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 first woman Puyi chose was not Wanrong. It was Wenxiu.
With a single circle of ink, the fifteen-year-old emperor picked her photograph out of four. Yet the bowl he lived in was never going to be hers. The choice was overturned within days, and Wenxiu entered the Forbidden City not as empress but as a secondary consort—chosen first, and placed second.
In this series I keep returning to one small object at the Summer Palace in Beijing. In the room of Empress Dowager Longyu—the Guangxu Emperor’s neglected empress—there is a tiny table whose top is a sheet of glass. Beneath it, our guide told me, goldfish were once kept, and the empress would watch them from above. Today the tank is empty.
Beautiful as they were, those goldfish had nowhere to go. When they weakened, they were simply scooped out and thrown away. They seemed to me exactly like the people of the Forbidden City: the consorts, the ladies-in-waiting, the eunuchs who wept when they were expelled because outside the walls they had no way to live. When Longyu issued the abdication in 1912, what she fought hardest to keep was that tank—an annual allowance for the people who could not survive outside it.
Puyi’s two wives were brought into that tank in its last years. Wanrong, as I wrote in my previous article, was a goldfish who could only be herself inside it. The glass walls, the title of “empress,” the gaze of the court: without them, she had no idea who she was. She clung to the tank all the way to Tianjin, then to Manchukuo, and finally to a Soviet detention cell.
Wenxiu is her mirror image. She is the goldfish who leapt out on her own.
But the water outside was cold and murky. The family that had put her into the tank still had its hands on her. The public that had once peered through the glass followed her into the street. This is the story of what it actually cost to leave—and of what she found when she finally did.
1. Sent into the Bowl for the Family
Wenxiu was born into a distinguished house—the Erdet clan, a Mongol family enrolled in the Manchu Bordered Yellow Banner, one 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 carried weight at court.
Then her father died young, and the family’s fortunes collapsed with him. Wenxiu and her mother were left to scrape by on the margins of a society that no longer had much use for impoverished banner nobility.
She still received a traditional education. Quiet and introspective, she immersed herself in classical Chinese poetry, history, and the old texts. Her world was in books.
In 1921, at thirteen, she entered the selection for imperial consorts. The Qing dynasty had fallen a decade earlier, but inside the Forbidden City, Puyi was still playing emperor, and the old rituals went on as if nothing had changed.
For her family, this was not an honor. It was survival. Entering the palace was virtually the only road left to restore the household’s standing.
✦ Satoe’s Take
Keep this in mind, because it returns at the end of the story. Wenxiu did not walk into the goldfish bowl. She was placed there—by a family that needed her to be there. The bowl was, from the very beginning, a family investment.
2. A Circle in Ink—and the Hand That Erased It
Four photographs were laid before the fifteen-year-old Puyi. The images were blurry, the faces hard to make out. According to his memoir, From Emperor to Citizen, he went with his gut: something about Wenxiu’s distinctive dress caught his eye, and he drew a circle around her picture.
✦ Satoe’s Take
Look at the surviving photograph and the reason is plain. Wenxiu alone wears an outfit of clearly different silhouette—most likely because, as a girl of Mongol descent, she was dressed unlike the Manchu candidates. Where faces could not be told apart, that shape stood out. The very feature that drew Puyi’s circle was the same ethnic fact that would place her just below the top.
The choice was overruled at once. Consort Duankang—a surviving consort of the Guangxu Emperor and the most powerful woman left in the palace—found Wenxiu unsuitable: poor, plain, with nothing to offer a court trying to look modern. Wanrong, from a wealthy family, Western-educated and fluent in English, was what the old court wanted to become.
Duankang did not confront Puyi. She went to his father, the regent Zaifeng. “Does this household answer to you, or to me?” she reportedly demanded. Zaifeng gave way, and Puyi was told to choose again.
Behind the scene was a factional fight. Duankang and Puyi’s seventh uncle Zaize backed Wanrong; Consorts Jingyi and Ronghui, with sixth uncle Zaixun, backed Wenxiu. Duankang won. Puyi circled Wanrong’s photograph.
That left one problem. By dynastic custom, a woman whose photograph had received the imperial mark could not marry anyone else. So Ronghui proposed a compromise: Wenxiu would enter as Shufei, a secondary consort. One empress, one consort. A Manchu woman above, a Mongol woman beside her—an arrangement in which, perhaps, the old instincts of the dynasty still quietly operated.
✦ Satoe’s Take
Notice what that custom did. Puyi’s circle could not make Wenxiu empress, but it was enough to make her ineligible for anyone else. The ink that chose her also sealed her in. She was now inside the bowl, with no way back to the life she might have had.
3. Inside the Bowl: Nine Years Unseen
Wanrong had grown up with Western ideas of marriage: a husband belongs to his wife alone. And she knew—she had to have known—that Wenxiu had been chosen first. The woman selected before her now lived in the same palace, one rank below. What Wanrong felt was less jealousy than hostility.
Wenxiu was everything Wanrong was not: bookish, reserved, uninterested in modern social competition. In the confined world of the palace, that difference became a chasm. Puyi, for his part, simply looked away.
The warm scene in The Last Emperor, where the three share a bed in apparent harmony, is cinematic license. The real triangle was Wanrong’s hostility, Puyi’s indifference, and Wenxiu’s isolation.
At one point the suffering became unbearable. Wenxiu hid a sharp pair of scissors in her sleeve, intending to take her own life. A eunuch noticed in time and stopped her.
In 1924, the warlord Feng Yuxiang expelled Puyi’s household from the Forbidden City. Wanrong loudly refused to leave. Wenxiu said she had no objection.
✦ Satoe’s Take
The Republic was more than a decade old. The throne was a fiction kept alive by habit. Wanrong refused to leave the bowl. Wenxiu, the “backward” classicist, may have been the only one of the three who saw that the bowl had no water left in it.
In Tianjin, the household settled in the Japanese concession, finally in the white villa called Jingyuan. Puyi and Wanrong lived upstairs; Wenxiu was placed on the ground floor. Pushed aside in the Forbidden City, she was now, quite literally, put below.
She kept to her duties anyway. Every morning she made her rounds—to Puyi, to Wanrong, to the dowager consorts—then returned to her room to embroider or teach the maids their letters. The staff are said to have spoken warmly of her.
One Lunar New Year’s Eve, a eunuch rushed in to say the Shufei had stabbed herself in the stomach with scissors. Puyi answered coldly: “That’s her usual threat. No one need pay it any attention.”
✦ Satoe’s Take
Two pairs of scissors, two separate incidents. For Wenxiu, I suspect, a blade was the last way left to say I am here. She could speak and go unheard, make her rounds and go unseen. Inside the bowl, even a wound was waved off as “her usual threat.” That night, I think, she understood that the glass would never let her be seen from within. If she wanted to exist, she would have to get out.
4. Breaking the Glass: The Consort’s Revolution
On August 25, 1931, Wenxiu left Jingyuan with her younger sister Wenshan and went into hiding at a hotel. There she retained a lawyer and filed for divorce from Puyi.
A consort suing an emperor for divorce was something the dynastic order could scarcely imagine. The old princes and ministers were shaken. Her own cousin Wenqi published an open letter in the newspapers denouncing her, and her clan condemned her bitterly.
Wenxiu did not retreat. Her grounds were plain: nine years in the emperor’s service without once receiving his favor, and a life of confinement and neglect she could no longer bear. Her side is said to have first demanded 500,000 yuan.
Puyi, secretly preparing his escape to Manchuria, wanted no further scandal. On October 22, 1931, the divorce was settled: he paid 55,000 yuan in a lump sum, on condition that Wenxiu never remarry. The public called it the “Consort’s Revolution.” Puyi became the only man in Chinese history to hold both the title of emperor and a record of divorce.
He did not stop there. Pressed by the old ministers, he published a proclamation in the papers of Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai stripping her of her rank and reducing her to commoner status for defying ancestral law.
✦ Satoe’s Take
Western accounts—and Western films—tend to tell this as a triumph: a modern woman who hired a lawyer and beat an emperor in court. I used to see it that way too. But by Japanese sensibilities, a wife dragging her husband before a judge for money is not heroic. It is unseemly—hashitanai. And Wenxiu, steeped in the classics and in the old virtues of a loyal consort, would have felt that far more sharply than any of us. I don’t think she went to court because she believed in modern rights. I think she went because she had nothing else left.
Consider her position. She had entered the palace as her family’s last hope. Her relatives must have expected something to come back—money, favor, a restored name. Instead she received no favor, lived on the ground floor, and served a court whose finances were steadily shrinking—the allowance Longyu had fought for was paid irregularly by the Republic and dwindled year by year. I doubt she ever had much to send home. I imagine she was blamed for it: the girl who was supposed to save the family and didn’t. Squeezed between an indifferent husband above and a disappointed clan behind her, she twice turned a blade on herself, and twice was ignored.
The lawsuit, I think, was the third blade. Not a proud stride into the modern world, but the last tool a cornered woman could reach. Puyi’s proclamation stripping her of rank was meant as punishment; it merely confirmed in public what she had already been forced to accept in private—that she could no longer survive as a goldfish in his bowl.
5. Outside the Bowl: The Water Was Cold
Fifty-five thousand yuan was a large sum. It should have been enough to start a new life. It was not.
Much of the settlement is said to have gone to lawyers’ fees and to relatives, leaving Wenxiu with relatively little of her own. Remember where she came from: a family that had fallen into poverty after her father’s death, and that had sent her into the palace as its last hope of recovery.
✦ Satoe’s Take
Here the story closes a painful circle. At thirteen, Wenxiu was placed in the goldfish bowl to save her family. For nine years she could give them almost nothing. Then, when she finally broke out, the settlement she won flowed largely back to her relatives. In a bitter way, it was as if the remittance she had never been able to send was paid at last, all at once—at the price of her title and her name. And the same clan that denounced her in the newspapers as a disgrace did not refuse the money that “disgrace” had won. She left the bowl, but she did not leave it light. The family that had put her in was still holding the net.
Wenxiu chose to hide her name and begin again as Fu Yufang, a Han name. In the summer of 1932, she began teaching Chinese and drawing at the private Sicun school in Beiping. Her chalk characters were beautiful, her voice clear, her lessons lucid. Her students grew fond of her.
Then the truth came out: the teacher Fu Yufang was the former Shufei. Reporters descended on the school. Sensational stories filled the papers day after day, and she could no longer stay.
✦ Satoe’s Take
This, to me, is the cruelest part. Wenxiu had broken the glass, but the eyes on the other side of it had not gone away. The public that once peered into the palace now peered into her classroom. Changing her name was her attempt to stop being looked at as a goldfish. The newspapers would not allow it. She had left the bowl, but for the world she was still “the consort who left the bowl”—a curiosity to be watched.
It is also worth noting: she is the only imperial consort in Chinese history to have worked as a schoolteacher.
The years that followed were long and hard. Little is recorded of them except hardship. Not until the summer of 1947, at thirty-eight, did she find steady work again—as a proofreader at the North China Daily, through an acquaintance.
6. A Ten-Square-Meter Room
At the newspaper she met Liu Zhendong, a relative of the publisher—a major and supply officer in the Nationalist army, in his forties, a native of Henan, and unmarried. Wounded so deeply by Puyi, Wenxiu hesitated. Over five months, his sincerity won her. They married in Beiping, with a wedding said to have been held in grand style at the restaurant Dongxinglou.
✦ Satoe’s Take
The divorce settlement had forbidden her ever to remarry. Sixteen years later, she married anyway. The last condition of the bowl—the rule that even outside it she must remain Puyi’s—was the one she finally set aside. She chose her own life over the emperor’s terms.
The times were turbulent. Through the civil war their finances sank, and they lived by selling household goods. When Beiping was taken in 1949, Wenxiu urged Liu to report his military past honestly to the new government. His candor was appreciated; spared imprisonment, he became a worker on a sanitation crew in Xicheng district in 1951.
The couple lived in a room of about ten square meters in Pichai Hutong, Xicheng. They had no children. Wenxiu did the shopping and cooking herself. Their life was poor, but by most accounts it was warm.
On the night of September 17, 1953, Wenxiu collapsed at home from a heart attack. She was forty-four. Only her husband was with her.
The household could not afford a coffin. She was laid in a box of four thin boards nailed together by the sanitation crew, and buried without a gravestone in a public cemetery outside Andingmen. Liu Zhendong, it is said, never married again.
✦ Satoe’s Take: poor, but not lost
Some sources describe her last years as “poor but warm and stable”; others stress that she “died in extreme poverty.” I don’t think these contradict each other. Materially, she was destitute. But for the first time, she shared an equal household with someone who loved her as a single human being. That small room in a back lane may have been the first real home she ever had.
✦ Satoe’s Take: the last confession
Liu Zhendong is said not to have known who his wife really was. As she 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.” She neither boasted of the bowl nor hid it in shame. She simply handed the truth, quietly, to the one person she trusted. Outside the bowl, at last, there was nothing left to hide from.
7. Two Goldfish
Puyi drew two circles in 1921. Both women went into the same bowl. They came out of it in opposite ways.
Wanrong never let go of the glass. The title of “empress” carried her through her refusal to leave the Forbidden City, through Tianjin, and into Manchukuo, where the Japanese bowed to her in public and called her “the false empress” behind her back. She died in 1946, addicted to opium, most likely in a Soviet detention facility. The bowl she clung to had long since run dry.
Wenxiu broke the glass herself. Outside, the water was cold. Her family still took its share; the newspapers still stared; for years she barely got by. Leaving the bowl did not save her from hardship—and I don’t want to pretend that it did.
But she lived. She taught. She married a man of her own choosing, against the emperor’s terms. She cooked her own meals in a ten-square-meter room, and at the end she told the truth about herself to someone who loved her.
✦ Satoe’s Take
Wanrong was a goldfish who could only be herself inside the bowl. Wenxiu was a goldfish who could only become herself outside it. One kept the glamour and lost herself; the other lost everything glamorous and found herself.
And I keep returning to that first circle of ink. Had Duankang not overturned it, a woman who saw the empty throne so clearly would have stood beside Puyi as empress. Perhaps Manchukuo would never have been an option at all. History does not answer such questions. But Wenxiu’s life suggests that the woman Puyi chose first was the one who understood the bowl best—and that is exactly why, in the end, she was the one who left it.
Beneath the glass of Longyu’s little table, the tank is empty now. The goldfish that weakened were scooped out; the eunuchs thrown out of the palace wept because they had nowhere to go. When I think of Wenxiu, I picture the one goldfish that did not wait to be scooped out. She leapt—and somehow, in the cold water of the ordinary world, she learned to swim.
Written by Saorin | 還暦散歩 (Kanreki Sanpo) | en.satoe3.com