The title Grand Empress Dowager (also Grand Dowager Empress or Grand Empress Mother) (Chinese: 太皇太后; pinyin: tài huáng tài hòu; Japanese: たいこうたいごう) was given to the grandmother, or a woman from the same generation as the grandmother, of the Chinese, Korean and Japanese dynastic rulers. Some grand empress dowagers held regency within the beginning years of reign of an underage emperor. Some of the most prominent empress dowagers extended long periods of regency, to beyond after the ruler was mature enough to govern alone. This was seen as a source of political turmoil, according to the traditional views of Chinese historians.
Famous quotes containing the words grand and/or empress:
“One of my playmates, who was apprenticed to a printer, and was somewhat of a wag, asked his master one afternoon if he might go a-fishing, and his master consented. He was gone three months. When he came back, he said that he had been to the Grand Banks, and went to setting type again as if only an afternoon had intervened.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We never really are the adults we pretend to be. We wear the mask and perhaps the clothes and posture of grown-ups, but inside our skin we are never as wise or as sure or as strong as we want to convince ourselves and others we are. We may fool all the rest of the people all of the time, but we never fool our parents. They can see behind the mask of adulthood. To her mommy and daddy, the empress never has on any clothes—and knows it.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)