University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies

Since Lien-sheng Yang published his seminal work “Female Rulers in China,” much research has been done on dowagers and empresses of imperial dynasties who held political power in place of their sons or husbands. In the south and southwest, however, women rulers have been systematical instead of exceptional. Known as nu tusi, or female chieftains, women rulers of the local non-Han peoples during the Ming-Qing period received attention from the literati, because they challenged Confucian social norms. The Chinese literati made a genealogy of women rulers of the south, representing them in various types of texts, including historical records, miscellaneous notes, gazetteers, fictions and pictorial images. In this talk Professor Hu will examine some examples to discuss how the images of women rulers of the south is formed rhetorically in their historical contexts.