60ty's strolling

Was Ruyi a Real Person? The True Story Behind Ruyi’s Royal Love and Yanxi Palace Short answer: yes — but not as “Ruyi.” The woman at the center of Ruyi’s Royal Love in the Palace really existed. Her name, however, was not Ruyi. She was the second empress of the Qianlong Emperor, known to history as the Step Empress, Lady Nara — the only empress in the entire Qing dynasty who was never given a posthumous title. If you have…

Why the Tiger Tally Never Came to Japan This piece continues from [Jade Gui, Bi, and Yue: The Jade Regalia of Rule], where I traced how the yue —the ceremonial axe—stood for the right to move an army. Here I follow that right forward, into the Warring States, where China turned it into something with the opposite logic: the tiger tally. And I follow it as a foreigner, because I am Japanese, and the tiger tally is the one Chinese…

> A note on what this is: an essay built on a single idea — that calligraphy is a portrait of the person who holds the brush — traced across the emperors and princes of the Qing dynasty. It begins with a scroll I saw in Shimonoseki, Japan, and ends with Kawashima Yoshiko’s father. Related pieces: [Li Hongzhang — The Scroll at Shimonoseki], [Prince Su (Shanqi) — The Qing Royal Who Chose Japan], [Kawashima Yoshiko], [Pujie and Saga Hiro —…

Four Words That Break What English Does to a Chinese Court — notes from translating a Warring States life I spent several weeks writing about a woman who rose from the entertainer households of Handan to become Queen Dowager of Zhao, and then helped destroy the state by having its finest general killed. She died around 228 BCE. History calls her the Chang Consort. Writing her in Japanese was difficult. Writing her in English turned out to be a different…

 The Chang Consort of Zhao — She Broke Every Ceiling, and Was Named for the Floor The state of Zhao should not have fallen the way it did. It was one of the seven great powers of the Warring States. It had survived Changping, where it lost over four hundred thousand men in a single catastrophe. It had produced Lian Po and Li Mu, two of the finest commanders of the age. And then, three months after Li Mu died,…

This article continues the story begun in “[Posthumous Names],” and stands as one worked example of the series’ opening piece, “[History Is Written by the Victors].” In the manga Kingdom, Zhao Qian appears as the strange, unstable king of Zhao — the state’s very last ruler. The history books dismiss him in a word: benighted, a fool. But read the single poem he is said to have composed in his place of exile, and you find something else: a man…

The General Who Never Lost — and the Country That Killed Him Anyway Ri Boku(Li Mu )(李牧) never lost a battle. He buried a Xiongnu host of more than a hundred thousand riders in a single engagement. He broke Qin’s (秦) general Huan Yi (桓齮) at Fei (肥), and the following year turned back a two-pronged Qin invasion at Panwu (番吾). Read through the Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji), and you will not find a single line describing this…

Wei Yingluo’s Real History: Heroine, Villainess, and the Poison Rumor Behind Story of Yanxi Palace If you’ve watched both hit dramas, you may be tangled up: the righteous heroine Wei Yingluo of Story of Yanxi Palace and the cold-blooded villainess Wei Yanwan of Ruyi’s Royal Love in the Palace are, in fact, the same real historical person — and then there’s the rumor that she was poisoned. Don’t worry. This piece cleanly separates the three: documented history, dramatic invention, and…

*The “golden lotus steps” scene in the hit drama Story of Yanxi Palace looks like pure invention. But pull on that single thread of fiction and something remarkable happens: almost the entire historical skeleton turns out to be real. What starts as a piece of palace mischief opens straight onto the deepest question in my whole series — what it actually meant to be a conquest dynasty, caught between Han and Manchu, and how that boundary came to be drawn,…

  This is a companion to [The tiny gold seal Japan nearly died to fetch], where we watched a “Son-of-Heaven system” hand out recognition at the edge of the world and let the periphery sort itself into a hierarchy for free. Here we watch the same machine run inside the palace walls. A hereditary slave could rise to become the mother of an emperor — the woman the drama Story of Yanxi Palace renders as Wei Yingluo was exactly such…

  This is a companion to [The Heirloom Seal of the Realm: the empty stone that ruled China for a thousand years]. That article looked at the center — the jade in which the Son of Heaven held the whole Mandate. This one looks at the far rim. What a little island at the outermost ring of that world crossed a deadly sea to fetch was not “the Mandate” at all, but something much smaller: mere *recognition*. And the gap…

This article continues from [The He Shi Bi (the jade that became the Heirloom Seal)]. The jade once guarded at the cost of lives was recut into the Chuanguo Xi — the Heirloom Seal of the Realm, the object that declared its holder the rightful Son of Heaven. For a thousand years it was seized, chipped, hidden, and at last lost forever. Why did emperors crave a single stone so badly? And why do replicas still sell today? This is…