Life Center / Comprehensive Report
▲Under the inhumane behavior of Emperor Jiajing, many maids died of illness or exhaustion. (Picture / Retrieved from Sohu.com)
Ming Shizong Zhu Houjun, also known as the Jiajing Emperor, was the eleventh emperor of the Ming Dynasty. He was named the “Lord of Zhongxing” by later generations after he reigned for more than 40 years. The four are fierce, and there are the five that shake the world alone.” All in all, it is very powerful. During his rule, the politics, economy, and military of the Ming Dynasty have been greatly strengthened and improved. The appearance of Emperor Jiajing was the mainstay of the Ming Dynasty’s continuation, but it was such a wise man who, in order to live forever, did not hesitate to force a group of maids to go to bed, and even used the maid’s menstruation to create elixir of life, and he was not allowed to eat and drink normally. The maids starved to death or died of exhaustion, which led to the incident of the maids assassinating the emperor.
▲The Emperor Jiajing abused the maid in order to make an elixir of life. In the end, he was assassinated by more than 10 maids and almost died in Huangquan. (Picture / Retrieved from Sohu.com)
Emperor Jiajing believed in Taoism in his later years and used a lot of elixir called “red lead pills”. The material for making this elixir comes from the menstrual blood of a virgin. The Taoists advocated that this pill could allow Emperor Jiajing to share a room with a virgin virgin after taking it to achieve the effect of “collecting yin and replenishing yang” and prolonging life. Therefore, in order to make a large number of such pills, Emperor Jiaqing ordered to recruit many thirteen and fourteen-year-old women from the people to become palace maids. Their task was to make materials for red lead pills, waiting for the favor of Emperor Jiajing. What’s more cruel is that in order to keep these “medicine introductions” clean, he ordered all the maids not to eat, but to eat mulberry leaves and drink dew like silkworms every day. This inhumane abuse left many palace maids starved to death and died of illness.
Where there is oppression, there is resistance. Don’t look at these are a group of weak women, they are not inferior to men when they are strong. In order to save themselves from the sea of misery, the palace ladies gathered together to formulate an assassination plan. They wanted to strangle Emperor Jiajing to death when he was not paying attention. So, in the twenty-first year of Jiajing (November 1542), the night of October 21st. After taking the medicine refined by Tao Zhongwen, Emperor Jiajing came to the residence of a concubine surnamed Cao, who was named “Duanfei”. The residence of Concubine Cao is called “Yikun Palace”, which is not far from the “Kunning Palace” where the queen lives. The palace maids are ready to start right here, because the palace maids who serve Concubine Cao are the advocates of the assassination plan.
Soon, more than a dozen palace maids gathered outside the Yikun Palace, sneaked into Emperor Jiajing’s dragon couch, took out the rope and strangled the sleeping Emperor Jiajing to death. Everyone started working together, using the prepared noose to wrap the Emperor Jiajing’s neck, and then pulling it with their hands. As a result, the nervous maids accidentally tied two dead knots, and the two dead knots were tied together, and the tighter they were, the emperor could not be strangled. The other palace maids were in a hurry. They pulled out their golden hairpins and silver hairpins and stabbed the emperor. Emperor Jiajing was held down by several palace maids, unable to move. In this way, Emperor Jiajing was still immortal, and finally a palace maid was afraid. She probably thought that Emperor Jiajing was a real dragon that could not be killed.
As a result, the only palace maid uprising in Chinese history, the “Renyin Palace Change”, ended in the failure of the palace maid. Although Emperor Jiajing survived, he was also scared to death, and he never dared to live with his concubine until his death.
