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Taiping, was only biding her time until she could make her own attempt to steal the crown. So he got crafty. First, he named his son Xuanzong to be his successor and abdicated the throne; then he had Xuanzong move on Taiping, based on the claim that she was about to try to depose him. After several of her men were killed, Taiping fled to a Buddhist monastery, where she was “allowed” to kill herself.
    The real surprise is that the Tang dynasty would continue for another 200 years, shocking given its members’ murderous (and suicidal) tendencies to kill themselves and each other.

Njinga of Ndongo
T HE P RINCESS W HO K EPT M ALE C ONCUBINES IN D RAG
    C A . 1581–D ECEMBER 17, 1663
S OUTHWESTERN A FRICA ( PRESENT - DAY A NGOLA )
    T he year was 1621. Princess Njinga was charged by her half brother Mbandi, ruler of the West African kingdom of Ndongo, to meet with Portuguese officials. For decades, the two powers had been fighting an on-and-off war, with the Europeans trying to seize more territory and resources. Now a treaty seemed possible. But when Njinga met with the Portuguese governor, she was faced with a blatant power play intended to humiliate her. While the governor lounged comfortably likea king on a throne, Njinga was not even offered a chair.
    The princess was having none of this nonsense. At her gesture, one of her maidservants got down on hands and knees. Njinga then sat on the woman’s back and addressed the governor as an equal. The negotiations were successful, and the peace treaty was signed. And just a few years later, Njinga would be sitting on a throne of her own—and it wouldn’t be made of maidservants.
P OLITICS AS U SUAL
    Njinga was the eldest daughter of the ruler of the Ndongo kingdom, a loose federation of Mbundu-speaking tribes in what is now the Central African state of Angola. At the time of her birth, the country was roughly 100 years into a complicated relationship with the Portuguese; the colonizers had arrived in the area in 1483 and been working hard to enslave or convert the population ever since.
    This situation didn’t exactly sit well with the people of Ndongo, though not entirely for the reasons you might think. A slave trade already existed between Ndongo and Kongo, its neighbor to the north, largely in war captives; by the 1500s, the two countries shared this trade with the Portuguese. But the Europeans were always angling for a bigger piece of the pie. The Ndongo nation fought several wars with Portuguese forces over independence and control of the slave trade and profitable salt and silver mines. Of course, that didn’t mean that Africans and Europeans were always at odds. If, say, the king of Kongo was getting a little grabby in their territory, Ndongo rulers called on the Portuguese as allies.
    But in 1575, the Portuguese upped the tension by establishing a colony at the city of Luanda, located between the two kingdoms’ territories, and started to stir up dissension among some of the disaffected factions nominally under Ndongo rule. Njinga’s father, Ngola Kilajua (
ngola
means “king”; the word was later taken by the Portuguese as the name of Angola), went to war against them, kicking off a protracted and bloody dispute.
    Princess Njinga was born into this uncertain landscape of shifting alliances and near-constant conflict. Stories about her childhood read like something out of
Girls’ Own Adventure
. She was a tomboy who could holda spear like a warrior and preferred climbing trees to doing more traditional girl things. She also didn’t take any crap—she once beat her half brother Mbandi bloody after he stole her beaded necklace, humiliating him in front of the entire village.
    The mythos about Njinga tells us that she grew into a strong, proud, decisive princess, the kind who was born to rule. But when her father died in 1617, her gender precluded her from ascending to the throne. It was Mbandi who became king, but only after murdering another brother as well