What Happened to All the Concubines After Imperial China Fell?

After the Qing dynasty fell in 1912, the women inside the Forbidden City didn't leave. A legal contract kept them trapped inside the same walls for 12 more years — funded by a republic that stopped paying. When soldiers finally came to expel them in 1924, two elderly concubines who had spent 52 years behind those walls refused to leave and held the palace for 16 days.