Few women in Chinese history have been as scorned – or as misunderstood – as Bao Si. For nearly three millennia, the queen has been remembered not as a person, but as a symbol: the beautiful femme fatale whose cold heart and unparalleled beauty brought down a dynasty.
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According to legend, Bao Si was a queen so aloof she never smiled.
Desperate to amuse her, King You of the Western Zhou Dynasty (about 1046-771 BC) is said to have played a deadly prank: he lit the kingdom’s sacred beacon fires – meant to warn of invasion – just to watch the nobles rush in panic to his court.
They dashed in, again and again, only to find no enemy. And when the real threat came – the Quanrong nomads storming in from the north – the beacons burned once more. Only, this time, no one came.
The capital fell. The king died. The dynasty collapsed. And the story became a moral lesson: how one woman’s vanity destroyed a kingdom.
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The tale has echoed through Chinese literature for over 2,000 years. The Records of the Grand Historian by Sima Qian painted Bao Si as icy and indifferent. The Classic of Poetry lamented: “The splendid Zhou dynasty. Did Bao Si wreck it all!”