Xu, the wife of Ming Dynasty Emperor Zhu Di, was a resourceful empress who aided his rise, earned wide respect, and was mourned by him for life.
In the winter month of the seventh year of the Yongle era, light snow had been falling in Beiping for a full ten days. When the news of Mrs. Xu’s death reached the desk in the Qianqing Palace, Zhu Di had just finished reviewing a memorial on border defenses submitted by the Liaodong Regional Military Commission. His knuckles, resting against the end of his red-inked annotation, were a nearly translucent white.
This empress, who followed Zhu Di from the Prince of Yan’s mansion to the Forbidden City, was never a delicate woman sheltered away in her inner chambers.During the Siege of Beiping in the first year of the Jianwen era, Zhu Di led the main force on a lightning raid to Daining to seek reinforcements, while Li Jinglong commanded a 500,000-strong imperial army that sealed off Beiping so tightly that not even a drop of water could pass through. Inside the city, only the elderly, the infirm, and a handful of stragglers remained, and the entire population lived in constant fear and dread.At that time, Xu, who was still the Princess Consort of the Prince of Yan, donned armor and climbed the city walls to oversee the defense. She led the strong women of the city in hauling bricks and stones to repair the fortifications. Even as arrows whizzed past her temples, she did not retreat a single step, tenaciously holding Zhu Di’s stronghold until the reinforcements returned.
After Zhu Di ascended the throne as emperor, Empress Xu assumed her position as the empress and remained steadfastly within the bounds of her duties. She cut back on unnecessary palace expenditures, never indulged in extravagance, and rejected every single request for official positions made by her relatives.Whenever Zhu Di faced major military or state affairs and found it difficult to make a decision, she was often able to cite classical texts and historical precedents to pinpoint the crux of the matter. The entire court, both civil and military officials, had long held this Empress in high esteem,and the palace attendants privately referred to her as “the female scholar.” From the moment she married into the Prince of Yan’s household at the age of fifteen, she had managed all household affairs with meticulous order, and over the decades, there were rarely any oversights.
No one could have imagined that a woman who had endured so many battles and possessed such extraordinary resilience would fall gravely ill from a common cold and pass away at the age of forty-six.
Zhu Di spent his entire life on the battlefield, enduring countless dangers of war, yet he suspended court proceedings for a full hundred days solely for Lady Xu. For the seventeen years that followed, the position of Empress remained vacant, with no successor ever appointed. Among the Ming Thirteen Tombs constructed later, the first to be interred was the underground chamber of Lady Xu’s Changling.
A thorough search of the official histories of the Ming Dynasty reveals no other empress who possessed both literary and military prowess and was capable of holding the home front together during times of crisis.
Such an extraordinary woman, remembered by the emperor throughout his life, truly deserves to be remembered by future generations in the annals of history.
