Lady Yu, the wife of Xiang Yu, the King of Chu, from the series Military Tales of the Han and Chu

While Kuniyoshi was achieving success in the warrior print genre, Kunisada began to design a series inspired by another popular novel translated from the Chinese, Military Tales of the Han and Chu. The tales recount the dramatic fall of the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE) and the rise of the Han dynasty (206 BCE–CE 220). In the tales, Xiang Yu, a prominent general of the Qin dynasty, and his wife Lady Yu find themselves surrounded at an encampment. Fearful that Xiang would not part from her, Lady Yu performed a final dance and killed herself. Xiang escaped with her severed head on the pommel of his horse. Dressed in distinctive Chinese armor holding a lance, Lady Yu looks more like a victorious general than a beautiful consort. The prominence of the horse, also in Kuniyoshi’s design, is a possible reference to the fate of her head.