She was the second empress of her husband Emperor Guangwu (Liu Xiu), even though she married him as his wife before his first empress, Guo Shengtong, did. She was famed for her beauty and meekness. (Her posthumous name started a trend for the rest of the Eastern Han, where empresses' posthumous names were formed not just from their husbands' posthumous names, as was customary during the preceding Western Han, but used part of their husbands' posthumous names along with an additional descriptive character.)