Today is International Women’s Day, and to celebrate we’ve compiled this countdown of some of the most influential women to ever grace the Middle Kingdom.
Wu Zetian (武则天)
Born 624AD
Died 705AD
Famous for Seducing, strangling and strategising her way to power.
Wu Zetian knew how to exploit her beauty and virtually unprecedented education, and soon rose to become a concubine to Emperor Taizong and later his son, Emperor Gaozong. However, Wu Zetian had some serious political ambition and progressively gained influence above and beyond that which was usual for an emperor’s consort: an asphyxiated baby and some slurs against the Empress later, Wu Zetian was a puppetmaster at court as the broadly useless Gaozong’s Empress Consort.
By 690, after hubby’s death, she was named as the one and only Empress Regent to rule China in the span of four millennia.
Soong Ching-Ling (宋庆龄)
Born 1893.
Died 1981.
Famous for Being the ‘mother of modern China’, philanthropy, holding an insane amount of PRC positions.
The wife of Sun-Yat Sen, the first President of the Republic of China, this political powerhouse continued to be heavily involved in politics after her husband’s death (and since ‘politics’ in this instance means revolution as opposed to local council petitions, it seems fair to say that Madame Soong had a titanium-reinforced spine).
Empress Dowager Cixi (慈禧太后)
Born 1835.
Died 1908.
Famous for Her ruthless grade-A machinations and eschewing a modern navy in favour of a giant marble boat.
Okay, so she inadvertently ended centuries of imperial rule. Okay, so the third paragraph of her Wikipedia page calls her a ‘despot’, and there might be a panel tucked away in the Forbidden City that asserts that she ordered one of her eunuchs to drown a concubine in a well. But to all intents and purposes, she controlled the government for 47 years through her son, scared people and built the Summer Palace in Beijing. She might not have been pleasant, but you can’t fault her drive.
Li Qingzhao (李清照)
Born 1084.
Died around 1155.
Famous for Being a literary badass and China’s most celebrated female poet.
Although most of her work has been lost, the remaining fragments we have of Li Qingzhao’s emotionally powerful poetry are some of the most revered works in China’s literary history. Li was one of the earliest writers to master ci style poetry (a type of song poetry) and conduct scholarship on its metrical form.
Tu Youyou (屠呦呦)
Born 1930 (now 86 years old)
Famous for Savings millions of lives across the world after discovering anti-malaria medicine; being a Nobel Prize winner.
In 2015, Tu Youyou was awarded the Nobel Prize for her historic discovery of artemisinin, one of the most effective drugs in the treatment of malaria. She is the first Chinese woman to ever receive the Nobel Prize, and the first Chinese person to earn a Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine.
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