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Overview
Niohuru-Nara Jinglian was the Tiansheng Emperor of the Great Ri, though she was enthroned after the loss of Ba Sing Se and is thus considered by historians to have ruled the Northern Ri. Coming to power after a brief interregnum following the assassination of the last Ri Emperor to rule in Ba Sing Se and be widely recognized as Earth Monarch, her father Turusi, she led a protracted war of resistance against the disintegration of the dynasty that was not ultimately successful. Initially commanding the support of much of the Northern and Western Earth Kingdom, the vassals of the Northern Ri gradually defected to the new Hao-Ting dynasty or were defeated on the battlefield. Jinglian managed to hold on to defensible Yonggan settlements in the mountains for the entirety of her long reign, long after any hope of retaking the capital was lost.
Early Life
Jinglian was born in 654 BG to Niohuru-Nara Turusi, then the 25-year-old Imperial Crown Prince, during the reign of her notorious grandfather Niohuru-Nara Kuazha. Her mother was Gan Fenfen (乾芬芬), a Ganjinese noblewoman with some Yonggan blood; Fenfen was selected as Turusi's paramount wife partly because she was a particularly strong earthbender, and indeed eventually attained the Emery Degree in the Ganjinese school. It was thought that her family's spiritual qualities would revivify the dynasty's earthbending, which the Imperial Succession Council was concerned had faltered somewhat in Turusi.
With multiple older siblings including brothers, it was thought that the chances of Jinglian ascending the throne were nil. Although she received a good classical education, little thought was given to preparing her to rule. When she was 12 years old, she was sent away from the capital to live with her mother's family in Ganjingguo, ostensibly to learn Earthbending from her mother's own teacher. She did well in her studies, though she did not have the same talent as her accomplished mother.
In 640, Jinglian's grandfather the Huowang Emperor was slain by nomadic vassals for desecrating the Imperial Hunt of that year. Her father ascended the throne as Taigai Emperor and shortly recalled his teenaged daughter to the capital.
Marriage
Enjoying the social scene of the Upper Ring as an Imperial Princess, she began to be courted by the young Prince of Wa, Yulu-Nara Asan (660-595), scion of the third-most prestigious families of the Yonggan conquest elite, after the Niohuru and Aisin. They were married in 636, and split their time between the Imperial Court and the Principality of Wa.
In 634, Jinglian gave birth to a son, Gaishan. He was followed by a daughter in 631.
Fall of the Great Ri
In 620, while Jinglian was away at her husband's fief with her family, a coup by the Ba Sing Se native elite toppled the reign of her father the Taigai Emperor. Her parents and the emperor's adult sons and their families were massacred by the conspirators, and only one of Jinglian's older sisters survived (also by being out of the capital at the time of the coup.)
Reeling from this blow, the surviving members of the Yonggan conquest elite and the territories that remained loyal to the Great Ri took some time before coalescing around two rival centers of power: the Aisin-Nara Prince of Jin, Bugan, and Jinglian and her husband, the Prince of Wa. Bugan and Asan disagreed over the course of action; despairing of defeating the Hao-Ting militarily after the banner armies of the Ri lost control of the outer wall of Ba Sing Se, Bugan made peace with the Hao-Ting and was followed in this by several other nearby polities that had initially supported the Ri over the Hao-Ting. The Prince of Wa and his camp, on the other hand, wished to fight on - if not retaking Ba Sing Se, then by establishing an independent dynasty in the North and West.
Ascension to the Throne
Although Bugan held the imperial seals (including, secretly, the Heirloom Seal of the Earth Kingdom, which the Hao-Ting thought was destroyed), the Prince of Wa and his allies proclaimed Jinglian the Tiansheng Emperor of the Great Ri in the Imperial Hunting Lodge, in lands they controlled. Replicas of the original seals of state were made, against the wishes of some of Jinglian's supporters who wanted to explicitly establish a new "Northern Ri" dynasty in the hopes of easing future peace negotiations by abandoning a claim to the capital and lands of the Central Earth Kingdom.
The Hao-Ting initially focused its efforts on fortifying the Abka Line in anticipation of attacks by nomads affiliated with the former dynasty, and fighting nearby vassal states and princes of the Yonggan conquest elite who had settled in the Central Earth Kingdom during the previous dynastic transition. During this time, Jinglian fortified her territory and established many mountain redoubts that would serve her forces in good stead in the coming decades.
Jinglian mostly deferred to Asan in military matters, but in civil and spiritual matters she fully assumed the duties of Emperor. In the Ri dynasty, she was the first Empress-regnant as opposed to Empress consort (in the Common language, she simply used the same title as her father, and her husband was termed Emperor's Husband (帝夫) by analogy to the usual term for an empress consort, literally Emperor's Wife.) This development required some adaptation of the dynastic ordinances; some of the state ritual praxis required the participation of the Emperor's Wife. (帝后) It was disputed among the sages of the State Religion as to whether or not an emperor-consort could substitute for this role or not, so in 618 Jinglian married a second spouse, Wan-Jala Baihe (婉扎拉·百合 640-559) who served as Emperor's Wife in the state rituals of the Northern Ri. Is is unclear if Baihe was actually a lover of Jinglian or only a ritual assistant who was legally married to Jinglian in her official capacity as emperor; contemporary propaganda of the Hao-Ting clouds the historical record.
Later Life and Death
Eventually, in 610, the Hao-Ting began a serious campaign to conquer the Northern Ri. It was a grueling and bloody war of attrition, all the more costly to the Ba Sing Se government because of the lukewarm support of their nominal vassals in the area, including the Aisin-Nara Prince of Jin and the western Nomads, who remained broadly unsympathetic to the Hao-Ting. Jinglian's generals were thus generally well-informed of Hao-Ting forces and their movements, and received, in the early years of the campaign, a steady stream of outside volunteers who were dissatisfied with their own polities' capitulation to Hao-Ting suzerainty.
Jinglian's husband, the Prince of Wa, died in battle in 607. Jinglian, fighting alongside him as an earthbender, barely managed to escape with her life. Despite the loss of Asan, who was a capable general, the war continued on under the guidance of Jinglian herself and her crown prince, Gaishan, now 27 and himself a skilled officer who had come of age fighting the Royal Army.
However, the far superior resources of the Hao Ting eventually turned the tide of war decisively against the Northern Ri, particularly once other conflicts associated with the dynastic transition had been resolved in their favor around 600. They chipped away at the territory Jinglian and her regime controlled, until it was restricted to highly defensible mountain settlements, mostly of Yonggan people.
Jinglian died of a stroke in 587, and was succeeded by her son Gaishan, as the Gainan Emperor, pretender 24th Earth Monarch and the last of the Northern Ri. The "empire" he inherited was at this point little more than a network of mountain redoubts with nominal allegiance to the Ri, and he disappeared after the last of these was conquered by the Hao Ting in 579.
Historical Appraisal and Legacy
Western Historians, e.g. of the Ganjinese school and the writers associated with the members of the post-Qin Yonggan diaspora settled in Omashu, praise Jinglian's leadership and courage in an impossible situation for which her early life did not fully prepare her. She exhibited many of the traditional martial virtues of her people and enjoys a positive reputation among the Yonggan even today, including those of the Western Yonggan lands who never politically supported her actual dynasty.
Jinglian's relationship with her official wife, Baihe, was targeted by propagandists of the early Hao Ting, who intended to scandalize the Northern Ri among the people of the Central Earth Kingdom by playing up differences between the sexual mores of the Yonggan and Zhongzu in relation to same-sex romance. This does not seem to have had much of a contemporary effect on its intended audience in the Central Earth Kingdom, but in later centuries the Hao Ting propaganda was re-appropriated by Yonggan authors. Some of them wrote long romances about Jinglian and Baihe, or about the supposed love-triangle between Jinglian, Asan, and Baihe; the characters and their doomed fight against the Hao-Ting are staples of Western melodrama.
Hao-Ting historians, obviously, assess Jinglian and the Prince of Wa in a very negative light, as rebels who spent thousands of lives futilely resisting a dynastic change that was inevitable.