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 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 family—the Erdet clan, a Mongol house enrolled in the Manchu Bordered Yellow Banner, the foremost of the elite “upper three” banners under the emperor’s direct command. 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 banner 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 distinctive 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.

There may be more to that detail than chance. Puyi recalled that what decided him was the dress—and even in a blurred, indistinct photograph, hers stood out. Look at the surviving image and the reason is plain: Wenxiu alone is wearing an outfit of clearly different silhouette. The likely explanation is her ancestry. As a girl of Mongol descent, she would have been dressed unlike the Manchu candidates, and that distinctive shape was enough to catch the eye precisely where the faces themselves were impossible to tell apart. If so, the very feature that first drew Puyi’s circle was the same ethnic fact that would later shape the hierarchy between empress and consort (see Section 5).

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 a sister of the tragic Pearl Consort—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. “Does this household answer to you, or to me?” she reportedly demanded. Zaifeng caved. Puyi was told to choose again.

Even the emperor’s own father could not stand against the pressure of a dowager consort.

✦ 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 Zaixun 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 now was impossible. But she could not withstand Duankang’s pressure, and Puyi was made to draw 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.

✦ My interpretation

It’s worth pausing on the ethnic layer beneath this choice. From its founding, the Qing had bound itself to the Mongol aristocracy through marriage—several of the dynasty’s earliest and most revered empresses, including the formidable Grand Empress Dowager Xiaozhuang, came from the Mongol Borjigit clan. Over the centuries, though, that pattern faded: empresses came overwhelmingly from Manchu banner families, while the Mongol alliance was sustained more by marrying Qing princesses out to Mongol nobles. By 1922, with the dynasty itself already fallen, no rule compelled the court to seat a Mongol woman at all.

And yet old instincts may have lingered. Wanrong, of the Manchu Gobulo clan, was the natural choice for empress; by the later Qing sensibility, placing a woman of Mongol descent at the very summit may have felt less fitting to the Manchu dowagers—even though the early dynasty had honored exactly such empresses. At the same time, the long tradition of welcoming Mongol consorts left a place for Wenxiu, of Mongol origin, just below. The documented trigger was the faction fight; but beneath it, one can sense an older logic quietly at work—a Manchu empress above, a Mongol consort beside her.

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 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 foreshadowed the conflicts that would later set Wanrong against Puyi and the Japanese army alike. 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, by contrast, said she had no objection to leaving.

✦ My interpretation

These two responses reveal something essential about each woman. Wanrong’s refusal was pure emotion and vanity—an attachment to the title and what it represented that fit neither the old norms of empress-hood nor any clear-eyed reading of the present.

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 hollow 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.

Life in the palace had been a long ordeal for Wenxiu. Trained in the old ways, she had resolved to support her emperor as a loyal consort. But between Wanrong’s exclusion and Puyi’s indifference, that resolve was never rewarded.

When the suffering became unbearable, Wenxiu once concealed a sharp pair of scissors in her sleeve, intending to take her own life. A eunuch noticed in time and stopped her.

✦ 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. In the image of a woman hiding scissors in her sleeve, you can see how total her solitude had become.

8. Tianjin: The Consort Left Downstairs

Driven from the Forbidden City by Feng Yuxiang’s coup in 1924, Puyi took refuge in the Japanese concession of Tianjin. He first moved into Zhang Garden, and later into the white Western-style villa known as Jingyuan—the “Quiet Garden.” The fallen court had shrunk to a single corner of a foreign concession.

The way the three of them divided that house tells the whole story. Puyi lived upstairs with Wanrong; Wenxiu was placed on the ground floor. Marginalized even in the Forbidden City, in Tianjin she was pushed, quite literally, “below.” A consort in name, she now rarely so much as saw her husband’s face.

And yet Wenxiu kept to her duties with quiet discipline. Each morning, once dressed, she would make her rounds—first to Puyi’s quarters, then to Wanrong and the dowager consorts—before returning to her own room to embroider in silence or teach the maids their letters. The household staff are said to have spoken warmly of her composed, courteous manner.

One Lunar New Year’s Eve, while Puyi and Wanrong were together in their bedchamber, a eunuch rushed in with urgent news: the Shufei had stabbed herself in the stomach with scissors. Puyi answered coldly. “That’s her usual threat,” he said. “No one need pay it any attention.”

That single remark is said to have become the fuse for what would later be called the “Consort’s Revolution.”

✦ My interpretation

The scissors of the Forbidden City—the pair hidden in her sleeve—and these scissors of the Tianjin New Year’s Eve are recorded as two separate incidents. There is something piercing in seeing the same token, the blade, recur twice. For Wenxiu, I suspect, a sharp edge was the one means she had left to assert that she existed at all. She could raise her voice and go unheard; she could make her dutiful rounds and go unseen. To wound her own body was the only way left to say: I am here. And even that cry was waved off as “her usual threat.” The final blade—divorce—was already being honed that night.

9. The Consort’s Revolution: The Woman Who Took an Emperor to Court

On August 25, 1931, Wenxiu left Jingyuan together with her younger sister Wenshan and went into hiding at a hotel. There she retained a lawyer and formally filed for divorce from Puyi.

A consort suing an emperor for divorce—it was something the dynastic order could scarcely conceive of. The abdicated Qing house, the old princes and ministers, were deeply shaken. Her own cousin Wenqi published an open letter in the newspapers denouncing her, and her clan condemned her bitterly.

Wenxiu would not retreat. She rebuffed her family’s opposition and every settlement offer floated by Puyi’s lawyers, and kept pressing the Tianjin district court for a formal divorce.

Her grounds were plain: nine years in the emperor’s service without once receiving his favor, and a life of palace confinement and neglect she could no longer endure. At first, her side is said to have demanded the enormous sum of 500,000 yuan in maintenance.

For Puyi—who was secretly planning his escape to Manchuria—any further scandal was the last thing he wanted. In the end, on October 22, 1931, the divorce was settled: Puyi paid 55,000 yuan in a lump sum, on the condition that Wenxiu never remarry.

The public called the whole affair the “Consort’s Revolution”—a “revolution” launched by the very consort who had once taken up a blade against herself. Puyi became the only man in Chinese history to hold the title of emperor and a record of divorce at the same time.

But his retaliation did not end there. After the divorce was finalized, the old Qing ministers pressed Puyi to “depose” Wenxiu. He issued a proclamation in the newspapers of Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai: the Shufei had arbitrarily initiated a divorce in defiance of ancestral law, and was therefore stripped of her rank and reduced to commoner status. In this way her title as imperial consort was publicly taken from her.

✦ My interpretation

What strikes me is that Wenxiu retained a lawyer and used a modern court system to challenge the emperor. This was China a century ago, and her opponent was a man who had, for all his diminished power, been emperor. And a single woman defeated him—not through appeals to sentiment, but through a legal battle. Tianjin, with its foreign concessions, breathed a far more modern air than the warlord-ridden regions elsewhere. In another place, this “revolution” might never have been possible at all. As I suggested earlier, Wenxiu had long since seen through the throne as an empty shell. That cool realism is what crystallized, here, into the concrete act of appealing to the law.

✦ My interpretation

One more thing should not be missed: Puyi blamed the divorce on Wanrong, and his relationship with her deteriorated as a result. To the end, he never admitted that his own neglect was the cause. With Wenxiu gone, his court lost one of its few “eyes that faced reality.” That vacancy would, in time, be filled by the Kwantung Army.

10. Living as Fu Yufang: The Consort’s Later Years

Now a commoner, Wenxiu chose to conceal her name and begin life again under the Han name Fu Yufang.

In the summer of 1932, she became a teacher of Chinese and drawing at the private Sicun primary-and-middle school in Beiping (Beijing). Her chalk characters were beautiful, her voice clear, her lessons lucid; her students grew fond of the new teacher. It was the first modest but dignified work she had held since the divorce.

Before long, however, the truth came out—that the woman teacher Fu Yufang was none other than the former Shufei, Erdet Wenxiu. Reporters descended on the school, and sensational stories filled the papers day after day. Her wish to live quietly was trampled by public curiosity, and she could no longer remain in teaching.

After long years of hardship, in the summer of 1947, the thirty-eight-year-old Wenxiu began working as a proofreader at the North China Daily, introduced through an acquaintance. There she met Liu Zhendong, a relative of the newspaper’s publisher—a major and supply officer in the Nationalist army, then in his forties, a native of Henan and still unmarried. Wounded so deeply by Puyi, Wenxiu hesitated at first at the thought of remarriage, but over five months she was moved by Liu’s sincerity and steadfastness, and they married in Beiping. The wedding, it is said, was held in grand style at the renowned restaurant Dongxinglou.

The times were turbulent. Amid the chaos of the civil war their finances declined, and they spent their days selling off household goods. Then, in 1949, Beiping was liberated. Urged on by Wenxiu, Liu honestly reported his military past to the People’s Government. His candor was appreciated; spared imprisonment, in 1951 he became a worker on a sanitation crew in Beijing’s Xicheng district.

The couple moved into a tiny room of about ten square meters in Pichai Hutong, Xicheng. They had no children. Wenxiu did the housework herself—the shopping, the cooking. Their life was poor but genuinely warm. Compared with the lonely days when she had reigned in the palace as an imperial consort, it may be that this small room in an ordinary back lane was, ironically, the first real home she ever had.

On the night of September 17, 1953, Wenxiu suddenly collapsed at home and died. It was a heart attack. She was forty-four. The only one at her side was her husband, Liu Zhendong.

The funeral was extremely simple. The household was too poor to buy a coffin, and in the end she was laid in a crude box of four thin boards nailed together by the sanitation crew, and buried—without so much as a gravestone—in a public cemetery outside Andingmen. This was the end of the woman an emperor had once chosen with a single circle of ink. Liu Zhendong, it is said, never took another wife for the rest of his life.

✦ My interpretation: on the conflict between sources

Accounts of Wenxiu’s later years diverge in tone. Many Chinese sources describe her life after marrying Liu Zhendong as “poor but warm and stable.” Others emphasize that, her alimony long since exhausted, she “died in extreme poverty.” I don’t think these two are contradictory. Materially, she was without question destitute. But it is also surely true that, for the first time, she built an equal household with someone who loved her as a single human being. The warmth of that ten-square-meter room—gained only by giving up the hollow title of “imperial consort”—was perhaps the very thing Wenxiu had sought all her life and never found. It is also worth noting that she is the only imperial consort in Chinese history to have worked as a schoolteacher.

✦ My interpretation

Liu Zhendong is said not to have known his wife’s true identity through six years of marriage. As Fu Yufang lay dying, she told him for the first time: “My true name is Erdet Wenxiu. I was once an imperial consort of the great Qing.” In this last confession, I feel, the whole of how she lived is distilled. She neither boasted of having been a consort nor hid it in shame; she simply returned the truth, quietly, to the one person she trusted, and then was gone. The contrast with Wanrong—who could never release her grip on the title of “empress” until the day she died—could hardly be sharper.

11. 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

“Does this household answer to you, or to me?” 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.

Puyi was, nominally, the Son of Heaven. But he did not even possess the freedom to choose his own empress. 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 power had long since drained away.

Wanrong, for her part, clung to her title through Puyi’s exile in Tianjin and then through his installation as emperor of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo. She died in 1946—most likely in a Soviet detention facility after the Japanese defeat. She had spent the last years of her life addicted to opium.

✦ My interpretation: the consort selection as a turning point

Puyi had no real power to choose his own empress. The choice he made was overturned by Duankang’s pressure, and that overturning became a great fork in the road of history.

Wanrong never relinquished her attachment to the title of “empress.” It carried her through everything—her refusal to leave the Forbidden City, her move to Tianjin, and finally to Manchukuo. What drove her at every turn was a thirst for the glory the title promised. The Japanese treated her with outward courtesy while calling her “the false empress” behind her back. The “empress” she clung to at the cost of her life had, by then, no substance left.

Wenxiu, by contrast, divorced Puyi in 1931 and chose to live as a teacher in Beijing. She quietly let go of the title of “consort” and found her own place in the real world.

Had Duankang not overturned Puyi’s choice, how might history have moved? If a woman who faced reality so clearly had become empress, perhaps Manchukuo would never have been an option at all.

— 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