What happened to all the concubines after the fall of imperial China?
The Last Women of the Forbidden City: The End of a World
On November 5, 1924, three men passed through the Gate of Divine Prowess into the northern half of the Forbidden City: Lu Zhonglin, commander of the Beijing garrison; Zhang Bi, chief of police; and Li Yuying, a republican delegate. They carried a document containing five clauses and an ultimatum. The former emperor’s family had three hours to leave. Artillery batteries were positioned on Jingshan Hill, behind the palace. If the family did not change course, the cannons would fire. Puyi, aged 18, held a final audience that morning. He presented the imperial seal. He immediately dismissed most of the remaining eunuchs and palace servants. That afternoon, he was taken to the residence of his father, Prince Chun, on the north bank of the Houhai River. His empress, Wan Rong, and his consort, Wen Xiu, accompanied him.
But two women refused to leave. The noblewoman Jingyi was 68 years old. She had entered the Forbidden City as a teenager in November 1872. She had lived within its walls for 52 years. The noblewoman Ronghui was the same age, had entered the same year, and had lived the same 52 years behind the same walls. When the soldiers ordered them to leave, both women declared they would rather die. The republic that had abolished the dynasty could not remove the two elderly women. They held the palace for 16 days. This is what happened to each woman inside the Forbidden City after the end of Imperial China.
The high-ranking consorts who ruled a phantom court for 12 years thanks to a subsidy that the republic eventually stopped paying. The palace servants who were dismissed with a one-time payment and nowhere to go. The concubine who received a title at 15 in a puppet state and spent the rest of her life being punished for it. And the two women who had spent so much time within those walls that leaving them was indistinguishable from death. The dynasty fell on February 12, 1912. That morning, Empress Dowager Longyu, acting on behalf of the six-year-old Puyi, accepted the articles of favorable treatment negotiated with the new Republic of China. There were eight clauses. These terms were unprecedented in Chinese history. Every previous dynasty had disposed of its predecessors’ wives by one of four methods: execution, forced monasticism, sale, or abandonment.
The republic proposed a fifth option: a contract. Puyi would retain his imperial title. The republic would provide an annual subsidy of $4 million to maintain the entire imperial household. The family could continue to live in the northern half of the Forbidden City. Existing staff—eunuchs, palace attendants, and domestics—would remain. No new eunuchs could be hired, but those already within the walls would retain their positions. Qing temples and tombs would be maintained at the republic’s expense. Private property, including jewelry, calligraphy, porcelain, and gold, would be safeguarded and protected. There was no separate clause for women, no budget line for the four high-ranking dowager consorts who outranked the child emperor by generational seniority.
No provision was made for the hundreds of palace servants who had entered the Forbidden City as teenagers and who had no family, no savings, and no skills recognized by the republic. The $4 million subsidy was a single budget line item covering everyone: the emperor, his mothers, his eunuchs, his servants, and his tomb guards. How it was distributed within the walls was the problem of the imperial household. The Qing ranking system listed the empress, the imperial noble consort, the noble consort, the consort, the concubine, the noble lady, the first-class assistant, and the second-class assistant, and it determined everything practical in a woman’s life within the Forbidden City. Living quarters were proportional to rank. An empress occupied an entire palace complex. A consort shared a side wing. The noble ladies and the lower ranks lodged together.
Food allowances followed the same hierarchy. An empress’s daily ration consisted of about 30 jin of pork, two chickens, two ducks, and 1.5 jin of butter. A noblewoman received about one-sixth of this. Almost none of it was actually consumed by the designated woman. Most of it was redistributed within her household, and the eunuchs and servants collected a tax at each stage. Even after 1912, these rank-based allowances were preserved on paper within the small court. The dynasty was gone, but not the meal rations. Longyu died on February 22, 1913, at the age of 44. Her death created a power vacuum in a palace that was no longer supposed to have one. The woman who filled it was Duan Kang, the Imperial Noble Consort, born Lady Tatara on October 6, 1873.
She entered the Forbidden City on February 26, 1889, at the age of 15, alongside her younger sister. The two girls were assigned to the Guangxu Emperor. Duan Kang received the title of Jin Concubine. Her sister received the title of Zhen Concubine, the Pearl Concubine. In 1900, when the Eight-Nation Alliance approached Beijing and Empress Dowager Cixi prepared to flee, a eunuch pushed the Pearl Concubine down a narrow well behind the Ning Shou Palace. She was 24 years old. The well is still on display in the Forbidden City. Tourists photograph it. Duan Kang survived. She was forgotten in the palace during the escape and was only rescued afterward. She steadily rose through the ranks. On March 12, 1913, after Longyu’s death, she was appointed to preside over all palace affairs, making her the effective administrator of the Forbidden City within the court.
The elder sister of the woman Cixi had murdered now ruled the palace, taking Cixi as her role model. She was one of the five “mothers” Puyi was required to visit each morning. The young emperor would kneel on a cushion covered in yellow silk. He would wait for the usual curt question: “Did the emperor sleep well?” He would receive a few terracotta toys, then be told to go and play. He later wrote that he never once had an ordinary, friendly conversation with any of them. Duan Kang’s authority over the inner court was absolute. In 1921, she publicly reprimanded Puyi’s biological mother, Yulan, Princess Consort Chun, about the young emperor’s behavior. Yulan returned home that evening. She never recovered from the confrontation.
The subsidy meant to support all of this didn’t arrive in full until 1912 and 1913. From 1914 onward, when Yuan Shikai redirected payments to the provincial governments, disbursements became increasingly scarce. By 1924, the total outstanding debt amounted to approximately 32 million taels, roughly 61.5 percent of what the republic owed. The women were not surviving on republican money, but by selling the palace’s treasures. Eunuchs acted as intermediaries, transporting antiquities to merchants in Liulichang. Gold was pawned, calligraphy was sold. Porcelain that had been in the palace for centuries was carried out of side doors in wooden crates. The $4 million contract was collapsing, and the women, within the palace walls, were liquidating their own history to eat.
Duan Kang won the battle for the selection of the empress in 1922, installing Wan Rong as Empress of Puyi over Wen Xiu. She arranged both marriages. Both would end in destruction, but she would not live long enough to see either collapse. On September 24, 1924, Duan Kang died of illness at Yonghe Palace. She was 50 years old. She had spent 35 years inside the Forbidden City, entering as a teenage concubine, losing her sister in a well, surviving a foreign invasion, outliving the dynasty, and ruling the remaining shadow court. She died six weeks before the soldiers arrived.
The system that supported the women within the palace relied on the eunuchs, not as symbols, but as infrastructure. Hairdressing, bathing, food preparation, food tasting, communication with the outside court, nighttime security, and the transport of messages between the complexes all required the eunuchs’ labor. In 1912, approximately 1,400 eunuchs still served the small court. This number steadily declined as men left and no replacements were permitted. On June 27, 1923, the Palace of Established Felicity caught fire. Puyi was convinced that the eunuchs had started the blaze to destroy evidence of systematic theft. An audit had documented the disappearance of 2,685 gold Buddhas, 1,675 gold altar ornaments, 435 porcelain antiquities, and 31 boxes of sable furs. After the fire, any further verification was impossible.
Puyi ordered the expulsion of all the remaining eunuchs. The dowager consorts immediately protested. They could no longer dress in the ceremonial manner required by the court. They could no longer function. Puyi relented and agreed to keep 50 to 100 eunuchs to assist them. Wan Rong’s brother, Wang Chih, later recalled that after the mass expulsion, many palaces in the Forbidden City were closed, and the area took on a desolate and abandoned appearance. A former palace servant named He Rong’er, born into the Manchu He She Ri clan around 1880, had served Cixi as her personal assistant for eight years, beginning at the age of 13. Decades later, in the 1950s and 1960s, a Beijing college teacher named Jin Yi and his wife, Shen Yi-ling, befriended her and recorded her memoirs.
Her account, published in 1992 as Memoirs of a Palace Maid , described a court that bore no resemblance to historical dramas. The real Forbidden City operated in near-total silence. Servants were never announced by a herald. Maids of honor could only wear braids. Any decoration was punishable. Superiors approached unannounced. The noisy, theatrical palace of popular imagination was a fiction. He Rong’er also observed that Empress Longyu was narrow-minded and harsh with her servants. Cixi, on the other hand, was privately kinder to her maids than her reputation suggested. The woman the world remembers as a tyrant was easier to serve than the empress who signed the abdication.
The term “cold palace,” lenggong , didn’t refer to a single building, but to any room where a woman the emperor wished to forget was kept. Under Emperor Wanli, Consort Wang was confined to the Palace of Great Splendor. Her servants were ordered to deny her drinking water and coal in winter. She lost her sight. She was only allowed to see her son once, at the end of her life. But the cold palace was a mechanism intended for women taken individually. What happened on November 5, 1924, was a cold palace applied to everyone at once. The three-hour ultimatum, the revised articles, the title of Puyi abolished forever. The annual subsidy was reduced from 4 million to 500,000 yuan, plus a one-time allocation of 2 million yuan to establish a factory employing impoverished bannermen. All state property reverted to the Republic. The palace had to be evacuated immediately.
Puyi left. Wan Rong and Wen Xiu left. The several hundred palace servants—women who had entered the Forbidden City as teenagers, from Manchu and Mongol banner families, who had served 10, 20, or 30 years behind those walls, who had neither profession nor property—received a single small lump sum payment and were evicted that afternoon. Many slept in the alleyways. Some gathered at the eunuch retreat temples, Xinglong Temple and Guanghua Temple near Houhai, where former eunuchs, also unemployed and rejected, had already congregated. The older Manchu servants returned to impoverished relatives in the inner city. The system designed to consume women for over 2,000 years now released them with nothing into a republic that had no place for them.
He Rong’er’s fate was representative. Cixi had married her to a Han Chinese eunuch named Liu, the adopted son of Cixi’s chief eunuch, Li Lianying. It was a “vegetarian marriage,” a formal union between a palace servant and a eunuch that the Ming dynasty had invented and the Qing continued. After the dynasty’s end, Liu succumbed to opium addiction. He Rong’er lived out her old age in a small hutong room near Houhai, surviving on sewing and the occasional gift. What happens to the last women of the machine once someone finally shuts it down is telling. These two women had entered the palace as teenagers in 1872 and spent 52 years there. When the soldiers told them to leave, they preferred death. Was it defiance? Or was it the only world they had ever known?
Jingyi and Ronghui’s refusal wasn’t theatrical; it was genealogical. The two women were consorts of the Tongzhi Emperor, who died in 1875 without a son. The succession had passed laterally to Guangxu, who was Tongzhi’s cousin, not his son. This meant that Jingyi and Ronghui were not Puyi’s legal mothers according to the Qing ritual system. They had never accepted the legitimacy of a succession that had bypassed their emperor’s line. For 49 years, they had harbored this grievance within the walls of the Forbidden City. Now, with the soldiers outside and the artillery on the hill, they demanded that Puyi be formally recognized as the ritual son of Muzong and Dezong (Tongzhi and Guangxu) before they would move. The Shuntian Times reported on November 12, 1924: “General Liu and the police chief, Mr. Zhang, asked the deposed emperor to persuade them to leave, but without success.”
For 16 days, a republic with an army, a police force, and artillery positioned on the hill behind the palace negotiated with two elderly women who refused to cross the threshold. On November 21, 1924, they finally left. The last continuous imperial residence in the Forbidden City came to an end, a 508-year cycle since the Yongle Emperor moved the capital to Beijing in 1416. Jingyi did not leave empty-handed. She took with her two of the Qianlong Emperor’s three rarities: Wang Xianzhi’s Mid-Autumn Letter and Wang Xun’s Letter to Boyuan . These were among the most precious calligraphic works in Chinese history, kept in his personal residence at Shoukang Palace. The scrolls passed through her relatives to private dealers. They resurfaced in Hong Kong in 1950. Premier Zhou Enlai personally authorized their purchase in 1951. A woman who had spent 52 years in the Forbidden City was carrying two masterpieces when she finally crossed the threshold. They reached the Palace Museum 27 years later. She had been dead for 19 years.
Jingyi died on February 3, 1932, at the age of 75. Her funeral on February 23, 1932, drew thousands of people. Beijing police had to manage the crowds. Ronghui died on May 18, 1933, at the age of 76 at Princess Rongshou’s residence. She had outlived the dynasty by 21 years and the palace by 9. On October 10, 1925, the 14th anniversary of the Wuchang Uprising, the Forbidden City reopened as the Palace Museum. More than 20,000 people visited on the first day. The 1925 inventory listed approximately 1.17 million works of art and artifacts. The complexes where Jingyi and Ronghui had spent 52 years were now behind velvet ropes. The Palace of Great Splendor, where Consort Wang had gone blind, became a ceramics gallery. The 12 complexes where women had been confined for entire lifetimes became air-conditioned exhibition halls.
Wan Rong and Wen Xiu followed Puyi from Prince Chun’s residence to the Japanese legation, and then to Tianjin. Their stories ended tragically: Wen Xiu’s divorce in 1931, Wan Rong’s opium addiction, and his death in Yanji Prison in 1946. But the concubine system still had one woman to consume. Tan Yuling was Duan Kang’s niece. She was a high school student in Beijing in early 1937 when Puyi chose her, partly to prevent the Japanese from forcing him to marry a Japanese woman. She was married to Puyi on April 6, 1937, in the Xinjing Salt Tax Palace. She received the title of Imperial Concubine Xiang, and later Noble Consort. She was 16 years old. She became the effective manager of the inner court as Wan Rong became increasingly incapacitated. According to Puyi, she was the person he was closest to during the Manchukuo years.
In August 1942, she developed severe cystitis. Chinese doctors were unable to treat her. The Kwantung Army attaché, Yoshioka Yasunori, insisted that a Japanese doctor examine her. Dr. Ono, from the South Manchurian Railway Hospital, arrived, examined her, and then spoke privately with Yoshioka for three hours. After the consultation, Dr. Ono administered an injection on August 13, 1942. Tan Yuling died the following morning, August 14, 1942. She was 22 years old. Puyi later testified before the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal that he believed she had been deliberately killed. The alternative explanation is fatal complications from an untreated kidney infection, which is medically plausible. What is documented is the three-hour private conversation between the doctor and the military attaché before the injection. Puyi kept her photograph inscribed “My dearest Yuling” until her own death in 1967. She was the last person in Chinese imperial history to receive the title of noble consort.
The Cultural Revolution finished what the Republic had started. The surviving micro-community of former eunuchs and palace women, already elderly and impoverished, was targeted as relics of feudal slavery. Former eunuchs from the Xinglong and Guanghua temples were paraded wearing dunce caps as “monsters and demons.” Sun Yaoting, the last surviving imperial eunuch, had been castrated by his father at the age of nine in 1911. His father was unaware that the dynasty had fallen just days earlier. Sun Yaoting served briefly at the palace, accompanied Puyi to Manchukuo, and eventually returned to Beijing. During the Cultural Revolution, he was denounced, beaten, and deprived of his small state allowance. His preserved organs, kept in a sealed jar according to Qing tradition to be buried with him so that he would be whole in the afterlife, were thrown away and destroyed by the Red Guards.
Li Yuqin, the last imperial concubine, was attacked for the crime of receiving a title at age 15 in a state that no longer existed, bestowed by an emperor who was then a gardener at the Beijing Botanical Garden. She had divorced Puyi in 1957, remarried, had two sons, and worked in a municipal library. None of that mattered; the title haunted her. In 1995, Sun Yaoting returned to the Forbidden City. He was 93 years old and in a wheelchair. He had become a tourist. He showed brass swing rings still embedded in a tree in the courtyard where Wan Rong had once played. He pointed out a doorway that had been carved to allow Puyi’s bicycle to pass through. The Forbidden City receives about 17 million visitors a year. The ticket costs 60 yuan. The well into which Consort Zhen was pushed is a photo stop on the standard tour. The Palace of Accumulated Elegance, where Cixi lived as a young concubine in 1856, is a heritage exhibit. Sun Yaoting wept.
