Top 10 Cruelest Chinese Emperors
I made this as a counter-list to ‘Greatest Chinese Emperors’. Before adding an item, be aware 'cruel' and 'incompetent' are different adjectives. Cruel does not automatically equal bad. There have been cruel emperors who led a prosperous China. Both cruelty to subjects, to officials and to family members count. If you think an emperor was particularly cruel either in his personal life or to his country ,add them.Guidelines for commenting:
1. No hate speech in any form.
2. No severe 'emperor-bashing': Just state why you think this emperor is bad/good.
3. I will accept constructive criticism, it helps me to improve my future lists.
- He built a lake of wine big enough to sail in and a forest of meat and taxed the people to starvation.
- He enjoyed watching people being tortured.
- He and his wife Daji invented a new torture method, and laughed at their cries of agony.
- He committed incest with his aunt and sister. His aunt's husband, He Mai, eventually found out what was going on. Liu Ziye decided to kill a lady in waiting and tell him that it was his wife (Ziye's aunt). He realised it wasn't and Liu Ziye killed him.
- He refused to visit his mother when she was sick because he thought there were ghosts in sick people's rooms. His mother asked her ladies in waiting to cut her open to see how'this animal' came out of her.
- He forced three of his uncles (including his successor Liu Yu) to live as pigs, forcing them to live in cages and eat disgusting food meant to look like pig food out of troughs. Liu Yu had it worst as his hands and feet were tied together and he was forced to live in a pigsty.
- He held orgies where his male guests raped princesses, one refused and she was whipped and her sons executed.
- Anyone who criticised his debauchery was executed, forced to commit suicide or otherwise punished.
- Emperor Xiaowu (his father) favoured his son Liu Ziluan from his concubine Consort Yin. When he came to the throne he forced his 9 year old brother to commit suicide and murdered his brother and sister.
- Liu Chuyu, his sister, asked her brother to give her 30 men to have sex with, which he did. She, however, did seem to respect sexual consent more than her brother as she let one guy go free after trying to add him to her harem for 10 days.
- He was murdered by his uncle Liu Yu, who used his other full brother and Liu Chuyu as scapegoats to blame Liu Ziye's rule on and had them murdered as well.
- He redrew his father's portrait to give it a big nose.
- He raped all the women in the Gao clan. The concubine Erzhu Ying'e refused to have sex with him and he killed her himself.
- He murdered all the previous Yuan clan, including women and children. Even distant relatives were murdered except for a select few households like the future Empress Yuan's, as she was the wife of his brother Gao Yan.
- He threatened to marry his own mother to a barbarian ruler.
- He had a very beautiful concubine who had an affair. He killed her and tossed her head on a table before playing with her leg.
- He was homicidal when drunk. A whole line of prisoners had to be created for him to kill.
- He thought his son, Gao Yin, was too Confucian (read 'nice') and ordered him to kill a criminal. Gao Yin couldn't do it, and he beat him so hard it psychologically traumatised him and left him with a panic disorder which left him unable to speak at times.
A very famous tyrant and the face of the 'bad last emperor' along with King Zhou of Shang and King Jie of Xia. It's important to note that although he killed many people when he built the Grand Canal, the Grand Canal was actually a beneficial addition.
- He started by convincing his father to depose his older brother Yang Yong, by pretending to be frugal and humble like his father while he had an underground harem. He then killed Yang Yong, and later his sons, when he got the throne.
- He possibly poisoned his own father (note the possibly; he was not treated well by historians who worked in the succeeding Tang dynasty)
- He taxed the people to starvation.
- He was determined to invade Goguryeo even if his people were starving and rebelling, and millions died in the invasion and his construction projects.
- He murdered the officials his father put in place to serve as his assistants.
- He was an alcoholic who made decisions while drunk.
- His posthumous name literally means violent.
- He threw animals into boiling water and skinned them alive. He broke his uncle's skull with a hammer.
- He banned some words, like 'missing' or 'without' because he thought people would tease him about being blind in one eye.
- He personally cut people open.
- He went on murderous rampages where he murdered every man, woman and child he found.
- He got depressed if a day went by without killing someone.
- He nearly poisoned his own stepmother, because her gift was not as lavish as he wanted. He only didn't because he wouldn't be able to spend his time on fun and games if he killed her.
- He personally murdered four of his officials' entire families after the officials plotting against him. Even infants were killed and he cut the bodies to pieces.
- When the general Xiao Daocheng was sleeping, he became intrigued by his big belly. He decided to shoot him non-lethally and successful targeted his belly button. He got fed up of this and killed Houfei, who was only 14.
- He forced his nephew Gao Xiaoyu to drink 37 cups of wine before poisoning him.
- He raped his sister-in-law Li Zu'e, threatening to kill her son Gao Shaode if she refused sexual relations. She got pregnant and Gao Shaode was not very happy. Ashamed, she killed her newborn daughter (which shouldn't have been born in the first place). Gao Zhan summoned her son to the palace and beat her son to death. Li begged for his life and he severely beat her.
- His brother Gao Yan had a son, Gao Bainian who Gao Yan had begged him to spare on his deathbed. Gao Bainian's teacher got him to write out a word only the emperor could use. Gao Zhan, furious, ordered he was beaten. His blood was all over the hall and when he was dying he begged to be Gao Zhan's slave. Gao Zhan personally finished off his nephew and threw the body into the pool, which stained it red. He was only 8.
- He entrusted all the actual ruling to his advisors while he partied and killed people.
- He largely ignored Sima Yan of Jin's army.
- He killed quite a few relatives for some reason.
- He liked torturing people by having their skin peeled from their faces.
Considered a good, if not great emperor. However, he was cruel to his officials, and to subjects and family members at times.
- He took the throne in a violent way - he felt threatened by his nephew the Jianwen Emperor and launched the Jingnan campaign. The Jianwen Emperor's palace was set on fire - his wife died, and the emperor either died or escaped. The Jianwen Emperor's infant son was placed under house arrest, where he was isolated and forgotten to the point that he didn't know what basic words were when a future emperor set him free.
- He launched a large purge of scholar-officials who supported the Jianwen Emperor, often implicating innocent people such as family members and killing them in cruel ways.
- He used not only nine, but ten familial exterminations, the tenth being the students and friends. He murdered 873 people just because Fang Xiaoru refused to write an inaugural address.
- When the forbidden city was built more than a million labourers were forced into gathering building materials from all over China, including whole logs of precious tropical wood from the jungles of Southwestern China and massive slabs of marble hauled across ice in the freezing north. If any stone was flawed, those who delivered it were beaten or slow-sliced
Possibly mythical. Famous 'bad last emperor' along with Yang of Sui. Spent his time doting on his concubine Mo Xi.
Famous for being the Chinese Boy Who Cried Wolf. His consort Bao Si wouldn't laugh, so he made her laugh by using the signals to alert the nobles to an invasion. The nobles stopped coming, and didn't come when there was an actual invasion.
1st Emporer of a unified China. An interesting, and all powerful ruler. Briefly, the Great Wall was first conceived and construction began under his rule. It has been estimated that between 100,000 and close to a million slave laborers died during it's construction ( and that many of these poor souls remains were added to the mortar of it's early construction). These estimates may be impossible to ever lock down, as the early portions of the Wall's construction were a crude packed earth structure, and have long since been lost to time. These early efforts were nowhere near as elaborate or as strong as the Great Wall we see today. In any case, the number of people who died as a direct result of it's construction is significant, and it's amazing how today these losses are considered cruel and inhumane, but during the time of it's construction were not even worthy of a footnote.
Note that she was actually a very good emperor - emperor being a gender-neutral title. She was also heavily defamed by Confucian historians, who were misogynistic. However, despite the records not being in her favour, the real Wu Zetian was still cruel to her family and purged officials.
- She killed her romantic rival Empress Wang but cutting off her limbs and placing her in a wine jar.
- She is recorded as killing two of her own sons, her stepsons and two of her grandchildren.
- She possibly strangled her baby daughter to frame Empress Wang (again note the possibly - this story is dubious and many people think that it was invented by the misogynistic Confucian historians)
He's generally considered one of, if not the greatest emperor in Chinese history. However his path to the throne was a bloody one - his two brothers plotted to kill him, so he killed them both in the Xuanwu Gate Incident. He then killed their sons (not their wives and daughters, he actually took one of their wives as a concubine, and raised some of their daughters in the palace) to prevent future rebellion and forced his father to abdicate to him.