At the end of the Qing dynasty, the scholar-official Xue Fucheng (1838–1894) produced a series of short stories in which he reflected on the shared experience of historical women in China, meditating upon the tradition of gender oppression and Confucian patriarchy. As part of this series, he wrote on a number of occasions about the tragic life of Li Zu’e (fl. 545–581). Having survived a highly abusive marriage to the alcoholic Emperor Wenxuan of the Northern Qi (r. 550–559), after he died, she was repeatedly raped by her brother-in-law, Emperor Wucheng (r. 561–569). As a result, the widowed empress became pregnant, and when she killed her newborn baby, Emperor Wucheng murdered her son and beat her so badly that she nearly died, before expelling her from the palace. Li Zu’e’s life was undoubtedly terrible, but also extremely challenging to gender norms about widow chastity promulgated from the Song dynasty onward, along with the idea that women should commit suicide to avoid rape and should be nurturing and love their children no matter what circumstances they are born in. While Xue Fucheng was generally very sympathetic to women’s sufferings in his writings, he also needed to change and adapt this story in order that Li Zu’e would fit better with nineteenth-century mores and be seen by his readers as a suitable heroine. This chapter explores the process by which the life of this Northern Qi empress was reshaped to fit with the gender ideals that pertained a millennium after her demise.