Read this short appendix. There is no need to worry about remembering the details. Just think about the question at the end.

Kings Jie & Zhou & Female Power

Many mainstream historical accounts claim that the extreme evil of the two famous "last kings" was the unfortunate result of a depraved woman’s influence. For example, regarding King Jie (#click here for illustrated Chinese version#):

Meixi was the concubine of King Jie of the Xia dynasty. She was beautiful in appearance but poor in virtue, and she threw the whole palace into confusion. . . . Jie cast aside propriety and lusted after women. He sought beautiful women with which to fill the palace harem; and gathered in hired singers and actors, pygmies and jugglers who were able to give weird and strange performances. . . . Day and night without ceasing, he drank wine and feasted with Meixi and the women of the imperial harem; he placed Meixi on his knee and hearkened her advice. In this disorder, he lost all sense of the rightness of things, becoming proud, extravagant, and unrestrained. He made a wine lake on which boats could move about and from which at one stroke of the drum, three thousand men drank like cows. While their heads were haltered, they drank of the wine lake, and, becoming drunk, they drowned in the lake. Meixi laughed at them and considered it fun (p. 186).

Regarding the last Shang King, King Zhou (#click here for illustrated Chinese version#):

Daji was the wife of King Zhou of the Shang dynasty and as a concubine she found favor with Zhou. . . . He loved wine and lewd pleasures and never left Daji at all; he valued highly whatever Daji praised, and he destroyed whatever Daji disliked. He made songs of new lusts, performed the dances of the northern villages [i.e., "barbarian" dances], and partook of extravagant pleasures. . . . He stored up grain until it was a hill, let wine flow until it filled a pond, and hung up meat like a forest. He made men and women pursue each other naked in their midst for a long night of feasting, and Daji loved it (pp. 187-88).

"The common people bitterly looked on . . . King Wu thereafter received the Mandate of Heaven to raise troops to punish Zhou; they fought at Muye and the leaders of the Shang forces turned down their spears. . . King Wu brought about the punishment of Heaven, cut off Daji’s head, and hung it up under a little white flag to manifest that it was a woman who had destroyed King Zhou (pp. 188, 189).

What views and roles of women are suggested in these descriptions? Keep this question in mind, and we shall return to this matter in the last chapter. (Passages above are based on Albert Richard O’Hara, The Position of Women in Early China According to the Lieh Nü Chuan "The Biographies of Chinese Women" [Taipei, Taiwan: Mei Ya Publications, Inc.], with some modification.)