined. On a friend’s advice he tried to frighten his father into changing course by having blood splashed on his gate at night, a supernatural warning. He was caught. Wang Mang had him poisoned in prison, along with his pregnant wife, and used the affair to destroy several hundred people connected to it.

Wang An, the third son, died of illness.

Wang Lin, the fourth, was the one who remained. He was made heir. He then had an affair with Yuan Bi, an attendant of his mother’s who had also been his father’s, and when the affair was discovered the two of them plotted to kill Wang Mang first. In 21 CE Wang Lin was forced to take his own life.

She had four sons. Her husband ordered the deaths of three of them.

Blind

The Book of Han states that she wept so much for Wang Yu and Wang Huo that she lost her sight.

Wang Mang’s response was to send Wang Lin to live with her and read to her — which is how Wang Lin came to be in his mother’s household, and how he met Yuan Bi. The arrangement made to comfort her over two dead sons is what killed the third.

She died in the second month of 21 CE, within weeks of Wang Lin. She was given the posthumous name Xiaomu 孝睦 — filial and harmonious — and buried in a tomb called the Yiling, which Wang Mang had built for himself and named, in the classical style, the Tomb of Righteousness.

Two years later the Red Eyebrows and the restored Han armies took Chang’an. Wang Mang was killed on a tower in the palace with the imperial seal in his hands, his head sent to the Han claimant and later kept in the imperial armoury for two hundred and seventy years. The dynasty ended with him. She was already dead, which is the only reason we know how her life finished at all.

What the record does and does not say

Everything above comes from a single source, the Hanshu, compiled by the Ban family under the restored Eastern Han — a regime whose legitimacy rested on Wang Mang having been a monster. The account is hostile by design.

That hostility cuts in her favour in an unusual way. A historian setting out to condemn a usurper has every reason to record that he destroyed his own children and blinded his wife with grief, and no reason at all to invent her tears. The details that make her sympathetic are exactly the details the source wanted.

What is missing is everything else. Her personal name is not recorded. Her age is not recorded. Not one sentence she spoke survives. She appears in the standard history almost entirely as a measure of what her husband was willing to do.

A note on the sources

Ban Gu’s Hanshu devotes its longest single chapter, juan 99, to Wang Mang. It is the source for the short dress, the deaths of the four sons, the blindness, and the date of her death. Later histories add nothing.

The old version of this page gave her dates as 8 BCE to 23 CE and said her fate after the fall of the Xin was unclear. Both are wrong: she was an adult with grown sons well before 9 CE, and she died in 21 CE, two years before the dynasty fell.

• Ban Gu, Hanshu 汉书, juan 99 (Biography of Wang Mang) — c. 111 CE
• Sima Guang, Zizhi Tongjian 资治通鉴, juan 36–39 — 1084
• Hans Bielenstein, “Wang Mang, the Restoration of the Han Dynasty, and Later Han”, in The Cambridge History of China vol. 1 — 1986
• Clyde Bailey Sargent, Wang Mang: A Translation of the Official Account of His Rise to Power — 1947

Connections

• Her husband’s aunt Wang Zhengjun — the Han empress who chipped the imperial seal rather than hand it over, and whose long regency gave Wang Mang his opening.
• The dynasty he ended The empresses of the Western Han.
• The dynasty that ended him Empress Guanglie and Guo Shengtong — consorts of the man who restored the Han in 25 CE.
• Her husband Wang Mang.

About this Painting

Artist	Xiang Li 李湘
Medium	Chinese watercolor on silk
Subject	Empress Wang of Xin
Painted	2012
Dimensions	36 × 78 in
Collection	The Chinese Empresses Collection
Availability	Original held by the artist · Prints available

More

• The Western Han empresses
• Wang Zhengjun
• The full collection