60ty's strolling

If you read a*Kingdom*, you already know one kind of traitor by heart: **Guo Kai (Kaku Kai)** of Zhao — the minister who took Qin’s gold, drove out Lian Po, and slandered the great general **Li Mu (Ri Boku)** to his death. Guo Kai is a *moving* villain. He schemes, he acts, he tips his country over the edge with his own two hands. The state of Qi was destroyed by the opposite kind of traitor. His name was **Hou…

If you follow *Kingdom*, you already hate one man on sight: **Guo Kai (Kaku Kai)**, the minister of Zhao who took Qin’s gold, drove out the veteran **Lian Po (Renpa)**, and slandered the brilliant **Li Mu (Ri Boku)** into an executioner’s hands. Zhao held two of the age’s greatest generals — and tore off its own arms. Histories call Guo Kai a bought traitor and leave it there. But I don’t think gold is the whole story. Underneath the greed…

In *Kingdom*, the fall of each state usually comes on the battlefield. But **Qi**, the last of the great eastern states, fell almost without a sword being drawn. Its ruler, **King Jian (Tian Jian)**, sat on a mountain of soldiers and surrendered anyway. This is the story of how forty years of peace, a bribed chancellor, and one seductive idea — *”China will be one, so why prepare for war?”* — destroyed a kingdom from the inside. ## The Boy…

> **A note before we begin.** This is not a defense, and it is not an indictment. The Manchu–Mongol Independence Movement was inseparable from Japan’s expansion onto the Asian mainland; from China’s point of view, it was part of an invasion. I do not erase that context. What I want to do here is set the labels down for a moment — “traitor,” “spy,” “puppet” — and return four caricatures to being human beings caught in the collapse of an…

If you know Yoshiko Kawashima at all, you probably know her from Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor — the flamboyant “Eastern Jewel,” a spy in men’s clothing who supplies Empress Wanrong with opium. It is one of cinema’s most memorable villains. I was born in Matsumoto, in Nagano Prefecture, Japan. In Matsumoto, Yoshiko Kawashima is not a movie villain. She is a former local schoolgirl whose grave stands in a quiet temple on the edge of town, and whose memory…

> ※ Two questions fans of Empresses in the Palace (甄嬛传 / Zhen Huan Zhuan) ask most often: Was Zhen Huan a real person? and What does her beautiful name actually mean? This article answers both — first the flesh-and-blood empress the drama was built on, then the classical love poem folded into the two characters of her name. — Part 1 — The Real Woman: Empress Xiaosheng Xian (Niohuru) Zhen Huan (甄嬛, pinyin Zhēn Huán) is not a complete…

Two of the most beloved Chinese historical dramas — Empresses in the Palace (The Legend of Zhen Huan) and The Legend of Mi Yue — open and close each episode with songs that are far more than background music. In Chinese drama, the theme is a distilled statement of the whole story, and these are some of the finest ever written. Below is a short guide to each: what the song means, and the centuries-old poetry hidden inside it. (Each…

> Part of the C-drama song cluster.  it explains the song’s meaning rather than reproducing the lyrics. The older poems quoted (the Sixth Dalai Lama’s couplets and a Japanese court poem) are centuries old and freely quotable. — The 2011 Chinese time-travel romance Scarlet Heart (步步惊心, Bù Bù Jīng Xīn; based on Tong Hua’s novel, and known in Japan as Kyūtei Jokan Jakukei) is carried by a duet that aches from its first note: “Yi Nian Zhi Zhuo” (一念执着, “one…

> A note before we begin. The doomed love between Zhen Huan and Prince Guo, which this song carries, is the drama’s fiction. The historical Prince Guo (Yunli) was a scholarly prince loyal to the Yongzheng Emperor; there was no romance with Zhen Huan. This piece is about the beauty of that story — and it explains the song’s meaning rather than reproducing its copyrighted lyrics. — The Chinese palace drama Empresses in the Palace (Chinese title The Legend of…

> A companion piece to the Late-Qing series. Where the Chinese essays celebrate “being summoned by the Son of Heaven” as the supreme honor, this Japanese poem turns that same summons inside out. — A crab in hiding receives the sovereign’s call Book 16 of the Man’yōshū (Japan’s oldest poetry anthology, eighth century) holds an unforgettable poem, number 3886. Its annotation calls it “a song composed to voice the pain of a crab.” It was performed by hokaibito—the lowest of…

If you’ve watched Empresses in the Palace (the 2011 Chinese palace drama also known as The Legend of Zhen Huan), you’ve heard “Feng Huang Yu Fei” (凤凰于飞) — the haunting closing theme sung by Liu Huan. To me, it isn’t a song about the throne at all. It’s the secret love song of Prince Guo and Zhen Huan. A note for first-time viewers Empresses in the Palace follows Zhen Huan, a young woman who enters the harem of the Yongzheng…

> Late Qing Dynasty Series｜Emperors　The Xianfeng Emperor > Reigned 1851–1861 (10 years) · Born 1831 · Died 1861, age 31 > > ※ This article focuses on the financial and structural collapse of the Qing under the Xianfeng Emperor. For the emperor as a man — the rigged succession, his dependence on the future Cixi — see the companion piece [The Rise of Cixi: How a 25-Year-Old Concubine Came to Rule the Qing]. — “Income could no longer cover expenditure”…