From Palace to Mountain: Empress Yifu at Maijishan

Yifu became empress when Yuan Baoju took the throne as Western Wei Emperor Wen in 535. The court stood between rival powers. Repeated Rouran incursions on the northern frontier made an alliance urgent, and the emperor took a Rouran princess, Yujiulü, as his new empress. Yifu was removed from the palace and entered Buddhist life as a nun. The marriage was a political settlement; its cost fell on the woman whose place at court it replaced. Yifu had entered Yuan Baoju’s household at sixteen, years before his accession. Her position as a former empress and mother to the heir made the decision more than a private change in status.

Court histories describe Yifu as frugal and restrained, and record that she bore twelve children, of whom only the crown prince and the Prince of Wudu survived. After the new empress remained uneasy about her presence, Yifu was sent to Qinzhou to live near her son Yuan Wu, then the region’s governor. The Dunhuang Academy’s account links her temporary residence there with Maijishan: the mountain was already an active Buddhist centre, and she lived in the region as a nun rather than returning to the Western Wei court.

The account in the dynastic history gives the story a painful turn: Emperor Wen still remembered Yifu and secretly sent word that she should grow her hair, in case she could return to the palace. The plan stayed private. In 540, Rouran forces crossed the Yellow River and advanced toward the northern frontier. At court, officials connected the attack to the emperor’s treatment of the Rouran empress. The political crisis closed the possibility of Yifu’s return.

The same historical account says Emperor Wen sent a written order for Yifu to die. She met her son, asked that Buddhist rites be held, and had dozens of attendants shave their heads and enter religious life before she withdrew to her room. She was thirty-one. Her son, the Prince of Wudu, had a niche made in the cliff for her burial. Scholarship identifies Cave 43 with this burial place, known as the Quiet Mausoleum; the room’s architecture has been studied as both tomb and Buddhist cave.

Yifu’s body was later moved to Yongling after Emperor Wen’s burial, according to the historical account quoted by researchers. Yet Maijishan retained the first burial and its architectural memory. The episode ties imperial diplomacy to a specific local place: a court decision in Chang’an, a woman’s enforced life in Qinzhou, a son governing Tianshui and a cave cut into the mountain. Reading Cave 43 in this sequence makes the grottoes part of political history, not only a setting for Buddhist images.