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Chintsong's reign was peaceful, but he seems to have only avoided war by yielding to all the demands of the Tartars, who encroached on the frontier and seized several Chinese cities. His son Chetsong was only ten when he became emperor, and the administration was carried on by his mother, the Empress Tefei, another of the capable women of Chinese history.
The local garrisons were crushed, the viceroy killed, and general disorder prevailed among the people of what was the most fertile and prosperous province of the empire. Chetsong attempted to set up an administration, but he does not seem to have possessed the capacity or the knowledge to establish a regular government.
While he headed the rebellious movement, a woman named Tsinleang, the hereditary chieftainess of a small district, placed herself at the head of the loyalists in the state, and, leading them herself, succeeded in recovering the principal cities and in driving Chetsong out of the province. She has been not inappropriately called by one of the missionary historians the Chinese Penthesilea.
These slighted and disbanded braves easily changed themselves into brigands, and as the government would not have them as supporters, they determined to make it feel their enmity, Chetsong Ming, the chief who had raised them, placed himself at their head, and attracted a large number of the inhabitants to his standard.
Her early death left Chetsong to rule as he listed, and his first acts of independent authority were not of happy augury for the future. He had not been on the throne many months before he divorced his principal wife without any apparent justification, and when remonstrated with he merely replied that he was imitating several of his predecessors.
The censor's retort was, "You would do better to imitate their virtues, and not their faults." Chetsong did not have any long opportunity of doing either, for he died of grief at the loss of his favorite son, and it is recorded that, as "he did not expect to die so soon," he omitted the precaution of selecting an heir.
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