Rebuilding the Realm: The Jingkang Princess

In the second year of the Jingkang era, Jin forces invaded the south and captured Bianjing.

Emperor Huizong and Emperor Qinzong were taken prisoner. The imperial consorts, princesses, and imperial daughters were all marched north and reduced to playthings for the Jin. History remembers it as the “Humiliation of Jingkang,” the darkest page in the three-hundred-year history of the Great Song.

Zhao Yingluo, Princess Roujia, was just sixteen, a pampered jewel of the imperial palace.

When she witnessed the Empress Dowager’s humiliation and her sisters’ brutal deaths, when a Jin general tore off her clothes in public and drove her north like livestock, she did not throw herself down a well like the other princesses, nor did she beg for mercy.

She bit her finger and wrote eight words in blood on the floor of her prison cart:

“I will not live as a human until I avenge this.”

Overnight, she transformed from captive into hunter. She set fire to a Jin encampment, led dozens of people in a desperate escape, and vanished into the vast Taihang Mountains.

Some said she would not survive three days.

Three years later, the “Women’s Army” of the Taihang Mountains had become a force to be reckoned with across Hebei, striking fear into the Jin.

Five years later, she ascended the throne in Hebei, keeping the name “Song” for her state. History would call it the Later Song.

Ten years later, she personally led her army to the gates of Yanjing.

That day, standing atop the city wall, she knelt facing north:

“Empress Dowager, my sisters, all the wronged souls who died in the north... Yingluo has brought you home.”

This is the story of a woman who used iron and blood to lift a dynasty out of disgrace.

No romance, female-led epic, high-stakes political intrigue, from imperial princess to empress