The latter Han (206 BC – 220) and three kingdoms (till 284) of China had Empresses and though outside my areas of expertise, so did dynasties before and after. They could hold considerable powers as Dowagers or be scapegoated for an empire's fall, they had their own biographies with their own tropes.

The three kingdom era has a book covering them called Empress and Consorts, Robert Cutter and William Cromwell, that also talks about how attitudes towards Empresses changed as well as a translation into English of all the three kingdom Empress SGZ (the records of the era by Chen Shou).

The females of the the kingdoms era certainly had their noteables, even just limiting to those listed in the Empress sections included Lady Wu, who acted as a regent for her second son Sun Quan after the shock assassination of her eldest son left the fledging state vulnerable. Bian who rose from singer to Empress Dowager, a restraining figure of her birth and marriage family and, when she failed to stop Yang Xiu's execution, made note to the grieving mother of her husband Cao Cao's short temper. Empress Guo was sent as a punishment for family revolt, she would end up trying to preserve the dynasty, outwitting the controller Sima Shi in a political battle for who to replace the deposed Cao Fang and being linked to several generals revolts against the Sima family.

There were others (like another Empress Guo who acted as a political adviser to her husband) and there were non Empress like Sun Luban (daughter of an Emperor, lover of a regent, political player in the court of Wu) and Lady Sun (sent by one lord as sister to marry another, she terrified her husband and on leaving attempted to kidnap his heir) who made a political impact.

My guess is why the most notable ones you know of are British or European is your education was shaped around that? Your cultural knowledge might also be British/European? That your education and the films/tv/literature around you will be based around figures like Elizabeth 1st of England, Isabelle of Castile and Catherine the Great rather then the Empress of Islamic world or Asia?

Thanks