A Ming Prince's Tomb Tablet Proved the Official History Was Wrong

When the Prince of Liang, Zhu Zhanji, died in 1441 without an heir, his young consort Wei knelt and asked to follow him into death. The court refused her. Five centuries later, the stone tablet buried beside her body preserved a life the official Ming histories never recorded. This documentary follows the women written out of the record of Ming China's princely houses, and the excavated tomb tablets that quietly corrected it. The Ming dynasty was founded by Zhu Yuanzhang, and after the Yongle Emperor, Zhu Di, seized the throne, its princes were penned inside gilded fiefs. We enter the household where the eunuch steward Kong Qin humiliated the prince, meet the earlier consort from the Ji family who died within a year, and reach the reversal at the heart of the story: the prince's mother, honored consort Guo, granddaughter of the founding general Guo Ying, was sent to die in ritual sacrifice, xunzang, when the Hongxi Emperor died in 1425, while a childless lower consort was spared. Years later it was not the Xuande Emperor, long dead by then, who spared Wei. In the tomb of the Prince of Ying, Zhu Dong, at Anlu in Zhongxiang, Hubei, archaeologists found six coffins holding six young women, alongside the record of Consort Guo of Ying, who had her portrait painted for her daughters before her death. In Nancheng, Jiangxi, a tablet from the Yi princely line caught the History of Ming (Ming Shi) in a genuine error that the Veritable Records (Ming Shilu) had smoothed over, and disproved a sacrifice rumor in the same breath. Wei went on to raise the daughters of the concubine Lady Zhang, human sacrifice was finally abolished in 1464, and the treasures of the Zheng He era now sit behind glass at the Hubei Provincial Museum in Wuhan. Real names, real dates, legend kept separate from record. Covering the Ming dynasty and Qing-era history writing, the princely houses of Liang, Ying, Yi, Tang, Shu, and Zhou, Chinese tomb archaeology, and the true fates of imperial consorts, concubines, and the forgotten women of the Ming court.