Were it evening time, and you a fly on the wall of a Tianjin hair salon, a Taiyuan living room, a factory dorm in Guangzhou, you would see the same: a soap opera playing to a rapt audience. Not likely the soap of modern folk and their mundane problems, but the soap of Chinese royalty from days of yore.

And really, how can modern soap compare?  Pampered, wanting for nothing but freedom and a chance to work their will, the emperors' ladies took to scheming like their common counterparts took to embroidery - patient, cunning, and deadly accurate with a needle. The women are true, their stories are fantastic, and here laid out sans the harsh Mandarin chirping of an outraged actress, which can grate on the unaccustomed ear.

Lady Bo - Last to be First

Traditionally, power went to the concubine who kept the highest running tally of nights with her emperor, but not always, not always.

Whether two-armed or eight, fortune tellers cause misery, especially when they see truly. General Wei Bao went to a fortune teller, for he couldn't decide which overlord to fight for. Instead, the seer Xufu told him his consort Lady Bo would be the mother of an emperor. Divinely inspired, the General declared his independence, only to be crushed by his former employer, Han Emperor Liu Bang. The Lady Bo was captured and impressed at the palace tapestry house.

But even a rose hidden in the back of the garden will eventually get plucked. As with all regents, Liu Bang delighted in arriving unannounced and unobserved. Peering through the tapestry house window, he spied the languid hands of Lady Bo, too plump to knot threads, her figure, too Rubenesque to be contained in work clothes. He slumped down from the window, dizzy, and sent word to have her installed in the harem.

Imagine, men among you, so many women awaiting that conjugal delight is a part-time job, juggling them a full-time hassle? Liu Bang never got around to his new plaything, indeed most likely forgot all about her, until more than a year later. After pleasing their master, two high-ranking concubines began discussing their childhood friend, none other than the Lady Bo. The three had sworn fealty through good and ill, and there she was, languishing in a forgotten corner!

That night, the Lady Bo received her summons to the Imperial bed chamber.

"You look nervous," Liu Bang remarked. "What troubles you?"

"Last night I dreamed that a dragon lay on my breast," whispered Lady Bo.

"Aha, you dreamed true, yet the dream will bring you fortune, fear not." That night, Lady Bo conceived a son.

Yet she sank once again beneath her emperor's notice, and was relegated to the fiefdom of her son, the Prince of Dai. Liu Bang sickened and died, freeing his empress, Lu Zhi, to wreak revenge on all the women who had preceded her in the bedroom. She began by mutilating Qi Gu, torturing her to death, and martyring her as goddess of the bathroom.

Lu Zhi worked systematically and thoroughly. Lady Bo, never having spent more than a night with the dead emperor, was spared, along with only a few others. By the time Lu Zhi died, she had wiped out almost all blood succession. In turn, the Lu clan was executed by her councilor-in-chief, lest other vipers lay in that nest. Prince Dai was installed as the new emperor, Wendi, the Lady Bo suddenly empress dowager. Xufu's words had turned out true, and Lady Bo a queen, by staying far from her emperor's favor.

The Zhao Sisters - Rock-a-bye Babies

Your average woman today would take a job in telemarketing before becoming an emperor's plaything. But for a slave-girl in Old China, it was a dream gig, one to kill and kill again for.

On an inspection tour, the Emperor Chengdi chanced to stop at the house of Princess Yang'a. The Princess trotted out her dancing girls to amuse the emperor. Zhao Feiyan, the "Flying Swallow", did much more than amuse with her undulating hips. Her performance in the bed chamber topped the one in the dining hall, and when she told Chengdi she had a sister even younger and sexier, Zhao Hede, the three became inseparable company.

Before, Chengdi had comported himself reasonably respectably, dividing his play time between two well-bred consorts, the Ladies Ban and Xu. Now, every waking moment, every ounce of energy, went to scaling new heights of pleasure with the Zhao sisters, and new depths of depravity. And whatever experience they lacked in court scheming, the sisters more than made up in sheer malevolence.

They began with a slander campaign that saw first-consort Lady Xu deposed, then Lady Ban imprisoned. Now the sisters had all Chengdi's attention, had grand palaces for themselves built, but neither could seal the contract with a male heir. So they took the low road, and stamped out the king's seed wherever it grew.

Chengdi somehow found the time to knock up a female scribe, Cao Gang, whose condition remained unknown to the Zhao sisters until she was delivered of a son. They dispatched guard Ji Wu to kill it, but like Snow White's would-be executioner, he hid the child with a wet nurse, and passed a note to pass to the emperor. Even the emperor lived in fear of the sisters' wrath, and had the baby spirited away by a eunuch, who also oversaw the poisoning of Cao Gang by imperial edict. Even the six maids attendant at the birth chose hanging over the unnamed option the sisters dangled over their doomed heads.

Such skullduggery poisoned even Chengdi's once-boundless ardor for Feiyan and Hede. He managed to lay with the banished Lady Xu, who also delivered a son. The Zhao sisters trotted out the old good cop/bad cop ruse, Feiyan raving, knocking over pottery and gnashing her teeth, while Hede moaned piteously, "What have we done to make you prefer Xu to us? Surely you will make her empress, and not us?"

Too much boom-boom weakens a man's legs, mind, and character. Chengdi signed off on an edict ordering Lady Xu to commit suicide, and to have her baby delivered to the sisters in a reed suitcase. The suitcase was buried, as well as the deed.

The Zhao sisters carried on in this vein for years, refining their methods with drugs that unwitting consorts imbibed and induced abortions. Even in the countryside, peasants referred openly to them as "the killers of princes".

One morning, ostensibly in his prime, Chengdi dropped dead, most likely from an aneurysm, but in court opinion from having all of his essence drained by the sisters. The royal mother had her commander-in-chief make an "enquiry", which Feiyan and Hede knew all too well as their death warrant. The latter hung herself forthwith, but Feiyan managed to escape with a demotion to commoner, and banishment from the palace. Sunk in the memories of her crimes, and her lowly status, she too eventually took her own life.

Lady Hu - The Wanton

What was a healthy woman to do in those days, especially in China, where good girls weren't even supposed to think about it? Lady Hu slept her way to empress, partly through skill, but mainly through love of the game. Tired of the same daily sport, imperial though it was, Lady Hu began dabbling, at first with the eunuchs. Technically, this wasn't even adultery, only xiexia, immoral games. Immoral indeed, for the unnatured fall easily to the unnatural. Even an internet pro would be hard-put to find such depravity, firewall or no.

Next Empress Hu took up with He Shikai, her emperor Gao Zhan's favorite official. Like many a Chinese sovereign, Gao Zhan had his finger in too many pies to care if the cake at home was going stale, unless someone else was getting a slice. Everyone knew the affair was consensual, but custom dictated He's death, for seducing a blameless if chuckleheaded woman.

When Gao Zhan died, Empress Hu was born anew, an unrepentant sex bomb. She would lock herself away in monasteries, where monks would "read her scriptures" the livelong day, and night. One monk, Tanxian, acquitted himself so well and tirelessly in touching her soul that the others referred to him as the Emperor-in-Waiting.

Naturally, word got around to her son, the new emperor Gao Wei. But who wants to hear, let alone believe, that his mom is a slut? He eventually made his way over to her palace to sniff around, where he found her being ministered to by a pair of adolescent, shaven-headed nuns. Titillated, he had them summoned to his chambers, where he grew tired of their reticence and stripped off their robes - to discover two beautiful, if effeminate, teenage boys.

Outrage forgives much more easily than embarrassment. Tanxian was dispatched to his heavenly reward with all due haste. As for empress dowager Hu, she was placed under house arrest, forbidden from speaking to anything with an XY chromosome. Whoever thinks this dissuaded her from getting her jollies has a thing or two to learn about women.