Three Women Who Changed the Tang Dynasty from qocsuing's blog

Three Women Who Changed the Tang Dynasty

This isn’t news: Human history is, by and large, a collection of men’s stories, with women serving as a silent backdrop or, occasionally, props. Ancient Chinese family genealogies record only the names of male members; the names of the women who nurtured them are lost to us forever.To get more news about women in ancient china, you can visit shine news official website.

Nothing is absolute, however. For a brief period — less than a lifetime — women dominated Chinese political life. Beginning in the late 7th century, Wu Zetian rose from empress consort to empress regnant, becoming the only woman to rule China in her own name. Under her unprecedented influence, women gained remarkable power. Female officials like the brilliant Shangguan Wan’er participated in military and state affairs while Wu’s daughter, Princess Taiping, took active roles at court.
Wu’s reign was brief. She was deposed in a coup in 705 and died shortly thereafter. Within a decade, both Shangguan Wan’er and Princess Taiping were killed. All three were vilified by historians for centuries.

Today, they have become icons of sorts for Chinese women tired of conforming to patriarchal gender norms. Wu is seen in some corners as a proto-feminist, while activists wonder what might have been if Shangguan Wan’er and Princess Taiping had been able to consolidate power. Yet, viewing these three women through the prism of modernity risks missing what made them so unique and important in the first place.
The Ming and Qing dynasties were the very period when ancient women paintings were developing at an unprecedented rate. The amount of women painters and that of their works as well as their artistic expression through painting languages all surpassed the performances of women painters in other dynasties.
The works of women painters in this period were marked with extensive themes such as landscape, flowers and birds and figures, rich techniques as various as fine and freehand brushworks, dark color depiction and ink and wash as well as all kinds of art forms like album, scroll and fan. Although most of these women painters, due to the restrictions of cultural environment, life conditions and ethical and moral standards in that period, failed to form distinctive styles and their achievements in painting languages could not be compared with those of male painters, yet they naturally poured true feelings on their artistic creation so that their works, graceful but slightly melancholy, were characterized by subtle emotions peculiar to women.
Their works opened the new field of revealing women’s emotion world, thus no doubt possessing unique significance in art history of China. The Palace Museum attaches great importance to the acquisition of ancient women painters’ works. Through channels like purchase and donation, the Museum collects over 250 works of the Ming and Qing women painters, among which many are representative works of key women painters. This exhibition displays 42 representative works of 27 women painters in the collection of the Palace Museum and gives a glimpse of the basic features of ancient women paintings in China. (Column Master:Li Shi)