There has always been a narrative in Chinese folklore that during the Jingkang Disaster, the Northern Song royal family was taken captive to the Jin Dynasty, and the female members experienced all kinds of humiliation, all in order to pay for the crimes committed by Zhao Guangyi. According to legend, Zhao Guangyi once forced Xiao Zhou and ordered someone to depict the incident in detail, and hundreds of years later, his descendants also suffered the same disaster, as if it was a cycle of heaven and karma. However, is this really the case?Let's take a closer look at this legend today.
Li Yu, the queen of the Southern Tang Dynasty, once married a pair of sisters and respected them as queens, which later generations called "the queen of the big and small weeks". The two sisters were born in the family of Situ Zhouzong in the Southern Tang Dynasty, because Zhou Zong's prominent status was as a veteran of the society, and the eldest daughter Zhou Ehuang was talented, good at singing and dancing, and familiar with history books, so she was selected as his wife by Li Yu, the king of Wu at that time. After the death of Yuanzong Li Jing, Li Yu succeeded to the throne as the queen of the Southern Tang Dynasty, and Emperor Zhou E was also honored as the empress.
In 964 AD, Emperor Zhou E fell seriously ill and sent his young second son Li Zhongxuan to another hospital to take care of him. Unfortunately, when Li Zhongxuan was playing in front of the Buddha statue, he accidentally knocked the big glass lamp down, fell ill after being frightened, and soon died. This blow further worsened Emperor Zhou'e's condition, and Li Yu, the queen of the Southern Tang Dynasty, personally took care of him in the harem. Zhou Ehuang's younger sister Nuying came to visit her sister, but unexpectedly got in touch with her brother-in-law Li Yu. This situation made Zhou Ehuang angry, and she decided to lie facing the wall, not even at the last moment of her life to look back at Nuying.
With the death of Emperor Zhou E, Li Yu still set up Empress E's sister Nu Ying as the queen step by step, that is, the little Zhou Hou. Completely different from her sister, Xiao Zhouhou prefers luxury and pleasure, and Li Yu spares no effort to satisfy her luxury wishes. However, in major national affairs, the Southern Tang Dynasty retreated under the leadership of Li Yu and was finally forced to surrender to the Song Dynasty. In order to show his tolerant mind, Zhao Kuangyin, the founding emperor of the Northern Song Dynasty, named Li Yu as the Marquis of Disobedience, and Xiao Zhouhou as the wife of Zheng Guo.
At the time of the captivity, the throne of the Song Dynasty changed. Zhao Kuangyin died unexpectedly, and he was not replaced by his son, but his ambitious younger brother Zhao Guangyi. Zhao Guangyi had a slightly different mind from his brother, and often suppressed and insulted those who surrendered. It is in this environment that Li Yu created classics such as "When is the Spring Flower and Autumn Moon".
In the widely circulated folklore, Zhao Guangyi's biggest insult to Li Yu is said to be: he took advantage of the opportunity of his female relatives to enter the palace to face the saint and periodically insulted Xiao Zhouhou. The frequency can be as long as 10 days and half a month, or as short as 3 to 5 days. Every time Xiao Zhou was sent back, he seemed to be in a trance, as if he had lost his soul. Then, Li Yu would launch a fierce verbal attack on Zhao Guangyi, and the scolding would spread outside the mansion, so that the people around him could hear it clearly.
Li Yu knew how humiliated Xiao Zhou had suffered, but he couldn't change the status quo, so he could only endure it silently. Once, Zhao Guangyi had a whim, and in the process of forcing Xiao Zhouhou, he specially summoned a painter to depict the details one by one, forming "Xiling Xingxiao Zhouhou Picture". Later, Li Yu was rumored to have been poisoned by Zhao Guangyi because he missed his hometown (there is no conclusive evidence), and Xiao Zhou Hou also went away. Therefore, hundreds of years later, the concubine daughter of Song Huizong was subjected to the Jin Dynasty**, which triggered the perception that many people thought it was karma. And although the surviving Zhao Gou is also a descendant of Zhao Guangyi, he has long lost his fertility and finally returned the throne to the bloodline of Taizu Zhao Kuangyin.
Regarding whether Zhao Guangyi is fortunate to be Xiao Zhouhou, there is no relevant historical data to prove its authenticity. The earliest record of this event appeared in the Northern Song Dynasty's Wang Gong's "Silent Notes", and was later cited in Ye Mengde's "Summer Resort", Song Wu's "Ji Ji Ji", Mao Xianshu's "Southern Tang Dynasty Memoirs", and Pan Yongyin's "Song Barnyard Banknotes". However, Wang Gong claims in the "Silent Notes" that he learned this information from Long Gon's "Jiangnan Lu". However, in fact, there is no such thing as Long Gon's "Jiangnan Lu", he only wrote "Jiangnan Ye History". It is worth noting that in "Jiangnan Wild History", there are only anecdotes about Xiao Zhou's ** palace competing for favor, and there is no mention of Zhao Guangyi's plot after Xiao Zhou's fortification.
In the end, the empirical evidence for the "Xiling Xingxiao Zhou Hou Tu" shows that there is no record of this painting in the historical materials, wild histories, and literati notes of the Song Dynasty. On the contrary, in the Ming Dynasty, about 400 years after Song Taizong, some people claimed to have seen this painting, and there were many inscriptions on the painting. Among them, the inscription of Feng Haisu, a scholar of the Yuan Dynasty, reads: "The plum flowers left in the south of the Yangtze River bloomed, and they were also forcibly folded by the king." The strange bottom of the golden wind rushed to the ground, and the royal garden was full of red and purple dragons. In other words, the painting first appeared during the Yuan Dynasty. After the Jingkang Revolution, it is likely that people from the Yuan Dynasty deliberately produced this fictional painting in order to emphasize the crimes of the Northern Song Dynasty. Sadly, however, the painting has long since been lost. Therefore, the incident about Zhao Guangyi's strong luck after Xiao Zhou is likely to be a fiction compiled by later generations.
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