Ye Yuhe, daughter of a disgraced official, entered the palace at fifteen as a medicine-serving maid and became the lowliest servant beside the eight-year-old child emperor, Xiao Chen. Over the next ten years, her extraordinary intelligence made her the emperor’s sharpest blade and strongest shield. In the end, she broke the three-hundred-year-old rule barring palace maids from becoming empress, becoming the first empress of the Great Zhou to rise from slave status: the “Heavenly Union Queen.” Together, she and the emperor ruled the realm.
