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"The Long Rest of Life: A Northern Wei Palace Maid and Her Times" Author: Luo Xin Publishing House: Beijing Daily Press Douban 2022 Annual Historical and Cultural Books
"The Long Rest of Life: A Northern Wei Palace Maid and Her Times" Author: Luo Xin Publishing House: Beijing Daily Press Douban 2022 Annual Historical and Cultural Books
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Description
Introduction · · · · · ·
In 466 AD, Emperor Ming of Song Liu Yu and his nephew Liu Zixun, who proclaimed himself emperor in Xunyang, co-existed as two emperors. The civil war almost affected the entire territory of Liu Song, and then evolved into a war with the Northern Wei Dynasty. Wang Zhonger, who was born in a middle-level bureaucratic family in the Southern Dynasty, was forced to get involved, her family was broken up, and two years later she was abducted as an ordinary maid in Pingcheng Palace at the age of 30. However, her fate was accidentally linked to the "son is noble, mother dies" system, and she was accidentally involved in the vortex of power struggle. She became a key figure in raising two generations of emperors as a maid and a nun, and lived in the Northern Wei court for 56 years.
Professor Luo Xin uses epitaphs and other historical materials to tell the story of Wang Zhonger's long and eventful life, and looks at the era she lived in through her eyes, restoring the emperor, concubines, relatives, courtiers, eunuchs and palace maids into specific people, showing their joy, suspicion, arrogance and despair when facing power... As Wang Zhonger's life story unfolds, there is also the nearly eighty years of Northern Wei history from Emperor Xianwen, Emperor Xiaowen to Emperor Xuanwu and Emperor Xiaoming, and of course there are also many people who were swept away by the stormy waves of the times.
We pay attention to ordinary people in distant times because they are part of real history. Without them, history would be incomplete and untrue.
About the Author
Luo Xin is a professor at the Center for Research on Ancient Chinese History and the Department of History at Peking University. His professional research interests include the history of the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties and the history of ancient Chinese ethnic groups. His representative works include Studies on the Names of Northern Ethnic Groups in the Middle Ages (2009) and The Emperor of the Northern Wei Dynasty on the Black Felt (2014). He has also written travel literature From Dadu to Shangdu: Rediscovering China on the Ancient Road (2018) and the academic essay The Rebel Who Does Not Do Something (2019).
