Empress Xiao(萧皇后): The Empress Who Quoted Laozi
Paul Peng
She was born a princess. She was raised in poverty. She became the empress of one of the greatest empires in the world. And then she watched her husband destroy it.
Empress Xiao (萧皇后) was the wife of Emperor Yang of Sui—the brilliant, monstrous ruler who built the Grand Canal, exhausted the empire with endless wars, and died with his dynasty in flames. Throughout his spectacular rise and catastrophic fall, Empress Xiao wrote only one surviving work: the Ode to Expressing My Aspirations (《述志赋》).
It is a document without parallel in Chinese history. An empress, writing in the most formal literary genre, quoting Laozi chapter by chapter, telling her husband—the Son of Heaven—that everything he was doing was wrong. Not in the language of political criticism, but in the language of Taoist philosophy. And she was right. She survived him. She survived the collapse of the Sui. She survived captivity by three different warlords, exile among the Turks, and the rise of the Tang. She died in Chang’an, an old woman who had seen everything.
The Princess Who Was Not Raised a Princess
Empress Xiao was the daughter of Xiao Kui, the Emperor Ming of the Western Liang. She was born into royalty, but not into security. For reasons the Book of Sui does not fully explain, she was sent as an infant to be raised in the home of her maternal uncle. There she lived not as a princess but as an ordinary girl. She knew poverty. She knew work. She learned what the world looked like from below.
This childhood—half royal blood, half peasant upbringing—would shape everything that followed. Unlike most women born to power, Empress Xiao understood that the line between a palace and a hovel was thinner than anyone in the palace believed. She was fond of learning, skilled in writing, and unusually perceptive. When the Sui prince Yang Guang was looking for a wife from the southern aristocracy, Empress Xiao was selected. She married the future emperor. Then she watched him rise. And then she watched him change.
The Ode to Expressing My Aspirations: A Taoist Manifesto
The Ode is preserved in her biography in the Book of Sui. It is written in the fu form—the most demanding genre of classical Chinese literature. But its content is not literary decoration. It is a systematic application of Laozi’s philosophy to the situation of a woman watching her husband steer the empire toward the cliff.
She begins with her philosophical ground:
“I uphold non-action and embrace unity.”
This is straight from Laozi. “Non-action” is wu-wei. “Embracing unity” means holding to the undivided Tao rather than chasing the ten thousand fragmented things of the world. She continues:
“Knowing that unrestrained boasting is not the Tao, I thus nourish my life in calm serenity.”
“Calm serenity” is xu jing (虚静)—the Laozi’s phrase for the stillness of the sage. She contrasts this with “unrestrained boasting”—a direct reference to the grandiose language Emperor Yang used to justify his wars and building projects. Then she turns to the core Taoist doctrine of restraint:
“I wish to set my will on reverence and frugality, and privately strive to guard against excess. Who would think of contentment, if there is no desire for undue fame?”
“He who stands high is bound to be in danger. One must beware of overflow when full.”
She is quoting the Tao Te Ching to her husband. He did not listen. She goes on to explicitly reject the material splendour of the imperial palace:
“I walk in humble radiance and uphold my will, and wish only to be content with a small space. The wonders of pearl curtains and jade screens, the beauty of golden chambers and jade terraces—though the world admires such splendour, they are what I disdain.”
An empress, writing from within the most luxurious palace complex on earth, declaring that she disdains it all. This is not conventional modesty. This is a philosophical argument. The Laozi says: “Rare goods lead people astray.” Empress Xiao was telling her husband that his palaces were not achievements. They were traps. She describes her state of mind as the crisis deepens:
“It is like standing on the edge of an abyss or treading on thin ice. My heart trembles as if in cold.”
She was afraid. She had read Laozi. She knew what happened to empires whose rulers could not stop. And she was watching it happen, in real time, from the innermost chambers of the palace, with no power to intervene except through a poem that her husband probably never read.
The Disaster She Could Not Prevent
Emperor Yang did not stop. He launched his third invasion of Goguryeo. The empire broke. Rebellions erupted across the north. In 618 CE, Emperor Yang was assassinated by his own general in Jiangdu. The Sui dynasty, which had reunified China after three centuries of division, collapsed after only thirty-seven years.
Empress Xiao survived. Yuwen Huaji took her captive. Then Dou Jiande captured Yuwen Huaji and took her into his custody. Then the Turks demanded her release. She was taken north to the grasslands, to the Turkic capital, where she lived for years among a people whose language she did not speak. In 630 CE, Emperor Taizong of Tang defeated the Turks and brought Empress Xiao back to Chang’an. She was given a residence. She was treated with honour. She lived out her remaining years in the city that had replaced everything she had lost.
She died an old woman who had been a princess, a peasant, an empress, a captive, an exile, and a guest. And through all of it, she had held to the philosophy she had written down in the Ode: uphold non-action, embrace unity, be content with a small space, disdain the glittering things that destroy everyone who loves them.
Why This Matters for the Living Tradition
Empress Xiao’s Ode is one of the earliest surviving Taoist texts written by a woman in Chinese history. Taoism has always had space for the feminine—the Laozi speaks of the “mysterious female,” the “mother of all things.” But actual texts by female Taoist thinkers are extremely rare in the early medieval period. Empress Xiao’s Ode is a precious document—not only for what it says about the politics of the Sui collapse but for what it says about the capacity of a woman, writing from within the most constrained position imaginable, to claim the authority of the Tao.
From a Zhengyi perspective, Empress Xiao embodies a vital aspect of the tradition: the understanding that Taoist wisdom is not the property of priests and hermits alone. It is available to anyone—male or female, powerful or powerless—who is willing to read the Laozi and take it seriously. Her life, which moved through more reversals of fortune than almost any other figure in Chinese history, is a testament to the practical power of “holding to non-action” in circumstances where action of any conventional kind was impossible.
What the Empress Knew
Empress Xiao wrote the Ode at a moment when the world around her was still outwardly glorious—when the Grand Canal was full of barges, when the palaces gleamed, when the Sui armies seemed invincible. She looked at all of it and saw ash. She was right. And the fact that her husband did not listen does not diminish the value of what she wrote. It only confirms the oldest Taoist teaching: the sage knows, but the world does not believe her.
She was the sage in the inner palace. And her Ode survives as a message from the edge of the abyss.
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