Lady Xie and the Princess of Pengcheng

OK. If you haven’t read the poetry battle post from two days ago, go back and read it now. It introduces the two wives of Wang Su, Lady Xie and the imperial princess, and their rivalry, expressed in verse form, over their shared husband. Intrigued by this, I started looking in to what I could learn from historical and epigraphic sources about our two main characters.

There’s not much about Lady Xie. She was the daughter of Xie Zhuang 謝莊, a ranking official of the Liu-Song court. Her brother’s daughter Xie Fanjing 謝梵境 became the last empress of that dynasty. And she herself was one of the well-born women who became nuns and formed a religious community around the women of the Northern Wei court at the turn of the sixth century.

The princess, however, is another story entirely. Here’s what we know about her:

• She was born around 470 as the sixth younger sister of the emperor Xiaowen 孝文 (r. 477-499), and granted the title Princess of Pengcheng 彭城公主.
• She was married around 490 to Liu Chengxu 劉承緒, the son of the general Liu Chang 劉昶, another refugee from the South and a member of the Liu-Song imperial family.
• She was widowed before 497.
• In late 498 or early 499, Empress Feng (孝文幽皇后) proposed to marry the princess to her younger brother Feng Su 馮夙. The emperor was away on campaign but agreed; the princess objected. Empress Feng tried to force the issue by setting a date for the wedding. The princess enlisted the help of members of her household to sneak out of the palace and travel 200 miles in the pouring rain to make her case to the emperor in his camp. There she also revealed the affair the empress was having with her attendant Gao Pusa 高菩薩. As a result, the emperor, who was ill and approaching the end of his life, issued an order for the empress’ execution, to be carried out after his death. He died in the fourth lunar month of 499 and the empress was poisoned while his coffin was in transit back to the capital.
• The princess’ nephew succeeded his father as Emperor Xuanwu 宣武 in 499. Our princess was now the aunt of the reigning emperor, rather than the younger sister as before.
• In 500, the new emperor promoted Wang Su and gave the princess to him as a wife. At this point the princess was also given a new title, the Senior Princess of Chenliu 陳留長公主. Late in that year or early in 501, Lady Xie arrived from the South with her three children, and the events of the poetry battle ensued.
• The princess was widowed again in 501 when Wang Su died.
• In 502, two men courted the princess: the general Zhang Yi 张彝 and the civil official Gao Zhao 高肇. The latter was the young emperor’s maternal uncle and a major power player at court. The princess preferred Zhang Yi, so the emperor denied Gao Zhao permission to marry her. As a result, Gao slandered Zhang to the court and caused him to be demoted to commoner status. History does not record whether the princess then married Gao Zhao, but one hopes not.
• The latest record of her life comes in about 520, when the princess exhorted her pregnant niece (another imperial princess) not to put up with the long-running infidelities of her husband Liu Hui; because of the niece’s recalcitrance, Liu Hui beat her, causing her to miscarry and then to die, and his subsequent trial is an important landmark in the history of Chinese jurisprudence. However, what happened to our princess after that is not known.

Bonkers, eh? And the amazing part is that all this is drawn together from the accounts of other people’s lives. There is no official biography of the Princess of Pengcheng – but obviously that’s not because she never did anything noteworthy!