Nurse empress dowager () was an honorific title given to
emperors'
wet nurses of the
Xianbei-led Chinese
Northern Wei dynasty. The existence of the title owed itself to a peculiar institution of Northern Wei—that when a son of the emperor were to be made
crown prince, his mother, if alive, must be forced to commit suicide. The crown princes were therefore raised by wet nurses, and when they became emperors, they would typically honor their wet nurses as nurse empress dowagers. Often, later in their reigns, they would then honor their wet nurses as full
empress dowager
Empress dowager (also dowager empress or empress mother) () is the English language translation of the title given to the mother or widow of a Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Vietnamese emperor in the Chinese cultural sphere.
The title was also g ...
s, and they often had just as much influence as the emperors' mothers would have had—rendering the rationale for the Northern Wei institution of putting mothers to death (that therefore empress dowagers would not dominate the political scene) somewhat ineffective.
Chinese empresses dowager
Northern Wei
Wet nursing
Chinese courtiers
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