The Emperor Erased His Wife From History Because Of a Haircut | The Step Empress Nara.

She was Empress of China for fifteen years. Then, on a single afternoon in 1765, she picked up a blade and cut off her hair — and her husband, the most powerful man on earth, spent the rest of his life making sure you'd never know her name. No portrait. No tomb. No honorifics. Her own children were erased from the succession. The Qianlong Emperor dismantled her legacy piece by piece, using the full machinery of the imperial state to do it. We know exactly what she did. We will never know why. This is the story of the Step Empress Nara — the most deliberately erased woman in Chinese imperial history — and the one thing her husband couldn't destroy.