Title: Huang hou zhi si (皇后之死)
Description: Boyang says that empresses held one of the most dangerous positions in Imperial China. In this three volume series, Boyang documents empresses who were killed because of their position of power. Boyang argues that most people today only consider the glory associated with being an empress, while failing to see that the Chinese court throughout all the dynasties was a place of power struggle, both amongst consorts and within the political arena.

In this series, empress is loosely defined to include all the wives and consorts of Chinese kings and emperors. This underscores the polygamous lifestyles of the emperors. Boyang stresses that an emperor may have had as many as 40,000 consorts at his disposal. All these women were there to provide pleasure for one man. Numbers this extreme may have been rare, but Boyang emphasizes that even the most modest emperors in the Qing Dynasty kept at least 200-300 consorts at any given time.

With so many women jostling for the emperor’s affection, and given the often uncontrollable political disputes that followed, withdrawing an empress’ or consort’s title was commonplace. The repudiation of the title often led to the execution not just of the woman in question, but of her entire clan as well. Huang Hou Zhi Si documents the deaths of these empresses and consorts from 2390 BCE to the beginning of the Three Kingdoms period in 220 CE.
Subjects: Biography, Court and courtiers, Empresses, Queens
Places: China