Imperial Succession in an Imaginary China
Jan. 6th, 2022 08:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
steepholmSo, last night's dream raised a waking question that I hope someone here can answer.
In my dream, I was working in the Chinese imperial court, helping to look after the Emperor's two children. They were two boys, still quite young (about 3 and 6), devoted to each other and really very sweet. Strangely, though, the younger rather than the elder was the heir to the throne of China.
This is how it came about. I'm not sure if real-life Chinese Emperors could be married to more than one woman at once, but my dream-Emperor was. He preferred his second wife (mother of the younger child), but because the elder child was the son of his first wife he could not at first make him his heir. His solution was to divorce his first wife, and then remarry her, bumping her and her son down the pecking order so that she was now wife No. 2. According to Chinese law, this also made her son into son No. 2.
In my dream, I spoke to the demoted wife, who seemed quite philosophical about it - she was still married to the Emperor, after all - but I was worried that the boys' relationship would be soured in future years when they learned the whole story.
I suppose my question is, has anything like this ever happened outside my head, either in China or elsewhere? It seems like a good set-up for a multigenerational blockbuster novel, of the kind that I would want neither to write nor read, but that would rake in the cash.
In my dream, I was working in the Chinese imperial court, helping to look after the Emperor's two children. They were two boys, still quite young (about 3 and 6), devoted to each other and really very sweet. Strangely, though, the younger rather than the elder was the heir to the throne of China.
This is how it came about. I'm not sure if real-life Chinese Emperors could be married to more than one woman at once, but my dream-Emperor was. He preferred his second wife (mother of the younger child), but because the elder child was the son of his first wife he could not at first make him his heir. His solution was to divorce his first wife, and then remarry her, bumping her and her son down the pecking order so that she was now wife No. 2. According to Chinese law, this also made her son into son No. 2.
In my dream, I spoke to the demoted wife, who seemed quite philosophical about it - she was still married to the Emperor, after all - but I was worried that the boys' relationship would be soured in future years when they learned the whole story.
I suppose my question is, has anything like this ever happened outside my head, either in China or elsewhere? It seems like a good set-up for a multigenerational blockbuster novel, of the kind that I would want neither to write nor read, but that would rake in the cash.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-01-06 03:40 pm (UTC)The Empress Consort was the principal wife, and in theory the oldest son of the first Empress Consort had priority on becoming the Crown Prince, even if lower-status wives had sons who were older, but in practice this hinged on how good the Empress Consort and her birth-family played the game of palace politics. (Whether the Crown Prince actually succeeded his father was a whole other kettle of wax.)
There were multiple ranks of consorts and wives and concubines, resulting in a large harem quarter, but in practice the lowest levels of concubines never even saw the Emperor but were attached to his household in order to give them access to the harem as higher-level servants to the other consorts and higher-level concubines.
So, if your older son was from a secondary consort and the younger from the Empress, then yes, that's an entirely plausible scenario, without bothering with the convoluted (and deeply politics-filled) divorce scenario. The divorce and remarry thing couldn't/wouldn't happen, actually.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-01-06 05:41 pm (UTC)