Rewarding Female Commanders in Medieval China: Official Documents, Rhetorical Strategies, and Gender Order

Shoufu Yin

doi:10.1017/jch.2021.20

Abstract

AbstractMuch of our knowledge of women and warfare in medieval China comes from biographical/narrative genres of a retrospective nature. This article shifts the focus to an underutilized corpus: imperial documents conferring titles and rewards on women who commanded troops. I examine how the court described these women when it came to honor them, or even when it sought their support through real-time negotiation. In these cases, the recognition of women's achievements was conditioned not only by deep cultural/literary traditions but also by immediate political/military goals of the regime. As a result of the concrete political need to engage with female commanders, medieval Chinese courts deployed different approaches to eulogize them. My investigation shows that closer dialogue between gender studies and official document studies will lead to a more dynamic picture of how a patriarchal regime actually functioned in premodern China.

Highlights

From the Disney animated film Mulan (1998) to the video game Total War: Three Kingdoms (2019), contemporary popular culture has staged medieval Chinese stories of women in war for the global audience.1 Behind these legendary tales, there is an under-recognized history of Chinese women who assumed leadership in violent settings.2 They engaged in fighting, mounted and on foot
My investigation shows that closer dialogue between gender studies and official document studies will lead to a more dynamic picture of how a patriarchal regime functioned in premodern China
Absent from existing scholarship, is an examination of how the court described female commanders when it rewarded them with titles, honors, and other benefits, or even when it sought their support through real-time negotiation

Summary

Introduction

From the Disney animated film Mulan (1998) to the video game Total War: Three Kingdoms (2019), contemporary popular culture has staged medieval (ca. 200–1000 CE) Chinese stories of women in war for the global audience. Behind these legendary tales, there is an under-recognized history of Chinese women who assumed leadership in violent settings. They engaged in fighting, mounted and on foot. While biographical genres are important sources of medieval Chinese history that no researcher can afford to overlook, this article focuses on an alternative corpus: edicts and other official documents (including orders and court-issued letters) rewarding female commanders with privileges, titles, ranks, and incomes.6 These documents, which leave us records of real-time politics, have long evaded scholarly attention, partly because the texts survive for contingent reasons and in a number of different forms, so that serious effort is required to identify them. Genres ranging from official dynastic histories to poems and tales sought to justify female leadership in war by highlighting the heroine’s resolve to rescue, to aid, or to avenge her father or husband This rhetoric contrasts with that embedded in real-time political negotiations, which we shall examine in subsequent sections. In the heat of the moment in the midst of complicated political necessities that the aforementioned biographers—writing in retrospect—did not face, the authors of edicts and other official documents deployed somewhat different rhetoric, which the following sections examine

Female Commanders as Exceptions to Patriarchal Rule

Balancing Female Virtues and Army Commanderships

Balancing Marital and Martial

List of Cited and Mentioned Edicts