horrid.

The most common misconception about chinese polygamy is that men could have "multiple wives". Under older Chinese legal systems, a man could have only one wife at a time, but many concubines. In some later dynasties, a concubine could potentially be uplifted to become a wife if the original wife had died, but replacing an actual wife with a concubine was considered a serious crime, no matter what certain harem dramas might suggest.

Concubines could be bought, sold, and gifted to other men, while wives could not. I doubt PIDW paid any attention to realism or social conventions, so its all whatever with Bingge's harem, but it's still more or less a given that a emperor's wife is the empress. Consorts are just fancier titles for royal concubines. The concept of a "first wife" seems to be a western fandom thing.

@porcupine-girl @westiec @grumpypotat

I think a lot of it has to do with lacking context; the word "concubine" can be similarly misleading if people don't already have some understanding of how chinese concubinage works. Is a "concubine" a mistress? Slave? Sex worker? "Lesser wife"? It's too foreign a concept so the term "wife" is sometimes used interchangeably. Honestly "concubine" is a bit of a weird translation too, but I think it helps make a clear distinction between 妻 (qi) and 妾 (qie), because historically they were very different roles. I also suspect that (especially in the olden days), many westerners'™️ first intro to the concept of polygyny comes from bible stories and muslim practices, where depending on where or when you are, you might actually be able to have multiple wives of equal status. In Ancient china though, treating concubines and your one actual wife as equals could literally be punishable by some pretty harsh criminal sentences. (Obviously, people being people, many have attempted to bend the law to varying degrees of success but this was still very far outside the norms of society.)

The most well-known one was Emperor Hongzhi of Ming (1470-1505). He became the heir apparent pretty much by a stroke of luck--all the other princes were killed off by another consort, and his mom also died to what was assumed to be a harem assassination. I imagine he was pretty traumatized by the whole thing, so when he became an emperor, he was strictly monogamous, though it's said that his empress was deeply enmeshed with her own family, which led to an extreme level of nepotism for the in-laws and a lot of political resentment.

Another example was Emperor Wen of Sui (541-604), though one might argue he was never a true monogamist. He and his wife, Dugu Jialuo, had been married since they were teens and were extremely close. After he became Emperor, his Empress, who was also extremely powerful politically, kept a very tight leash on him and basically prevented him from straying lol. The story went that he cheated once and the empress straight up executed the woman he slept with behind his back. The emperor was so enraged when he found out that he ran away from home in protest, and his officials had to beg him to return to his palace.

They'd be pretty shitty people by modern standards but their marital problems were still extraordinary in the sense that they were the problems of a "normal" couple, as opposed to the wild harem drama of most historical emperors. They even lived together like a regular married couple--normally, the emperor and empress would live separately. The Emperor did eventually say yolo and fuck around with a bunch of concubines after Empress Dugu's death, but his marriage remains an oddity throughout the thousands of years of chinese imperial history.

I just think fafa being a little mean to lianlian is sexy and they both deserve it (´-ω-`)