In all centuries, the Chinese believed that a woman transmits the life force “qi” to a man - this is a fundamental concept of the Chinese picture of the world. Therefore, it is no coincidence that Emperor Xuanzong, who at the age of 60 fell under the spell of his son’s charming young concubine Yang Guifei, kept about 40 thousand women in his palaces. And even such an orthodox communist as the Chairman of the Central Committee of the CPC Mao Zedong, firmly believed in this Taoist dogma and had a harem - with the full understanding of the masses. The author, the famous Chinese scholar Viktor Nikolaevich Usov, in this original study, tells the story of the life of the wives and concubines of the Celestial Empire from ancient times to the beginning of the twentieth century, when the last emperor Pu Yi reigned. The book contains a lot of interesting information about the structure of the imperial harem.