The Tragic History Of Chinese Emperors

The Chinese civilization is so old, it takes ancient to another level. By the time the country's last emperor left the throne in 1911, the nation of China was among the largest that had ever existed. And ruling it was no picnic. Across 4,000 years, around 49 dynasties gave it a try. One made it 289 years, while another didn't even get to its first anniversary. 

The fates of the emperors themselves were just as varied. Only half of the rulers actually managed to die in office or abdicate by choice. The other half were more aggressively "retired" by assassination, forced abdication, forced suicide, or an uprising. Some emperors lived the royal life to the hilt, indulging in the abuses of power that seem to go hand in hand with absolute rule. Other emperors were little more than gilded prisoners. Life as an emperor in the Middle Kingdom wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

The problem with hereditary government is that it's kind of a genetic lottery. With almost three hundred rolls of the genetic dice, the Chinese empire was guaranteed to, and did, birth some rulers of legendary incompetence.

As the Jin dynasty collapsed (266-420 CE) in the fourth and fifth centuries China fragmented into multiple competing kingdoms. Although already blind in one eye when he took the throne of one of these kingdoms, Fu Sheng worked hard to earn the title of "one-eyed tyrant," according to the World of Chinese. Apparently sensitive about his disability, and too dumb to know better, he forbade the words like "missing" or "without," killing anyone who said them in his presence. He was deposed and killed in just two years for wanton idiocy and needless cruelty. Cruel, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son. 

Liu Shan was the second and last emperor of the Shu Han dynasty (221-263 CE), starting his reign at age 17 with every advantage. Son of a respected warlord and under the tutelage of Zhuge Liang, one of the era's greatest generals, Owlcation reports that Liu Shan nonetheless guided his empire into dissolution. He eventually surrendered his empire peacefully to the rival Wei kingdom and retired comfortably in their capital city. His ineptness was so profound that his childhood name is now a modern idiom for moron. 

The palace was even more hazardous for the people working there, especially for imperial concubines. Practices changed over the dynasties and centuries but for the majority of China's tens of thousands of royal concubines, life could be hell. 

For almost a millennium Chinese upper class women, including most concubines, practiced a peculiarly painful beauty regimen known as foot binding, per Smithsonian. Starting around age five or six, girls broke their arches and toes so that their heels and soles touched; the shorter the foot, the more desirable the woman — 3 inches was perfection. 

As early as the Jin dynasty (266-420 CE) concubines were conscripts as well, chosen according to the particular criteria of that dynasty or emperor. For over fifteen hundred years, women and girls were kidnapped from or given away by their families and made to live with the emperor, hopefully providing him with sons. The South China Morning Post says while there was a hierarchy among the emperor's women, and opportunity for advancement, harems were often filled with jealously and rivalry — frequently leading to the women attacking, poisoning, and murdering each other. Of course, concubines belonged to the emperor — who could kill them anytime he wanted. As part of the royal household concubines were often subject to purges as well and could be killed by competing sons or warlords. And, according to Ancient Origins, as a job well-done, they could also be forced to join their emperor when he died.

The threat of invasion was a constant reality in ancient China and foreign invaders ended many dynasties. Qin Shi Huang, first emperor of a unified China, began construction of the Great Wall over two thousand years ago to keep out the Xiongnu, northern nomads that he couldn't conquer. The Han dynasty eventually vanquished the Xiongnu after 200 years of war. 

It took Genghis Khan and his grandson Kublai 60 years to complete their Mongol invasion and takeover of China. Exactly how many Chinese were killed during the creation of the greater Mongolian Empire is impossible to know but suffice to say that, according to Stanford University climate researcher Julia Pongratz, so many Asians died that the Mongol invasion altered global carbon dioxide levels. The Chinese empire they established, the Yuan dynasty, lasted over 200 years. The last Chinese Imperial Dynasty, the Qing, ended in no small part due to over a century of aggression and meddling by other imperial powers known in China today as the "Century of humiliation." 

Of course, invasions don't necessarily come from outside. Before unification, and during the many periods afterwards when China was splintered into competing kingdoms, the country was embroiled in some of the bloodiest internecine warfare in the world. According to Business Insider, without even counting events of the 20th century, four of the 10 bloodiest wars in human history were Chinese civil wars. 

Historically, royal families can be as violent and sexually broken as anyone. Roman emperors, French courts, and Russian tsars have filled books with disturbing and/or hilarious tales of debauchery and cruelty. A not-insignificant number of Chinese emperors were murdered by their own siblings and extended family but, of course, plenty of emperors had their own families killed.

Ancient History Encyclopedia reports the Tang dynasty's (618-097 CE) Empress Wu Zetian was the only outright female monarch in Chinese history and by all accounts a terribly effective, while controversial, one. She became a royal concubine at 14, finagled her way into the position of first consort, then empress consort, then empress dowager, before ruling openly as China's first female emperor. Wu accomplished this by murdering her own infant daughter and blaming the emperor's wife who she then had killed too, although Smithsonian Magazine suggests these accounts should be taken with a grain of salt. 

At the age of 15, Liu Zeye ascended to the throne of the Liu-Song dynasty (420-479 CE) but was under the impression that his father would have preferred his younger son as successor. The new emperor convinced his sibling to commit suicide and then had his sons killed. Liu eventually went full-Caligula and is said to have brought both his aunt and sister into the palace for intimate relations. He was assassinated by his uncle when he was 16. 

Leaders living apart from their subjects is not unusual, indeed it may be the standard. The trope of royal families enjoying cushy lives completely divorced from the real world circumstances of the common folk is found in literature and legend all across the world but China's last dynasties, the Ming and Qing, really set the bar for self-isolation.

China's emperors had long set themselves far above their citizens, anointed to lead as the literal Son of Heaven. For over two thousand years, anyone approaching, or approached by, the emperor had to kowtow; prostrate on their knees with their forehead touching the ground. Ancient History Encyclopedia says in addition to his own fleet of custom-carriages the emperor also had his own personal roads which no one else could use and even his own unique first-person pronoun.

The color yellow had been associated with nobility since the Han but the Ming and Qing appropriated it completely and it was illegal for anyone else to wear. The imposing Forbidden City in Beijing was not merely the seat of imperial power it was, as the name implies, an intact, fully functioning city in its own right. There was nothing the emperor needed that his thousands of staff couldn't procure or the tens of thousands of square feet and 98 separate buildings couldn't accommodate. That would be if the emperor had the time to do anything, his responsibilities to the vast Chinese bureaucracy required rigid adherence to absurdly time-consuming protocol and tradition.

Since ancient times, gift-giving has been widespread in Chinese culture, especially in politics and business, described as guanxi. Even today, writes Mary Stzo in the Fordham International Law Journal, "Guanxi, which literally means 'relationships' or 'connections,' is widely acknowledged as essential for successful business dealings in China." Guanxi isn't exactly bribery, but let's just say the practice has always left the ground fertile for corrupt officials.

A hallmark of collapsing governments is corruption and, considering the many Chinese dynasties toppled in uprisings and the many prominent reformers in Chinese history, ancient China was regularly corrupt. Bribery and graft were so endemic, and so brazen, that the names of corrupt officials are still known hundreds of years later, per People's Daily.

By the late imperial era, China had turned inward. For almost five centuries, China eschewed the outside world and, just as the increasing rigidity of tradition restricted the movements of the emperor, so some traditions encouraged corruption such that illicit income in the Ming and Qing dynasties was calculated by University of Missouri researchers to be 14 to 20 times as much as official income. Ultimately, Qing corruption was so bad that an international customs agency was established to collect taxes on import/export business in large part because local officials couldn't be trusted, accounting for an astounding one-third of all revenue.