The Buddhist Women Who Ruled China
- Mrunal Madhuri Milind Dupte
- Apr 26
- 7 min read
Once again, history crowns its kings: fierce, commanding, and larger than life. They build kingdoms, shape civilizations, and carve their names into stone. And the women? They’re the beautiful footnotes, the silent queens standing beside the power.
Generation after generation, we’re handed the same tired script: men as the makers of destiny, women as mere companions. This isn’t just storytelling but a pattern of erasure. Official histories often reduce women to ornaments or smear them as schemers when they dare to hold real power. The deeper you look, the clearer it gets: the history we celebrate isn’t just male-centered: it’s rigged.
This isn't just a local flaw, androcentrism and misogyny stain historical records across the globe. It isn’t a glitch!
This is the story of a queen who, instead of being remembered for her strength, was painted as a villain. Historians branded her a wicked woman, accused of murdering her husband and son in a ruthless grab for power. They called her a disgrace to womanhood, blaming her for the fall of her kingdom.
After all, history, as it’s so often told, is simply the biography of great men, and she dared to be a woman.
Empress Dowager
The Empress Dowager, a name barely whispered in the grand halls of history. A woman of real power, yet remembered only through a cracked and distorted mirror.
Born in the late 400s in Anding, a region once held by the Han Empire before its western expansion, she rose in a world that was never built for women to rule. Her story? Mostly written by men who gained everything from her downfall.
They painted her as a monster: a cruel queen, hungry for power, accused of murdering her own husband, the emperor, and later her son, just to keep her grip on the throne. When she was finally toppled in a conspiracy, her legacy was systematically destroyed.
So here’s the question: if her story was erased and rewritten by those who despised her, how much truth do we even have left?
Historian Stephanie Balkwill points out something powerful: if we want a true account of women’s roles in ancient society, we have to turn to Buddhist studies. During medieval times, Buddhism wasn’t just a religion, it was a vital space for women. Women didn’t just follow Buddhism; they helped shape it, leaving behind documents and records that we now call “Buddhist sources.”
These sources offer rare and revealing glimpses into women’s lives, a history written by women, about women.
This approach, often called Buddhist feminist historiography, digs into historically grounded Buddhist texts to ask critical questions about how women really lived, ruled, and resisted, cutting through the myths written by those who tried to erase them.
Who Was the Real Empress Dowager?
When we turn to Buddhist sources, the ones women helped create, a very different picture emerges. The Empress Dowager wasn’t a villain; she was one of the most influential queens of her time, honored by the people as Empress Dowager Ling. Her legacy didn’t end with her — her granddaughter would go on to become Emperor Wu, China's first and only female emperor, and another forgotten monarch buried under centuries of male-centered history.
After the emperor’s death, Empress Dowager Ling stepped up, taking charge of the kingdom at a time when few women were allowed near real power. Her rise wasn't accidental: she had been brought to the court by her aunt, Shi Sengzhi, a Buddhist nun and court influencer under Emperor Xuanwu (r. 499–515).
Buddhism, unlike many other traditions of the time, gave women a path to real influence — allowing them to teach, lead, and shape the highest levels of society.
What Did Empress Dowager Ling Actually Do?
For starters, she transformed the skyline of her empire.
Before history tried to erase her, Empress Dowager Ling commissioned the tallest building the world had ever seen, a soaring Buddhist stupa, or pagoda, right at the heart of her capital, Luoyang. This wasn’t just a temple; it was a monumental, nine-story religious and political complex called the Eternal Peace Monastery. Covered in dazzling decorations, the stupa stretched 248 meters into the sky — taller than two American football fields stacked end to end. Historians wrote that it gleamed like a jewel, sheltering over a thousand rooms for monks and nuns.
Influenced by Emperor Ashoka’s legendary 84,000 stupas in India, Empress Dowager Ling ordered five-story pagodas built in every prefecture across her realm, echoing his grand vision.
Beyond the Eternal Peace Monastery, Empress Dowager Ling built its sister sanctuary, the Jade Radiance Nunnery, tucked within the palace walls themselves. She personally funded its crown jewel: a magnificent five-story pagoda that soared fifty zhang into the sky, so high that its bells were said to hang among the clouds.
The nunnery was no small retreat, it was a sprawling complex, with lecture halls, nun’s quarters, and over 500 rooms bustling with life, learning, and prayer. Here, women found a sanctuary to live, lead, and study beyond the confines of traditional patriarchal roles.
Through her architectural marvels, Empress Dowager Ling wasn’t just building temples, she was building a future where women could thrive.
She carried the title of Cakravartin, the universal ruler, and lived up to it, fusing faith, politics, and architecture into a power few dared to imagine. Beyond architecture, she ushered in sweeping social reforms, making her reign a force of spiritual and societal transformation
Beyond Monuments: Empress Dowager Ling's True Legacy
Empress Dowager Ling didn’t just leave her mark on architecture, she reshaped society itself.
Beyond her stunning contributions to monastic communities, especially for women, she was the driving force behind the patronage of the largest and most intricate Buddhist grottoes of the Northern Wei dynasty. She funded grand monasteries and spearheaded massive urban projects that transformed the capital’s landscape.
In an era when patriarchy ruled every corner of life, Buddhism offered women a rare escape. It carved out spaces where women could step outside the rigid demands of family life and create new forms of virtue, as chaste, independent figures within all-female, state-sponsored networks.
Buddhism wasn’t just a religion; for the women of Northern Wei, it was a revolution.
Empress Dowager Ling saw the power of this shift. She sponsored the construction of the Nunnery of the Superintendent of the Nuns, a bold institution that opened doors for women to become nuns, scholars, and leaders within the capital. Under her reign, Buddhist women rose to hold high political positions, an unprecedented leap forward in a deeply male-dominated court.
Looking closely at her rule, historians realized she wasn’t trying to mimic the usual dynastic monarchy. She was building something radically different: a Buddhist monarchy. She ruled as a Cakravartin, a wheel-turning monarch, blending spiritual authority with imperial power, and forever changing the possibilities for women in China.
A Queen Like No Other: Empress Dowager Ling's Bold Public Life
Empress Dowager Ling wasn’t a ruler hidden behind palace walls. She was bold, visible, and defiant. Some accounts describe her riding out in public, surrounded by women in armor on horseback, flanking her royal carriage like a living symbol of strength.
She practiced archery, wielding a bow with the same skill as any soldier, despite the scolding of male courtiers who tried to remind her of "proper" behaviour for a woman. She ignored them.
Under her reign, women didn’t just exist, they led. Rock inscriptions show women and men collaborating on vast construction projects, with women enjoying enough financial autonomy to fund major initiatives themselves. Within Buddhist monastic communities, women acted as independent agents, no longer tethered solely to male authority.
Buddhism gave them this power and Empress Dowager Ling championed it.
She ruled over a multiethnic, multicultural state during a time of intense reinvention, tapping into new social currents that allowed women to rise as leaders. Northern Wei women, often erased from the historical spotlight, were active, autonomous public figures, controlling their finances, leading projects, and reshaping society.
Unlike the monarchs before her, Empress Dowager Ling’s patronage of Buddhist building projects eclipsed even her imperial predecessors, reportedly costing more than four million medieval cash coins.
She wasn't just following tradition — she was rewriting it.
Empress Dowager Ling did something revolutionary: she placed a girl on the throne — a bold move backed by her role as a Buddhist regent. Drawing on Buddhist ideas that supported female rule, she reshaped the very notion of who could wield power in her kingdom.
The Erasure of Empress Dowager Ling
And after all she gave — after reshaping her capital, after building sanctuaries and futures, what did Empress Dowager Ling receive? Betrayal.
She was accused of the unthinkable: the murder of her own husband and son. Stripped of honor, she was drowned in a river, her body discarded without ceremony. No funeral. No mourning.
The towering monuments she commissioned have long since crumbled into dust. Her story - her true story, was buried too, erased by the hands of the very men who seized the empire she once ruled. Her official biography, cold and brutal, was written by those who inherited her throne, eager to erase her power and rewrite her as a villain.
If women vanish from historical records under the weight of male-dominated narratives, how much more brutal was the erasure of a woman like Empress Dowager Ling, violently removed, then ruthlessly rewritten?
And heartbreakingly, she is not alone. Her story is one among countless others lost to silence.
Conclusion: Reclaiming Her Story
History has never been kind to women. For centuries, official records hammered home one brutal message: a woman’s rule meant chaos. "Just as a hen cannot crow at dawn, neither can a woman speak in political matters," they wrote, not as some ancient relic, but as a belief that still lingers in today’s patriarchal world.
When women ruled, they weren’t celebrated, they were vilified. Labeled as meddlers, signs of weakness, curses upon the natural order. Heaven itself, they claimed, despised female power.
Empress Dowager Ling was not alone. Empress Jia (256-300) of the Jin Dynasty was branded jealous and reckless. Empress Lü of the Han Dynasty (241-180 BCE) was condemned as cruel, ruthless, and dangerously ambitious.
Time and again, powerful women were rewritten as villains, murderers, seductresses, and monsters.
But buried beneath the propaganda, another truth survives. When given space, as Buddhism offered, women didn’t bring collapse. They built. They led. They transformed societies. They flourished.
It’s time we shift our lens. Buddhist feminist histories offer a window into the real stories stories that patriarchal records tried to erase.
It’s time to stop reading history through the eyes of those who feared powerful women. It’s time to reclaim the past, uncover the accounts written by women, and finally hear the voices history tried so hard to silence.
