The Assassination of Shidibala (r. 1320–1323) Reconsidered

Article Abstract: Has Shidibala been whitewashed by literati officials, court historians, and later scholars? Who was Tegshi, leader of the assassination plot? What was his relationship to the hated minister Temüder, to Shidibala's empress Sukebala, and to Shidibala's successor, Yisün-Temür? This article seeks to answer these questions in an attempt to show how the political agency of this Mongol qa'an has been framed or obscured in Yuan sources. Portrayals of his grandmother Dagi likewise exemplify how political agency asserted by women in ruling circles is typically decried as wasteful, inappropriate, or as an immoral interference in government. Yet its institutionalization in the Mongol-Yuan government, especially in the empress dowagers' office, demonstrates that the official and unofficial networks of royal women were important channels through which Mongolian imperial sovereignty was constructed and negotiated, increasingly in tension with the Daidu bureaucracy and a throne seeking to centralize power in its own hands

Ancient history · Archaeology · China · Historiography · Chinese history and philosophy · History · Philosophy