Exceptional women, who were warriors, bandits, and rebels in Imperial China. Ancient China has handed down many legends and stories of women war leaders and warriors. China’s most celebrated woman warrior was the legendary Hua Mulan or Fa Mu Lan, who in the fifth century a.d. reputedly took the place of her conscripted but ill father. According to Chinese legend, Hua Mulan, with her hair cut short and wearing her father’s armor, fought for ten years with valor without her sex being discovered. Tradition lauds her for preserving her chastity and desiring nothing but to cast off her armor and return home. Her exploits are touted in the traditional Chinese "Mulan Play" and, more recently, in an animated Disney movie.
Women are remembered in Chinese history as defenders of the castles in which they resided and as bodyguards to the masters whom they served. Women served as military leaders as well. The Tang Empress Wu Chao (684-704) had learned martial arts as a child. She avenged her murdered father and seized the throne. She then directed an ongoing war with Korea to a successful conclusion. During the Sung Dynasty (960-1126), Liu Chin Ting, a sixteen-year-old Tartar, led her people’s resistance against rival clans and then against the emperor himself. Her forces defeated and captured General Chun Pao, sent by the emperor to pacify the Tartars. Liu Chin Ting ordered Chun Pao executed, but her admiration for his courage grew into love. She pardoned him and then married him. For the emperor, Chun Pao’s marriage to an imperial enemy was treasonous. To gain pardon from the emperor for her husband’s betrayal, Liu Chin Ting went over to the side of the emperor. As a general with Chun Pao as her second, she successfully commanded Sung armies for thirty years. Liu Chin Ting was not the only woman military commander of the Sung. Mu Guiying served as a Sung commander in chief.
During the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), Ch’in Liang-Yu fought along side her husband Ma Sian-cheng. Before his death, she had been appointed commander of a division, and after his death she succeeded him as commander. During the Ming dynasty, women fought in the armies of the empire and among rebels. Women played a key role in the nationalist White Lotus Society. There had been women bandits in China, such as Nie Yin-Niang, who, schooled in the martial arts as a girl by a nun, became a Chinese counterpart to the later Western Robin Hood. During the Manchu period, Hsi Kai Ching was the chief of an immense pirate fleet. Unable to subdue her, the Chinese government persuaded her to retire with a pardon and a rich bribe.
At the end of the imperial period, Ch’iu Chin joined the Nationalist movement of Sun Yat-sen at its inception in 1904. As principal of the Ta-t’ung School of Physical Culture in Shao-hsing, she trained her students for struggle against the corrupt imperial regime. In 1907, when she was thirty-two, she was arrested, tortured, and beheaded. After the empire fell in 1911, Ch’iu Chin was given a hero’s burial by the new Chinese republic.
