Wenxiu: The Woman the Emperor Chose—and Was Forced to Give Up
Aisin-Gioro Wanrong 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 himself selected. Yet she would spend her entire life as an imperial consort—never an empress—in a palace where she was unwanted.
1. Born into Nobility, Raised in Poverty
Wenxiu was born into a distinguished Manchu family of the Plain Yellow Banner—one of the eight banners that had formed the backbone of Qing military power. Her grandfather had served as a high-ranking official, and the family name once commanded respect at court.
But her father died young, and the family’s fortunes collapsed with him. Wenxiu and her mother found themselves struggling to get by on the margins of a society that no longer had much use for impoverished Manchu nobility.
Despite the hardship, Wenxiu received a traditional education. She immersed herself in classical Chinese literature—poetry, history, the old texts. Quiet and introspective by nature, she found her world in books.
2. Age Thirteen: A Family’s Last Hope
In 1921, thirteen-year-old Wenxiu entered the selection process to become an imperial consort. The Qing dynasty had already fallen a decade earlier—but inside the Forbidden City, Puyi was still playing the role of emperor, and the old rituals continued as if nothing had changed.
For Wenxiu’s family, this selection wasn’t simply an honor. It was survival. Entering the palace was virtually the only path left to restore the family’s standing.
3. Puyi’s Choice: A Circle Drawn in Ink
Four candidates’ photographs were presented to the fifteen-year-old Puyi. He was supposed to choose his own empress—at least in theory.
The photos were blurry, the faces hard to make out. Puyi went with his gut. Something about the dress Wenxiu was wearing caught his eye. Without hesitation, he drew a circle around her photograph.
✦ My interpretation
The story about the blurry photos and Puyi’s snap decision comes from his own memoir, From Emperor to Citizen. It’s his account—which makes it a primary source, even if it reflects his self-presentation.
4. The Dowager Consort’s Rage—and the Real Power in the Palace
The choice was immediately overruled.
Consort Duankang—a surviving consort of the Guangxu Emperor, and the elder sister of the tragic Pearl Concubine—was furious. After Empress Dowager Longyu’s death, Duankang had become the most senior figure among the four remaining consorts. Yuan Shikai had even formally appointed her to oversee palace affairs, giving her effective control over the Forbidden City’s internal politics. She treated Puyi as something close to her ward—managing him in nearly every aspect of his life.
To Duankang’s eyes, Wenxiu was simply unsuitable: from a poor family, plain-looking, with nothing to offer a court trying to project relevance in the modern world. Wanrong, by contrast, was everything the old court wanted to become—from an elite family, educated in Western-style schools, fluent in English, sophisticated and contemporary.
Duankang didn’t confront Puyi directly. She went after his father, the regent Zaifeng, instead. “Whose house is this—yours or mine?” she reportedly demanded. Zaifeng caved. Puyi was told to choose again.
✦ My interpretation
Duankang would later berate Puyi’s biological mother so severely that the woman is thought to have taken her own life with opium. Puyi himself acknowledged the extraordinary hold Duankang had over everyone in the palace. This was not a woman anyone in the Forbidden City crossed lightly.
5. The Real Game: Faction Politics, Not Romance
What looked like an imperial consort selection was actually a proxy battle between rival palace factions.
Duankang had formed an alliance with Zaize—Puyi’s seventh uncle—to back Wanrong. Against them stood Consorts Jingyi and Ronghui, who aligned with sixth uncle Zaijun and threw their support behind Wenxiu. These two sides had been at odds for years, and the selection process became the latest arena for their conflict.
Consort Jingyi argued that the emperor had already made his choice, and that overturning it would set an unseemly precedent. But Duankang’s faction prevailed. Puyi drew a circle around Wanrong’s photo.
That left one problem. Under dynastic custom, a woman whose photograph had received the imperial mark could not marry anyone else. Wenxiu’s photo had already been circled. Consort Ronghui proposed a compromise: give Wenxiu the title of Secondary Consort, or Shufei. One empress, one consort. The crisis was resolved—on the surface.
6. Wanrong, Wenxiu, and a Palace That Was Never Big Enough for Both
So Wanrong became empress and Wenxiu entered the Forbidden City as a consort. In most historical periods, this arrangement would have been entirely unremarkable—emperors routinely had multiple wives and consorts, and the empress’s formal role included maintaining harmony among them.
But Wanrong was not a traditional empress. She had grown up with Western ideas about love and marriage—specifically, the idea that a husband belongs to his wife alone. The presence of Wenxiu wasn’t something Wanrong could simply accept as a matter of palace protocol. She resented her.
The Last Emperor includes a warm, intimate scene where Puyi, Wanrong, and Wenxiu share a bed together in apparent harmony. Knowing what we know about Wanrong’s personality, this feels like cinematic license. The actual dynamic between the three was defined far more by Wanrong’s hostility and Wenxiu’s isolation.
Wenxiu was everything Wanrong was not: bookish, reserved, steeped in classical learning, and entirely uninterested in the modern world’s social competitions. They had almost nothing in common. In the confined world of the palace, that difference became a chasm.
✦ My interpretation
There’s something else worth noting. Wanrong knew—she had to have known—that Wenxiu was Puyi’s first choice. The woman who had been selected before her was now living in the same palace, holding a title just below her own. That’s not a dynamic that produces equanimity. What Wanrong felt toward Wenxiu was probably less like jealousy and more like something closer to contempt. Or hostility.
✦ My interpretation
Consider what a “traditional” empress might have done differently. In the Qing conception of the role, the empress was the manager of the inner court—expected to maintain order, show impartiality toward the other consorts, and keep her personal feelings subordinate to her institutional responsibilities. A woman who embodied that ideal might have found a way to coexist with Wenxiu. But Wanrong’s formation was entirely different. She had been educated to expect romantic exclusivity, to value personal feeling over institutional role. The collision between her modern emotional expectations and the palace’s traditional structures didn’t just damage Wenxiu—it set Wanrong herself on a path toward destruction. Her tragedy deserves its own article.
7. “You May Leave.” Two Women, Two Answers.
In 1924, the warlord Feng Yuxiang staged a coup and ordered Puyi and his household to vacate the Forbidden City immediately. Puyi, characteristically, said nothing.
Wanrong refused to go. She insisted, loudly, that she would not leave. A traditional empress, faced with this moment, would have deferred to her husband’s judgment. Wanrong asserted her own.
Wenxiu, when asked, said she had no objection to leaving.
✦ My interpretation
These two responses reveal something essential about each woman. Wanrong’s refusal was pure emotion—an expression of her identity as empress, her attachment to the title and what it represented, her unwillingness to let go of something that, by 1924, had already ceased to exist in any meaningful sense. Wenxiu’s answer was something different. The Republic had been established more than a decade earlier. The title of emperor was a fiction maintained by habit and nostalgia. The Forbidden City was a shell. Wenxiu, the quiet classicist dismissed as backward and traditional, may have been the only one of the three who was actually seeing things clearly.
8. Scissors in a Sleeve
Life in the Forbidden City—and later, in the household that followed Puyi into exile—became increasingly unbearable for Wenxiu. She had entered palace life intending to fulfill her role: to support the emperor, to be a loyal consort in the traditional sense. But Puyi ignored her, and Wanrong worked to make her invisible.
At some point, the isolation became too much. Wenxiu concealed a sharp pair of scissors in her sleeve. A eunuch noticed in time and intervened.
✦ My interpretation
Wenxiu had come to the palace with a genuinely traditional sense of purpose. She wanted to serve. The depth of her isolation—that she reached this point—says something about how completely that purpose had been denied her.
9. The First Woman to Divorce a Chinese Emperor
In 1931, Wenxiu did something no woman had done in Chinese imperial history: she sued for divorce.
She won. She left the imperial household, returned to Beijing, lived quietly, and worked as a schoolteacher until her death in 1953.
Wanrong, who clung to her title through Puyi’s exile in Tianjin and then his installation as emperor of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, died in 1946—likely in a Soviet detention facility after the Japanese defeat. She had spent the last years of her life addicted to opium.
10. What The Last Emperor Left Out—and What It Caught Anyway
Bertolucci’s film is a masterwork of cinema. But it doesn’t tell this story. The power struggle over the consort selection, the way the dowager consorts overruled the emperor’s own choice, the factional maneuvering that determined who would become empress—none of it appears.
And yet the film grasped something real. There’s a scene—low light, the dowager consorts watching Puyi from the shadows, silent, unmoving, just watching. Many viewers probably register it as atmospheric detail, the weight of tradition pressing in from the darkness.
Knowing this history, that scene takes on a different quality. Those eyes weren’t just watching. They were controlling. Even the selection of his own wife was not Puyi’s to decide.
✦ My interpretation
“Whose house is this—yours or mine?” Once you know Duankang said that to Zaifeng, the silence of those women in the shadows lands differently. Bertolucci may not have dramatized the consort selection battle—but he put its essence on screen anyway.
A Quiet Verdict on Power
Puyi was, nominally, the Son of Heaven. But he could not choose his own wife. The selection was overturned by a dowager consort whose authority rested on factional maneuvering and the sheer force of her will.
Wenxiu’s story is a quiet illustration of what had actually happened to Qing imperial power by the early 1920s. The throne retained its ceremonial forms—the robes, the rituals, the photographs being circled—while the real decision-making had long since moved elsewhere.
Wanrong never stopped being an empress in her own mind. She held on to the title through everything—the coup, the exile, the puppet state, the catastrophe that followed. The Japanese, who installed Puyi as their puppet emperor of Manchukuo, called her “the false empress” behind her back. The thing she had sacrificed everything to hold onto had, by then, no substance left.
Wenxiu let it go in 1931. She became a teacher. She died obscure, in 1953, in the People’s Republic.
It’s possible to read their two trajectories as a kind of verdict—not on which woman was better, but on which one saw clearly.
— A fuller account of Wanrong’s life and fate will appear in a separate article. —
Written by Saorin | 還暦散歩 (Kanreki Sanpo) | en.satoe3.com