Why were ancient emperors basically not fat?

The ancient emperor was the supreme ruler of the empire, and the conditions such as food, clothing, housing and transportation were the most superior. Theoretically speaking, it is reasonable that there should be many fat people in the emperor group, but why there were basically no fat emperors in ancient times?

There were many fat emperors in ancient times, but none of them were famous for being fat.

In fact, the statement of this topic itself is not objective, and there were many fat emperors in ancient times. A more objective statement should be that there were basically no fat emperors in ancient times, but there were still many fat emperors.

Only such obese and prominent emperors as An Lushan and Zhu Gaochi, Emperor Renzong of Ming Dynasty, can have more historical records. Few emperors reached this level of obesity, so in the eyes of many people, only one or two emperors were fat in history.

In fact, this is an obvious misunderstanding. Being fat and being very fat are two different things after all. Just because there are few fat emperors doesn't mean there are few fat emperors.

Judging from the portraits of emperors handed down from ancient times, there are still many emperors who are relatively fat, but they are not very prominent.

The description of this fat but not particularly fat emperor's figure in historical materials may be just a simple sentence or two of "full figure". So many people don't know the figure of these emperors, so they won't leave the impression of "fat emperors".

The portraits of emperors in the Song Dynasty and later dynasties all adopted realistic painting methods, that is, they were painted according to the real situation of the emperor himself, which could well reflect the real content of the emperor. Judging from the portraits of these emperors, at least many emperors in the Song Dynasty and later were chubby.

For example, from the portrait, Song Taizu in Zhao Kuangyin and Song Taizong in Zhao Guangyi are both obese, bloated and slightly black. Genghis Khan is also a chubby man with a big face and a slightly chubby figure.

Let's look at the portraits of emperors in Ming and Qing dynasties. Except for Zhu Qiyu and Zhu Houzhao, almost all emperors in the Ming Dynasty were fat. There were relatively few fat emperors in Qing Dynasty, but at least some emperors such as Nurhachi, Huang Taiji, Yongzheng and Jiaqing were fatter.

Theoretically, except for a few emperors whose celestial bodies were empty, such as Xianfeng, all other emperors with normal constitution would develop into chubby ones. After all, living conditions are so good that it is difficult to stay slim. Of course, the emperor who has too much sex life is another matter.

So it's not that there were no fat emperors in ancient times, but that many emperors were fat and not famous. From the true images of dozens of emperors handed down, we can see that many emperors are fat, and what's more, there are more emperors who have not left the true images, and there must be many fat people among them.