July 2026

Kaku Kai (Guo Kai): The Man Who Sold Li Mu and Lian Po — and Buried Zhao and Himself | Kingdom 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…

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 King…

  **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…

> *This continues from [The Real Yunli, Prince Guo]. The romance and the revenge in the drama are fiction — but underneath them stands a woman who truly lived.*  The Real Woman Behind Zhen Huan  Introduction *Empresses in the Palace* (甄嬛伝), which aired in China in 2011, set off a wave that swept across Asia. Its heroine, Zhen Huan, still holds a firm place in viewers’ hearts as a kind of ideal — a woman people return to and admire.…