The Woman With the Axe: On Fu Hao, Ancient China’s Warrior Queen

The earliest Chinese word for king, “wang,” may be translated as “the big man.” But there’s another translation that made me do an excited little clap when I found it: “the man with the axe”—which, as my source helpfully clarifies, is “used for chopping off heads.”

The primary axe of ancient China, called the yue, is a lot different than the axes in Ahhotep’s tomb. Some yues are actively menacing, with eyes and a horrible rictus grin cut out of the bronze, square-toothed jack-o’-lantern style. The yue is thin and heavy, big enough and recognizable enough from a distance for it to be tied to the top of a tall pole and used as a standard for the military to follow. These were bespoke weapons, each tailored to the particular danger of the carrier. The process of design and casting would take a lot of time and resources, creating the kind of object meant only for the highest of high, kings and generals. And maybe a queen.

For a time after we began to understand metal, the axe remained the symbol of power and military prowess. As we started to record our own existence on papyrus and clay tablets and bits of bone, we used axes to communicate something more primal. Far from a tool taken for granted, an axe raised high on a pole was a provocation, an expression of might. China was one of the greatest producers of bronze in the ancient world, and in the Shang dynasty the axe was its totem: weapon of the executioner and the battlefield, a canvas on which to show off artistic and technical excellence, and a flag for warriors to follow into combat. Shang dynasty warriors didn’t use battleaxes in their hand-to-hand combat. The yue was more authoritative than that. It was only “bestowed upon generals who had the right and power to levy war.”

Kings displayed the axe to remind their subjects of the consequences of disobedience. Executions were not reserved for lawbreakers. Enslaved people were frequently executed as a part of ritualistic violence. State violence performed with an axe is not necessarily the same as axe murder as an act of interpersonal violence. Which is not to say that they’re any better; few righteous processes end with an axe in the head. But in many cases they are decisions made not by one person but by the community. War and execution and even human sacrifice have to consider customs, ritual, circumstance.

The Shang dynasty king Wu Ding hung an enormous axe with the face of an eager, terrifying beast behind him on the wall when he met with his subjects. This wasn’t a functional thing, this yue. It was certainly sharp enough to chop off a head, but it was massive. The proportions are like those of a fantasy axe in a video game, technically capable but simply too huge to pose a practical threat. Yet it was certainly a threat. The axe was power itself.

The Shang axe embodied the fear and might that underpinned Wu Ding’s relationship to his subjects. The axe and the menace of execution, the implicit force that made the king’s will be done, were so internalized that he didn’t need to actually wield it: “The axe went straight from the wall to their hearts.”

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The queen Fu Hao was buried with four axes, but she began her life as a horse girl. She was the beloved scion of the Hongshan culture of horse breeders, an ideal princess bride for Wu Ding. He had a habit of marrying women from tribes and communities at the edge of his kingdom, presaging the harem of the rear palace system with his “living symbols of Shang diplomacy.” Like his other wives, she was not just an ornament from his travels but a formidable ally who spent her childhood in military training to prepare for a life of power.

The Zi dynasty must have seen her marriage to Wu Ding, then a prince, with great pride and love leavened by the sorrow of losing her. Wine vessels from her maternal line that may date back to before her wedding address her as “the smart and lovely girl.”

Not long after her wedding to Wu Ding, her father-in-law the king died, and the family was obligated to formally mourn and abstain from courtly life for three years. The young couple used the time to get to know their country. Encountering other communities on a non-warfare basis could have been a rare opportunity even for these most privileged leaders, and the couple took the time to learn about the local landscape: the crops, the irrigation methods, the terrain. It was a time of agricultural scarcity, and Fu Hao and her husband tried to mitigate the pressures of hungry times by holding meetings with local officials and the public.

Once the mourning period was over and the royal couple had returned to the capital city Yinxu, they encountered immediate military trouble in need of a creative solution. There was a boundary dispute at the northern borders, but all their best men were already deployed in the south to address a separate conflict. In this crisis, the new queen volunteered for service.

Wu Ding was conflicted. The Shang dynasty was certainly not a matrilineal society, like the Yangshao culture of the Neolithic era. But it wasn’t as patriarchy fixated as the next society; only in the Zhou period did the axe become “clearly a symbol of male authority.” Fu Hao was raised with the entitlement of royalty and the assurance of military training, but her rise in the fighting ranks was far from predetermined. She held a unique position distinct from the courtly responsibilities of other wives, garnering the kind of respect enjoyed by few others in her milieu—women or men. Thanks to her high-status family of origin and the diplomatic experience of her royal honeymoon, she was becoming a political force of her own, and she was ready to turn soft power into sharp bronze.

When Fu Hao got her axe, she raised it high so her soldiers could follow behind her, and brought it down against threats to her empire. Sometimes she acted as the advance team for Wu Ding—finding lodgings, spying, tending to wounded soldiers, scouting the battlefield. Other times she was the boss. She led thirteen thousand soldiers in battle against the southeastern state of Jiang. Hundreds of miles to the north of Yinxu in modern-day Mongolia, Fu Hao was a key part of Wu Ding’s campaigns. Perhaps her greatest triumph was in the southwestern state of Bafang: she snuck into Bafang to occupy the enemy’s path of retreat; when Wu Ding attacked them, she confronted them as they escaped. The royal couple destroyed their enemy.

Fu Hao’s life is attested to in oracle bones—shards of ox bone and turtle shell that were burned until they cracked and then interpreted for news of the future. The predictions—question, divined answer, and outcome—were written upon the bones, leaving some of the earliest writing in Chinese history. Fu Hao appears frequently in the bones, to mixed results. One of Fu Hao’s pregnancies was incorrectly predicted to be a boy, which would have been a disappointment. But she was successful as ever at court, taking on senior roles in official duties and ruling over disputes among Wu Ding’s other consorts. Her son the heir honored her well, giving gifts (but only after he checked with the oracle bones).

But soon after she returned to Yinxu, she got sick, and then her son did too. The prince died first, followed by Fu Hao, followed by as many as sixteen other enslaved people sacrificed to her afterlife.

When Fu Hao’s tomb was discovered in 1976, it was a landmark in ancient Chinese archaeology. But what made her grave so significant wasn’t really the axes. Most of the things in her tomb weren’t unique, not the jade parrots or the beauty supplies or even the people buried alive with her. Her military service is deeply fascinating, but we’d have no idea about it if it weren’t for the thing that truly sets her story apart from her royal peers.

Fu Hao’s tomb is different because it was never robbed.

Fu Hao’s unmolested crypt may be directly related to her secondary status. Wu Ding and his top wife Fu Jing were in the main tomb complex. Fu Hao’s smaller tomb was apparently harder to find. Since her son predeceased her, she wasn’t the heir’s mother at the time she died. She’s clearly an important figure, but the world of the Shang dynasty hereafter is deeply competitive. As powerful as she was on the battlefield, she was a woman. And even though she was the first wife chronologically, she did not die as the top woman—perhaps because of her early death. Still she was prepared to live the afterlife lavishly. There were two hundred bronze vessels for food and wine offerings, some from her life on earth and some from her mourners, many almost two feet tall, depicting unique and fanciful birds with dragons coming out of the back of their heads.

The tomb also held twenty-seven knives and over a hundred other weapons. One jade dagger-axe had an inscription indicating that it was one of five daggers given as tribute by an outlying tribe. This isn’t the sort of thing that showed up in the tombs of other consorts—this was Fu Hao flexing her martial power, not her marital power.

Fu Hao had four axes in her grave, two of them weighing over seventeen pounds. The most famous of the four features an expressionless bald face projecting from the center of the yue, menaced from both sides by stylized tigers. The others feature dragons and owls; all bear Fu Hao’s name. The axes set her apart from other royal women, suggesting a power withheld from other consorts.

“Because the axe is present in her grave, that means that she wields the power over life and death,” Dr. Keren Wang, a scholar of Chinese legal and intellectual history at Emory University, told me. “That means she can put people under trial and declare them guilty and execute them without approval of the king. And that’s considered extremely significant power.”

It’s exhilarating to find queens of the past like Ahhotep and Fu Hao, to see women in power during eras in which women’s contributions were usually erased. But the war-crime-level excess of Fu Hao’s life and death were not a moral triumph. She lived her elite lifestyle on a wave of violence and enslavement embodied by rituals of human sacrifice. As many as sixteen people (and six dogs) around (and under) Fu Hao’s tomb were a pretty modest offering by royal standards; the scale goes way up as you move up the royal order. Nine thousand people were killed in just one of Wu Ding’s ceremonies. In the case of Fu Hao’s tomb, the form of sacrifice was called Renxun. Though these were mostly ancestral rites, they also served to “instill fear into the spectators, which ultimately helped to dissuade both internal dissent and attacks from outsiders.”

Dr. Wang is a scholar of human sacrifice, and in our conversation he explained how modern sacrifices that have become mundane parts of daily life are connected to the bloody spectacles of centuries ago. The framework of a ritual conditions us to accept the unacceptable—even when the trappings of the ritual are no longer oracle bones and vestal virgins.

Triage is the modern human-sacrifice ritual I’ve thought of the most since. The process of quickly sorting out which patients need the most urgent care in hospitals means that some of the patients most in need of care will die so that time and energy will be spent instead on cases who stand a better chance of survival. As a ritual, the process imposes order on an inevitably tragic decision so that the way can be cleared to prevent others from dying unnecessarily. Another, less sympathetic human-sacrifice ritual practiced today is the commonplace decision to axe thousands of jobs in order to guarantee stockholder happiness, the kind of bloodless brutality that we cannot accept and cannot resist.

The collective stakes of human sacrifice were crucial in strengthening the royal court in the Shang dynasty, an early example of centralized government and social stratification: the rituals reflected and reinforced the norms of the day. They were as much political theater as they were religious ceremony.

One of Wu Ding’s rituals, called forth to end a famine, struck me as Kubrickian in its cinematic use of language: “a cascade of blood,” as Dr. Wang explained it. The ritual was structured on a step pyramid, with sacrificial victims numbering in the hundreds or thousands stationed atop it. These men were decapitated, but the axe didn’t stop there. Their torsos were chopped in half in order to generate the amount of blood needed for a waterfall effect. Some of the blood was also used for wine, but the main purpose of this flood of blood was to invoke rain, the axe recalling the thunder.

The people in the cascade may have known that they were headed for sacrifice, unlike the victims in Fu Hao’s tomb. Her human sacrifices were caught unaware. “They thought they were coming back,” said Dr. Wang. “They were just getting ready for the sarcophagus and getting all of the ritual objects set up. And then they turn around, and people are closing the lid.”

Suffocation killed them, not the axe. But it was the threat of the axe hanging on the wall that empowered these rituals of sacrifice and slavery.

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From Whack Job: A History of Axe Murder by Rachel McCarthy James. Copyright © 2025 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press, an imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group, a division of Macmillan.