Blog

Consort Wenxiu: The Woman the Last Emperor Chose—and Was Forced to Give Up Aisin-Gioro Puyi Series | Late Qing Dynasty Erdet Wenxiu (December 20, 1909 – September 17, 1953) From the blog 還暦散歩 (Kanreki Sanpo) by Saorin The 1987 film The Last Emperor is widely celebrated as a masterpiece—but it left out one remarkable story. Puyi, China’s last emperor, actually chose his own empress. And the people around him refused to let that choice stand. Wenxiu was the woman Puyi…

Why “winning without fighting” turned out to be a matter of arithmetic If you’ve read one book of Chinese military strategy, it’s almost certainly Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. It sits on the recommended reading list at West Point and is studied at Sandhurst. What far fewer Western readers know is that Sun Tzu’s book is only the most famous of seven — the Seven Military Classics of Ancient China, the canon formalized in 1080 under the Song dynasty.…

Wanrong — The Last Empress of China, Part I From the Glory of the Gūwalgiya Clan to the Forbidden City by Satoe  |  還暦散歩 (Kanreki Sanpo) — Late Qing Dynasty Series I. The Glory of the Gūwalgiya Clan A Family Among the Eight Banners The Gūwalgiya clan — the family into which Wanrong was born — was a distinguished Manchu family that had earned its place among the Eight Banners through military service during the Qing conquest of China. The…

Late Qing Dynasty Series  |  The Prince Su Family Prince Su Shanqi A Qing Prince, a Japanese Samurai’s Son, and the Dream That Outlasted an Empire In 1900, as allied Western forces threatened to shell the Forbidden City, a single Japanese man talked them out of it — in Chinese. His name was Kawashima Naniwa, and he was the son of a former samurai from a small Japanese castle town called Matsumoto. A year later, that same man became the…

The Fengshan Ritual: China’s Supreme Ceremony of Heaven and Earth Only the Son of Heaven Could Perform It — From the First Emperor to the Song Dynasty A Hierarchy of the Sacred: Who Could Worship What To a reader shaped by Christianity or other Western religious traditions, this may seem deeply strange. In those traditions, prayer is available to everyone — the poorest farmer and the most powerful king kneel before the same God, and no earthly rank determines one’s…

*The boy named “joint rule” who was never let in.* — The **Tongzhi Emperor** was given a name that promised him everything and handed him nothing. *Tongzhi* (同治) means “joint rule.” Yet the boy who carried it was kept outside that rule from before he could even speak. The power was shared, just never with him — it was shared between his mother, **Empress Dowager Cixi**, and the thin screen she sat behind while the empire was governed in her…

LATE QING DYNASTY SERIES February 12, 1912: The Day Two Thousand Years of Imperial China Came to an End Empress Dowager Longyu, Yuan Shikai, and the Last Act of the Qing Dynasty On February 12, 1912, a six-year-old boy named Puyi signed away the throne his family had held for nearly three centuries. With that act, more than two thousand years of continuous imperial rule in China — a system that traced its origins to the First Emperor of Qin…

The Guangxu Emperor: The Emperor Who Said He Didn’t Need Power Imprisoned by Cixi, possibly poisoned — yet Guangxu never broke. He launched 103 days of reform to save China. The emperor who chose mission over power.The Guangxu Emperor and the 103-Day Revolution That Failed Late Qing Dynasty Series * * * “If it would save the country, I do not need to hold power.” No emperor in Chinese history was supposed to say this. Princes fought and bled for…

A Merchant Sees Gold in Human Form In 267 BCE, in the bustling city of Handan—capital of the Zhao state in ancient China—a wealthy merchant named Lü Buwei encountered what would become history’s most audacious investment opportunity. To understand the brilliance of his gamble, you need to know the context. China during the Warring States period (475-221 BCE) was fractured into seven major kingdoms locked in a brutal competition for supremacy. Think of it as ancient China’s version of Game…

“Buy low, sell high” — this fundamental principle of commerce remains unchanged throughout history. But around 2,300 years ago during China’s Warring States period, one man took this concept far beyond basic trading to deploy sophisticated market manipulation techniques that made him fabulously wealthy. His name was Lü Buwei (呂不韋, Lǚ Bù Wéi). He wasn’t just a merchant. He was a pioneer of “scarcity marketing” — a strategy still used by the diamond industry today — and ultimately rose to…

About Yasuke Yasuke doesn’t appear frequently in Japanese historical records. Therefore, we don’t really know whether he actually played such an active role as Oda Nobunaga’s page (personal attendant) like he does in video games. The Honnō-ji Incident If Sasuke had truly been one of Oda Nobunaga’s pages, he would have been with Nobunaga during the Honnō-ji Incident in 1582. The Honnō-ji Incident was a major historical event where Oda Nobunaga, one of Japan’s most powerful warlords, was betrayed and…

Here’s the English translation with explanations for those unfamiliar with Chinese history: The Prince Gong’s Mansion in Beijing belonged to Prince Gong, an important member of the Qing Dynasty’s imperial family during the late imperial period. The most famous Prince Gong was Aisin Gioro Yixin (1833-1898). The Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) was China’s last imperial dynasty, ruled by the Manchu people. Young Prince Gong Yixin Born as the sixth son of Emperor Daoguang, Yixin showed exceptional talent in both literary and…