What Happened to the Children Born to Concubines in Imperial China

In the hidden, labyrinthine corridors of the Forbidden City, a five-year-old boy is taken from the women who raised him. His hair has never been cut; it sweeps the floor as he walks, for cutting it would have been a public declaration of his existence, a death sentence in a place where infants were often deemed liabilities. For five years, his mother has hidden him from his own father, the Emperor of China, and from the formidable, ruthless woman in the palace who, for nearly a decade, has systematically eliminated every infant born to a rival concubine. His name will eventually be Hongjia, and he is destined to become the only Ming emperor in three centuries who refuses to take a concubine. He will die at the age of 36, mourned by a court that felt a grief they had never extended to any predecessor.

Yet, before his reign, he was simply a child whose primary political act was surviving. The women who kept him alive were paying for his existence with their own safety and sanity. In the structure of Imperial China, a mother’s status decided everything for her child: the rank she held at the moment of birth, the favor she maintained within the bedchamber, and the enemies she had cultivated in her climb toward the Emperor’s influence. A boy could be the biological son of the “Son of Heaven” and still perish in a locked, dusty room long before anyone beyond the palace walls ever learned his name.

This is the history of the children born to the concubines of the Imperial court—those who ascended to the throne, those who perished from starvation, those whose mothers were commanded to end their lives, and those whose existence was never recorded at all because of a singular, chilling question asked by the eunuchs following every imperial encounter: Liao or bu liao? Keep or not keep? Sometimes, the answer was a simple, fatal “no.”

To comprehend the fate of these children, one must grasp the rigid hierarchy that governed their lives. A son’s status was dictated entirely by his mother’s rank, not by his innate talent, the order of his birth, or his father’s personal affection. That singular designation determined whether he would be the heir to a vast empire or a forgotten ghost in a dusty palace registry. At the apex sat the Empress; her sons were the legitimate heirs by default, regardless of whether the Emperor had visited her bedchamber since their wedding day. Below her existed a tiered structure of consorts, graded with the precision of military officers. By the late Ming dynasty, the system officially recognized twelve titles beneath the Empress, and below those, hundreds of women who served the Emperor, slept beside him, or were merely granted a fleeting glance, only to be cataloged accordingly.

A child born to a high-ranking consort might be raised in opulent apartments staffed by dozens, while a child born to a palace maid whom the Emperor visited only once might never be acknowledged by the court. There was a strict procedure. Whenever the Emperor slept with a woman other than the Empress, two eunuchs from the Directorate of Imperial Concubines recorded the date, the time, and the woman’s identity. Then, they asked the crucial question: Liao or bu liao? If the Emperor responded with “keep,” the encounter was logged, the resulting pregnancy was tracked, and the child was treated as imperial issue. If the Emperor answered “not keep,” the eunuchs administered a herbal abortifacient, or, in certain eras, they physically pressed upon the woman’s abdomen to ensure she could not conceive that night. The encounter was recorded in the archives for posterity, but the child, should one somehow survive, was not.

This question—Liao or bu liao—was the dark architecture upon which all other power dynamics rested. It determined whether a woman would become the mother of an emperor or remain a footnote in a lowly maid’s personnel file. It determined, quite literally, whether a child possessed a right to exist. When a child was marked to be “kept,” the political machinations began in earnest. The Empress’s faction fought to ensure no heirs were born to anyone but her. The Imperial Noble Consort, who frequently wielded more de facto power than the Empress, was determined to keep only her own sons in the line of succession. The reigning Emperor’s mother, the Empress Dowager, harbored her own agendas inherited from the previous reign. Beneath them all operated the eunuchs—the essential cogs who moved the food, delivered the messages, and distributed the medicines. These eunuchs were the only ones who knew which woman was pregnant before her own family; they were the ones who could make a pregnancy vanish or conceal it for five years if their loyalties aligned.

Such was the world into which the boy with the floor-length hair was born. To understand the rarity of his survival, one must understand the woman who endeavored to ensure it never occurred: Wan Zhen’er. Born in 1428 to a minor official’s family in Shandong province, she was sent to the palace at the age of four to serve as a maid. She never left. By the time the future Emperor Chenghua was born in 1447, Wan was 19 and assigned to his nursery. She was his nanny; she fed him, clothed him, shared his sleeping chamber, and comforted him through the terrors of childhood nightmares. When the political crisis of 1449 saw his father captured by the Mongols and the boy himself temporarily named crown prince—only to be demoted and exiled within the palace—Wan remained the single constant in his life. She was the woman who stayed.

When Chenghua ascended the throne in 1464, he could not marry Wan; the age disparity was scandalous, and her rank was insufficient. However, within months, he had elevated her to an imperial concubine, and within two years, she was named Imperial Noble Consort. In everything but title, she was the most powerful woman in the Forbidden City. His official Empress, Lady Wu, committed the fatal error of attempting to discipline Wan early in the reign. Within a month, Wan had Empress Wu deposed and exiled to a remote palace compound. The subsequent Empress, Lady Wang, internalized the lesson and remained silent for the next 23 years.

In 1466, Wan gave birth to a son. The Emperor’s joy was boundless; he named the child crown prince in the official chronicles before the boy was even a year old. But the child died at only ten months. He was Wan’s only child, and at 38, she would never conceive again. It was here, in the cold, consuming grief of a woman who had loved this Emperor since he was a toddler and was now watching her only chance at motherhood vanish into a tiny coffin, that the systematic killing commenced. Between 1466 and 1475, every confirmed pregnancy in the inner court of Chenghua’s reign ended. Some were terminated by forced-fed herbal abortifacients delivered by eunuchs loyal to Wan; others were lost in ways the imperial physicians could never adequately explain. Several women who managed to carry to term saw their newborns die within hours, often in the presence of attendants who had been bribed or intimidated into silence. One concubine, Lady Bo, became visibly pregnant in 1471. She was offered a herbal tonic by a court eunuch who claimed it would bolster the child’s health. Within hours, she had suffered a miscarriage. She survived, but her child did not. Lady Bo was subsequently demoted, banished to a remote quarter of the palace, and never again appeared in the chronicles. The historian Mao Qiling, writing within the living memory of these events, documented at least seven such cases, noting that the actual figure was almost certainly much higher, as women who feared Wan’s vast intelligence network learned to conceal their pregnancies entirely.

By 1475, Chenghua was 28 years old, had occupied the throne for eleven years, and possessed no living son. The empire lacked an heir. One day, the Emperor uttered a complaint out loud that the eunuch standing nearby had been waiting for years to hear. The “Cold Palace” was not a specific structure; it was a moniker given to whichever quarter the disgraced women of the inner court were relegated. By the 1470s, that quarter housed the deposed Empress Wu, the demoted Lady Bo, and a handful of palace women whose pregnancies had been viewed with suspicion or whose status had been quietly stripped away. Among them, residing there since roughly 1469, was a woman whose name appears in various sources as Ji or Qi. She had been brought to the palace from a Yao ethnic minority family in Guangxi province following a southern military campaign. She was, by some accounts, a chieftain’s daughter taken as part of a tribute settlement; by others, she had been a captive who eventually became a palace librarian.

Whatever her origin, all accounts converge on this: the Emperor encountered her once in the Imperial Library in 1469 and spent a single night with her. He never saw her again. When Lady Ji realized she carried the Emperor’s child, she did not announce it. She confided only in those around her. The deposed Empress Wu, who had been Empress for only one month before Wan destroyed her, became the boy’s secret protector. The eunuch Jiang Min, who had been quietly haunted by the string of infant deaths for years, became his guardian. The boy was born in July 1470. He was given no name. He was kept in the Cold Palace, hidden from the official chroniclers, fed by the deposed Empress and the few maids who could be trusted. When Wan’s eunuchs came searching, these women would hide the child beneath bedding, inside cupboards, or behind false walls. His hair was never cut, for a child’s haircut required a ceremony, a ceremony required a name, and a name required an official record. So, they allowed it to grow.

For five years, he existed in this state. The deposed Empress Wu, the woman Wan had humiliated for attempting to enforce palace order, raised the Emperor’s son in secret while Wan’s spies prowled the palace for any sign of a hidden child. The eunuch Jiang Min smuggled in additional food rations, logging them as supplies for the maid’s quarters. Lady Ji breastfed the child for as long as she could and, for years afterward, slept in the same locked room with him every night, knowing that if Wan were to find him, the only path of escape would be one neither of them would anticipate.

The boy did not know his father was the Emperor; he did not know he held the potential for a throne. He was unaware that, 200 miles of corridors away, the most powerful man in the Ming Empire was telling his closest advisors that he had failed his ancestors because he had no heir. In May 1475, the Emperor was being dressed by his personal eunuch—the very same Jiang Min who had been carrying contraband milk to the Cold Palace for five years. The Emperor was lamenting his graying hair, remarking, “I am old, and I have no son.” Jiang Min knelt and replied, “Your Majesty, you do have a son.”

That afternoon, the Emperor sent for the boy. The women dressed him in the only clothing they possessed—a small red robe that fit. They cut nothing; they simply gathered the floor-length hair and let it trail behind him. A eunuch carried him in his arms, as the boy’s legs were unaccustomed to the expansive palace corridors he had never walked. The Emperor of China sat upon his throne, and a child he did not know existed was placed on the floor before him. Chenghua looked at the boy, noted his long, flowing hair, and declared, “This is my son. He has my face.”

The boy was named Zhu Youcheng. He would eventually take the reign name Hongzhi. He had survived, but his mother had not. Lady Ji was elevated; the Emperor moved her out of the Cold Palace, granted her the formal title of “Worthy Consort,” and assigned her apartments near her son. The deposed Empress Wu was quietly acknowledged but kept in her state of exile. The eunuch Jiang Min was honored, and the official chroniclers were instructed to record the boy as the rightful heir. Then, within months, Lady Ji was discovered dead. The official record states she fell ill. Modern historians, synthesizing court diaries and the testimony of palace women that emerged following Wan’s death, are more direct: most agree she was poisoned. The culprit was almost certainly someone within Consort Wan’s network. The Emperor knew, yet he remained silent. Six months after she had carried him through the palace to meet his father, Lady Ji was dead. She was approximately 30 years old; her son was five.

Two months after Lady Ji’s death, the eunuch Jiang Min—the man who had broken the silence, who had fed the child for five years, and who had spoken the truth to Chenghua—took his own life. He consumed gold, a slow, deliberate method used by loyal palace servants who wished to depart on their own terms before someone else decided their fate for them. He died over several days. The deposed Empress Wu continued to live in the Cold Palace; she had been deposed in 1464, restored as the boy’s protector in 1475, and would live quietly in exile until her death decades later. She was the only one of the protectors who outlived Consort Wan. She carried the memory of Lady Ji and Jiang Min and never spoke publicly about the toll those five years in the Cold Palace had exacted.

Consort Wan herself died in 1487. Following a violent confrontation with a maid, whom she struck, she collapsed and never regained consciousness. She was 59. Emperor Chenghua, the boy she had nursed at four and slept beside at 18, entered a period of mourning so profound that his ministers feared for his sanity. He died eight months later, in August 1487, at the age of 41. The official cause was illness, yet many at court believed he had simply ceased to fight for his own life.

The boy with the floor-length hair, now 17 years old, ascended the throne. He adopted the reign name Hongzhi, meaning “generous rule.” He reigned for 18 years, and by every metric employed by the Chinese historical tradition, he was one of the finest emperors of the Ming Dynasty. He executed almost no one; he reduced taxes during periods of famine; he invited Confucian scholars to lecture him on history and listened to their criticisms without retaliation. He balanced the treasury and kept the borders secure.

Crucially, he never took a concubine. This was not a minor deviation; the Ming Imperial harem in his father’s reign had numbered in the thousands. Every emperor before and after him filled the inner palace with consorts. Hongzhi married one woman, Empress Zhang, in 1487, and remained faithful to her for the rest of his life. She bore him two sons and three daughters. He fathered no other children, recorded or unrecorded, by any other woman. The court was perplexed by this conduct. Ministers submitted memorials urging him to take concubines to ensure the security of the dynasty’s bloodline; he ignored them. Other ministers more cautiously suggested that one or two consorts might diversify the imperial line should the Empress’s sons fail to thrive. He ignored those requests as well.

He had grown up in the Cold Palace. He had grown up with the knowledge that his own existence was the product of his father sleeping with hundreds of women, and that almost every one of those women had been forced to sacrifice their children to keep his father’s attention focused on a single rival. He had grown up watching his mother die and the man who saved him commit suicide. The system that produced him had also endeavored to destroy him, and he refused to replicate it within his own family.

He died in 1505 at the age of 36. The official cause of death was overwork combined with a misprescribed medicine. He had buried himself in the labor of governance because, as his closest advisors later wrote, he did not know any other way to be loved. His son, the future Zhengde Emperor, was nine years old when he inherited the throne. Zhengde would grow up to be one of the most erratic emperors in Chinese history; he kept tigers, named himself a general, and led excursions into fake battles. He died at 31 without a son, and the Hongzhi line vanished one generation after it began. Everything the deposed Empress, the loyal eunuch, and the murdered Lady Ji had done to sustain this child—everything the boy had become as a result—produced exactly one exceptional emperor, and then the line ended.

He was the “lucky” one, for there were thousands of children in Imperial Chinese history whose stories did not conclude with a throne. Most of these remain lost to history, but three in particular deserve examination, as they illustrate the other side of what the system inflicted upon its daughters.

In April 1644, the Chongzhen Emperor of the Ming Dynasty realized his capital was on the verge of collapse. Li Zicheng’s rebel army had breached the outer walls of Beijing. The Emperor’s officials had abandoned him, and his palace was emptying. The Emperor approached his wife, Empress Zhou, and commanded her to take her own life. She complied. He then went to his concubines, either killing them himself or ordering their deaths. Finally, he turned to his daughters. His eldest daughter, Princess Changping, was 15. She had been betrothed to a young scholar named Zhou Shixian and was awaiting a wedding that was supposed to occur that year. The Emperor lamented, “Why were you born into my family?” He drew his sword and swung at her. The blade struck her left arm above the elbow. As she raised her right arm to block the second strike, he faltered. Whether he could not bring himself to complete the act or whether courtiers intervened, the chronicles remain conflicted. He turned and proceeded to her younger sister, Princess Zhaoren, who was six years old, and killed her with a single stroke. He then retreated to a hill behind the palace and hanged himself from a tree.

Princess Changping survived. Her left arm did not. She was discovered by Qing soldiers when the new dynasty occupied the city. The new Qing emperors, recognizing the political utility of being merciful toward her, allowed her to live, located her fiancé, Zhou Shixian, and permitted the marriage to take place. She married in 1645. She was pregnant within months. She died in the autumn of 1646 at age 17, before her child was born. The Qing court recorded that she had mourned the fall of her dynasty without interruption from the moment of her father’s strike to her own death. The cause of death was listed as illness; it was, in every aspect but the official records, grief.

Three years later, in 1647, in a southern Chinese province where the last Ming loyalists were still waging a war they had already lost, an older princess perished. Princess Rongchang was the daughter of the Wanli Emperor, who had ruled from 1572 to 1620. She had been born at the height of Ming dynastic power and grew up in the golden years of the late 16th century, when the empire still believed itself eternal. By 1647, she was in her 60s. The Ming Dynasty had fallen in Beijing three years earlier. She had fled south with the remnants of the imperial family, seeking shelter in the household of a loyalist official. By the spring of 1647, that household had been dismantled. The Qing armies were closing in. The official’s family had nothing left to provide her. She starved. The precise location is disputed in the records, but the fact is not: a princess of the Ming Dynasty, who had been born into luxury that no European court of her century could match, died of hunger in a borrowed room in a borrowed province, 60 years after her father had ruled the largest empire on earth.

And there is one more daughter, and one more story—one of the oldest—which explains why no one in the imperial Chinese system fully trusted their own mothers. The year is 654. The dynasty is the Tang. The Emperor is Gaozong. His Empress is Empress Wang, and one of his consorts is a former nun who had been brought back into the palace following his father’s death. Her name was Wu Zhao. She would eventually become Wu Zetian, the only woman to ever rule China as emperor in her own right. That year, Wu Zhao gave birth to a daughter. The baby was healthy. Empress Wang, who had no children, visited the infant in her cradle in Wu’s apartments. Empress Wang was kind to the child; she held her and departed. When the Emperor arrived to see his daughter that afternoon, the baby was dead.

According to the Tang chronicles, written by historians a century after the fact, Wu Zhao killed her own daughter, concealed the body beneath a blanket, and then alerted the Emperor to the still form, screaming that Empress Wang had been the last individual in the room. The Emperor believed her. Empress Wang lost his trust. Within a year, she had been deposed. Within two years, she had been murdered, and Wu Zhao was Empress. Modern historians are divided on whether Wu Zhao truly killed her daughter. Some argue the chronicle was authored by hostile Confucian historians who sought to demolish her reputation centuries after her demise. Others observe that the death of a healthy infant in those exact circumstances, with that precise political outcome, is difficult to interpret in any other light. It does not matter which version is true. It matters that the system made it believable.

In a court where the rank of the mother decided everything for the child, where the eunuchs asked Liao or bu liao after every encounter, where consorts monitored each other’s pregnancies with the intensity of armies watching borders, the concept that a mother might kill her own child to destroy a rival was not viewed as absurd. It was viewed as strategic. Liao or bu liao—keep or not keep. The eunuchs posed that question after every imperial encounter for nearly 300 years of Ming rule and another 268 years of Qing rule thereafter. We will never know most of the answers. The records were incinerated in the fires of 1644 when Beijing fell, again in 1900 when the Eight-Nation Alliance sacked the palace, and once more during the Cultural Revolution. Most of the women who heard that question asked are absent from any chronicle. Most of the children who resulted from the “keep” answers, as well as those who resulted from the “not keep” answers, are equally vanished.

Historians attempting to tally these lives estimate that approximately 200,000 women served in some capacity in the Ming and Qing imperial palaces between 1368 and 1912. The number of children born from imperial encounters is harder to estimate, but those kept, raised, named, and recorded number only in the low thousands. The number of children whose lives were ended by herbal abortifacients, by quiet uterine intervention, by the actions of a rival consort, or by an Empress who could not afford competition, is a figure no one can ever recover.

The future Hongzhi Emperor survived because three people—the deposed Empress Wu, the eunuch Jiang Min, and a low-ranking woman from a Yao chieftain family named Ji—refused to let the system claim him. Two of them died for that choice within a year of his discovery. The third lived out her exile in silence. The boy himself ruled for 18 years, never took a concubine, and died young. Princess Changping survived a sword stroke from her own father and died of grief at 17. Princess Rongchang outlived the dynasty that produced her and died of hunger in a borrowed room. Wu Zetian’s daughter, whatever occurred in that cradle, became the moment a system realized it had taught its own mothers to consider their children expendable.

The system did not produce these stories accidentally. The rule that status tracked a mother’s rank meant that every imperial pregnancy was a political event. The presence of dozens or hundreds of rivals in the same household meant that every birth was a threat to someone else’s child. The role of the eunuchs ensured that the apparatus of removal was embedded within the palace before any pregnancy even occurred. The system was engineered to function exactly as it did. Hongjia understood this. He grew up within it, and when he became Emperor, the only response he could conceive was to refuse to participate. He married one wife, had a handful of children, and kept his court small. He did not produce the system’s next generation.

He died at 36. The Ming Dynasty persisted for 137 more years after his death. His son took concubines; his grandson took more. By the time Princess Changping raised her right arm to block her father’s sword, Hongjia had been dead for 139 years, and the inner palace had reverted to the exact shape it held the day he was born in the Cold Palace. He was the only Ming emperor who never took a concubine. He was the only one whose mother had been hidden from the world for the first five years of his life. He was the only one whose answer to the question Liao or bu liao was the answer his father had provided on the one night that produced him, and for which his mother had paid with her life six months later. He was the lucky one.

If you are following this exploration, you are aware that the dynasties we examine are not truly about the emperors themselves. They are about the people the emperors utilized, the people the emperors discarded, and the people who survived by hiding. The boy with the floor-length hair was one of those people. So was the mother who hid him. So was the deposed Empress who raised him in secret. So were the eunuchs who carried food into the Cold Palace for five years and requested nothing in return, except, in the case of Jiang Min, the permission to die quietly once his duty was complete.

There are stories like this in every dynasty. There are Tang princesses who were married to nomadic chieftains and never returned home. There are Han concubines whose sons perished in dynastic struggles before they could speak. There are Qing palace maids who entered the Forbidden City at 13 and died within the walls at 60 without ever stepping outside. Most of their names are lost. Some remain recoverable from court diaries, from the chronicles of officials who observed and documented, and from the partial records of eunuchs who left no descendants to defend their memory.

We will continue to uncover them. There are women in those chronicles who have not been mentioned in 300 years. There are children who survived against odds that no system should have created, and children who failed to survive against odds the system specifically designed. There are many more lives to be found, and many more voices that the history books intended to keep silent. We will keep searching for the names.