What Did Ancient Chinese Emperors Do All Day?

Woken at four in the morning. Dressed by other people. Served a hundred dishes and forbidden to eat more than three bites of any of them. Watched at every meal, every audience, and every night — with a clerk writing it down. We think of absolute power as freedom. It wasn't. The Emperor of China ruled a third of the human race and couldn't choose his own breakfast, couldn't leave his own house, and couldn't spend an hour unobserved. Every ritual that looks like luxury from the outside turns out, on closer inspection, to be a restraint. At least three of them worked that out and tried to escape. One built a fake shopping street inside his palace so he could pretend to be a normal man buying a normal thing. One was nearly strangled in his sleep by his own palace maids. And one found the only weapon he had left, stopped showing up for twenty-five years, and came close to bringing the whole dynasty down with him. A note on sources The Qing palace archives are unusually complete, which is why so much of this is reconstructable hour by hour. Yongzheng's vermilion annotations, Qianlong's poetry output, the 1542 attempt on the Jiajing Emperor, and Wanli's withdrawal from court are all well documented. A few details here — the three-bite rule and the multiple-bed sleeping arrangement — are longstanding accounts of Qing court practice rather than cleanly sourced facts, and I've flagged them as tradition in the video. Would you take the job? Comments below.