If the secret to the Mongols’ military prowess lies in their ability to adapt the nomadic hunting tactics of giving chase, feigning retreat, and then surrounding and ambushing prey to the medieval battlefield, then the secret to imperial China’s diplomatic prowess could be said to lie in their skill at harem management.
Similar to the elaborate system of treaties, titles, and gifts with which the emperors would play one border state or tribe against another, there existed an equally elaborate system of titles, nepotistic offices, and gifts to ensure that life for every member of the Inner Palace, from queen to concubine, was a constant contest for the emperor’s attention.
Such systems were necessary because, as many emperors discovered right before being destroyed, there is much truth to the English proverb, “hell hath no fury like a woman (or barbarous tribe) scorned.” It is better to direct that scorn at other members of the harem and their allied attendants than be caught without a buffer.
Another way of looking at ancient Chinese diplomacy and harem management is as a series of marriage relationships, with emperors regularly marrying—and marrying off—princesses to cement peace treaties and ensure loyalty. Just as it’s easier to make war on a stranger than on your son-in-law, it’s harder to defraud the emperor if he’s also your brother-in-law.
Lastly, high infant mortality rates from disease, violence, and palace intrigues meant that harems were also a kind of eugenics project: mating with the healthiest, smartest, and most attractive women of the land helped increase your chances of producing an adequate heir who might live for the sycophant’s refrain of “10,000 10,000” years.
While horniness no doubt played a part, I believe these other factors were far more instrumental in harems growing to over 20,000 strong by the Han Dynasty.
If your emperor does this, your dynasty is doomed.
While the common conception of Eastern potentates and their harems is that it’s a constant orgy, it is interesting to note that this was a major taboo for the ancient Chinese.
While it’s likely that the thought of getting it on with more than one of the 20,000+ consorts has undoubtedly crossed the mind of many occupants of the yellow throne, orgies are cited as a specific example of the extreme corruption of King Zhou. In addition to having a lake filled with booze and ripping out the heart of his uncle, later historians claimed the last ruler of the Shang Dynasty hosted festive orgies where he and his guests composed lewd poetry.
Of course, like the many crimes attributed to Rome’s Caesars by historians in the employ of their usurpers, it’s possible King Zhou was the victim of libel by later victors.
It’s also possible that, like the Christians who condemned the orgiastic fertility rituals of their Pagan ancestors, such practices are the misunderstood remnants of a society’s communal, matriarchal past.
Robert Graves, for instance, believes the seductively promiscuous nymphs of Greek mythology to be human female followers of the Great Goddess, in whose name annual fertility ceremonies were held involving orgies timed to bring about bountiful harvests in the spring and summer. Such holdovers from distant antiquity shrouded in myth might explain another Shang Dynasty anomaly: they permitted the co-existence of more than one queen.
Later regimes would latch onto such “excesses” as key factors to form an identity for their newly expanded ethnos. Similar to the prohibitions set forth by Moses in the Ten Commandments, it was a way to define the in-group by defining who they were not.
Regardless of whether such decadence ever happened, it’s clear that the ancient Chinese were okay with their rulers having multiple wives, just not all simultaneously.
Reasonable explanations may exist for why this was a big no-no, but I haven’t found any. As far as I can tell, the Confucians took it as a given that this was “unnatural” and wrong, while the Taoists were against overindulging in sex in all its forms (more on them later). Historians like Sima Qian were less interested in orgies per se, presenting it as the outer edge of the slippery slope of sexual perversions, not unlike how trans porn is the punchline for jokes about men who’ve seen so much of every other kind that nothing else will get them off.
So why were orgies seen as the rock bottom of depravity?
My purely speculative explanation is that an emperor wouldn’t want members of his harem catching feelings for one another any more than he wanted his imperial neighbors signing too many mutual non-aggression pacts. Chinese history abounds with stories of emperors and their heirs overthrown by wives and concubines with secret lovers. It’s best not to openly encourage such bonds by cucking to your subordinates.
Often, plots to kill the Son of Heaven were reversed at the last moment by courtiers convinced there might be a chance to win his favor once more. But laying bare how one truly feels about each mate for all the others to see dispels any doubt and invites open war. Perhaps this is why the Eyes Wide Shut partygoers all wore masks.
It also does away with any pretense that the harem is a government-sponsored incubator for future leaders and makes it an obvious institution of distraction for the man with the very serious task of running an empire. This also explains why the next most common sex crime lobbed at failed emperors was simping for a favorite courtesan to the neglect of their official duties.
Whether under the influence of sex, drugs, or rock and roll, an emperor who willingly invited such drama into their lives in exchange for bodily pleasure was rightfully seen as having lost his damn mind.
Solving the too much sex problem
But you didn’t need to suffocate in the press of all that pleasure dome flesh to learn that open relationships have always been complicated.
Outside the harem, polygamy carried some pretty dire consequences for the empire. Growing wealth gaps in those days didn’t just mean most people couldn’t eat—it also meant most single men couldn’t get married. With the women all locked away behind big mansions, there was little recourse for these angry single men but to burn those mansions down.
To make matters worse, many of the rich men who married all these women were wasting away, literally and figuratively, in their company. A kind of dissipation not unlike that which faces our porn-saturated generation today.
“A man has needs,” as they say, and you’re probably wondering what to do about them.
Enter the Taoists.
Through a series of exercises and meditations, the Taoists sought to transmute sexual desire into creative energy. They believed that with practice and dedication, you could gradually shift your so-called “need” for sex into an intuitive understanding of what needs to be done and effortless action.
The idea that sexual desire can be an energy source is so baked into Chinese thought that the most common word for human energy, 精神, shares the same character as the word for sperm (精子).
Much Taoist alchemy centers around this transmutation of base desire into a health-preserving life force. Like the pursuit of the Holy Grail or the changing of lead into gold, making the Golden Elixir/potion of immortality is instruction for how to make horniness work for you couched in allegorical terms.
How do we know this stuff works? Aside from the innumerable tracts, poems, and paintings created by Taoists throughout history, we have the legendary stories of sages who could perform acts deemed by others as miraculous.
Today, such deeds don’t seem as impossibly miraculous for a disciplined and intelligent person fully present in their surroundings. Acts like predicting the weather, navigating vast distances, healing the sick, remaining imperturbably calm under great stress, planning intricate strategies to win wars, inventing new culinary delicacies, and performing amazing acrobatic feats that require painful training and dedication to pull off.
Nor is the path to creative enlightenment solely reserved for celibate recluses. Many Taoist traditions include meditations and practices that couples can perform. Some even occur during coitus and bear striking similarities to Indian and Tibetan tantra. Mastering such techniques often requires both partners to deepen their familiarity not just with their bodies but with each other’s as well. Another reason to stick with one partner over a lifetime.
What is Love?
And so we come, really late, to Valentine’s Day. You can say it’s just a holiday invented to sell flowers and chocolate.
You can say that love is just something troubadours invented to make a living.
But I don’t think so.
Just about every civilization began with some form of harem as the organizing structure for male-female relationships. It was the only way to ensure some offspring would survive into the next generation.
But with it came a whole host of problems that played out at no more epic scale than in the city-sized harems of ancient China. More people meant less individual attention could be paid to each one, which was as true for the children as for the wives.
And so, it became easy for sons to undermine or even kill fathers, often with the support of their mothers, a common tragedy that so haunted Confucius that he got into philosophy to prevent it.
Today, with the likelihood of children reaching adulthood higher than ever, it makes far more sense to trade quantity for quality. For purely selfish reasons, that doesn’t just mean fewer mouths to feed, but focusing on deepening one’s affection for less kin is a means of achieving greater spiritual cultivation and emotional development.
For altruistic reasons, making those around you feel truly cared for and appreciated amounts to the kind of love that prevents violent crime and misery from spreading around the world. It makes for better people, which makes for a better place.
For both reasons, devotion to an ideal instead of political expediency leads to you consuming less and making better art.
After all, despite the best efforts of countless emperors, neither empire nor harem is around today. So it’s best to remember the truism that “how you do one thing is how you do everything.”
Forge empires and achieve conquests that will last a thousand years or make you the object of desire of infinite paramours, sure. But I wonder how many of those countless men and women through the eons would trade their wealth and beauty for just one person willing to devote themselves wholeheartedly to them. Not to the omnipotent ruler or fertility goddess they represent but to the scared and vulnerable human who lies beneath all our baubles and bombasts. Someone worthy of wholehearted devotion in return. Somewhere safe from the long knives and subtle poisons of so-called relatives plotting their destruction.
A final twist on an old cliche
“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”
It is a fine line, uttered by the oft-married and notoriously promiscuous superstar of Hollywood’s golden age, Mae West. Except the Chinese emperors, with their limitless harems and desperate immortality projects, are proof that it never is.
So instead of trying to cram twenty thousand lovers into one lifetime, treat one lover so right that even if they had infinite lives, they choose to spend them all with you.