The first half of Empresses in the Palace belongs to Hua Fei.
Arrogant, vicious, monopolising the emperor’s attention, punishing anyone who displeases her. She rules the harem on the strength of her brother’s power at court, and falls when he does. She is the first thing the heroine has to survive.
She was based on a real woman.
And that woman was, in nearly every particular, her opposite.
Lady Nian
The historical model was Lady Nian, who died in 1725 and is known to history by her posthumous title, Imperial Noble Consort Dunsu.
Her father had governed provinces. Her eldest brother ran the Imperial Household Department. Her second brother was the general who would pacify the northwest.
And the family was Han Chinese — enrolled in the Han banners, not Manchu nobility. Lady Nian was the first woman of Han descent in the dynasty to become a Noble Consort, and later Imperial Noble Consort.
She did not come through the selection
This matters, because it is where most of the confusion starts.
Lady Nian was not chosen through the imperial draft. The Kangxi Emperor assigned her directly to his fourth son, then a prince, as a secondary consort — the rank immediately below a principal wife in a prince’s household.
That was around 1709. Which means she had been part of his household for more than a decade before he became emperor. The women the drama shows arriving through the palace selection belong to a completely different generation. She was already there.
Her brother rose first
Here is the largest single error the drama produces.
In the series, Hua Fei’s favour is the source of her brother’s power. He is powerful because she is loved.
In life it ran the other way.
Her brother passed the highest imperial examination at twenty-two and entered the Hanlin Academy — the elite scholarly body. By 1709 he was governor of Sichuan, a provincial viceroy before the age of thirty. He was a scholar-official, not a soldier who married his sister upward. Even the Yongzheng Emperor later described him as widely read and sound in judgement.
Their father had reached a provincial governorship and won the Kangxi Emperor’s confidence by piloting a tax reform that anticipated one of the dynasty’s major fiscal changes. Their eldest brother held a series of senior posts on his own account.
The whole family climbed on merit.
Her brother’s appointment to Sichuan came at almost exactly the moment she entered the prince’s household. His career did not depend on her at all.
The marriage was a political placement
The timing is worth pausing on.
Her brother was made governor of Sichuan in 1709. The year before, the heir apparent had been deposed for the first time — the moment the Kangxi Emperor began seriously reconsidering the succession.
So the emperor tied a rising Han-banner family to his fourth son.
And twelve years later, that same brother held the post controlling supply lines to the northwestern army — the army commanded by the fourth son’s chief rival for the throne. (→ “[Why the Fourteenth Prince Lost]”)
Her marriage was not romance and it was not favour. It was a move on a board.
Ten years, and four children
The record of the Yongzheng Emperor’s offspring contains something startling.
For roughly a decade, every child he fathered was born to her. No other woman in the household bore him one.
She had four: a daughter, then three sons, the last born in 1723.
All four died in childhood.
The youngest was conceived during the period of mourning for the late emperor; the strain is thought to have brought on a premature birth at seven months. The child did not survive, and yet the emperor had him entered into the imperial genealogy by special exception and given a name.
Which brings us to the drama’s central invention.
Hua Fei cannot conceive. The incense the emperor gives her contains musk, and it has made her barren — the discovery of this is the tragedy her whole arc is built toward.
Lady Nian bore four children and buried four children.
Not the tragedy of a woman denied motherhood. The tragedy of a woman who kept becoming a mother and kept losing.
What the emperor wrote about her
The document elevating her to Imperial Noble Consort survives. These are his own words.
Her nature was gentle and good. Her conduct was modest and careful. Before the empress she was small and respectful in her bearing. She governed those beneath her with generosity and calm.
An earlier document credits her with something else: she was learned enough in the classics and histories to remonstrate with him — to tell an emperor he was wrong.
Proud, cruel, abusive to her attendants. The drama’s Hua Fei contradicts the record on every count.
Her death, and five days of silence
She was never robust; the emperor himself described her as habitually frail.
In late 1725 she became gravely ill.
- 8 November — the emperor departs for the imperial tombs for the third anniversary of his father’s death. She is too ill to travel with him
- 14 November — he returns to the capital, facing the winter solstice rites and a full desk
- 15 November — in the middle of all of it, he orders her raised to Imperial Noble Consort, adding that if she does not recover, every rite is to be performed at that rank
- 18 November — the moment the state sacrifice ends, he cancels the next morning’s court audience and returns to her that same day
- The following five days — the court diary, which records the emperor’s daily business, falls almost silent
- 23 November — she dies, before the investiture ceremony can be held
Then he suspended all government business for five days.
Consider what that means. This was an emperor who wrote tens of thousands of rescripts in a thirteen-year reign and slept perhaps four hours a night. He stopped for five days.
He gave her the posthumous name Dunsu.
What those two characters say
The first character means thick, generous, warm-hearted — used of a person, it means sincere and deeply feeling. Until then it had appeared only in the posthumous names of emperors.
The second means grave, careful, correct in conduct.
Together: warm-hearted and modest.
Now set that beside what he had written of her while she lived — generous and calm toward those beneath her, modest and careful in her conduct. The two characters map straight onto the two phrases.
A posthumous name compresses a whole life into two characters. He chose the two that repeated what he had already said. This was not a grieving man reaching for something in the moment; it was a settled judgement.
And “warm-hearted and modest” is very nearly the antonym of the woman the drama shows us.
Then he demoted four senior officials of the Board of Rites, from the president down, for conducting her funeral procession shabbily. During the mourning period he lost his temper over it twice.
And her brother died after her
This is the drama’s largest structural inversion.
In the series, the brother’s fall destroys Hua Fei. He is stripped of power; she collapses without him.
In life the order was reversed.
Her brother’s decline had begun while she was still alive. In the spring of 1725 he was transferred out of his viceroyalty to a lesser command, and impeachments followed from several provinces.
But no death sentence came.
Several sources record that the emperor held back the punishment because of his sister’s illness.
The ninety-two charges were settled, and he was ordered to take his own life, after she died — seventeen days after.
While she lived, her brother was protected.
Seventeen days after she stopped, he was dead.
The family was not destroyed
One more correction. It is usually assumed the whole family went down with him.
It did not. Her father died two years later and was buried with the rites of a first-rank duke by special order. Her eldest brother was promoted in 1726 and rose to one of the senior censorial posts in the empire.
Only the one brother was condemned.
And in 1737 she was interred in the imperial mausoleum, with the emperor.
Her son
She left one surviving son, who was eight when he died in 1728.
The emperor ordered him buried with the rites of a prince of the first rank — far above what his standing warranted.
Years later, elevating this brother posthumously, the next emperor gave the reason plainly: their father had cherished him.
✦ Satoe’s Take
What follows is my reading, not established fact.
| Hua Fei in the drama | Lady Nian in history | |
|---|---|---|
| How she entered | — | Assigned by imperial order, not selection |
| Her brother | Powerful because she is loved | Rose on his own; the order is reversed |
| Character | Arrogant, cruel | Gentle, modest, generous |
| With the empress | Openly hostile | Respectful and careful |
| Children | Cannot conceive | Four born, four lost |
| Order of the fall | Brother falls, then she does | She dies, then he is condemned |
| The emperor’s feeling | She was only ever useful | Five days of silence; a name reserved for emperors |
Every line is inverted.
And looking at her life from both ends, something else appears.
Coming in and going out, she was placed by politics.
She entered the prince’s household because an emperor made a move on a board, the year after the succession was thrown open. Her wishes had nothing to do with it.
And her death became the signal for her brother’s. While she breathed, he was safe. Seventeen days after she stopped, he was ordered to die.
At both ends, her life was given a meaning she had no part in choosing.
The word “Shilan”
There is one line I want to take seriously.
Just before Hua Fei throws herself against the wall, she cries out:
Your Majesty — you have made Shilan suffer so.
Everything about her is in that sentence, and almost none of it survives translation.
Court usage requires a consort addressing the emperor to refer to herself by a formal self-deprecating term — the speech of a woman occupying a rank. She had been using it moments earlier.
She drops it, and says her own name.
In the harem, a name is what only an intimate may use. The emperor addresses his consorts by title; Hua Fei is an office, not a person. The name Shilan belonged to the hours when they were alone.
So the line means: I was never your consort. I was Shilan.
A woman stripped of her rank, demoted to the lowest tier, ordered to die — and the last thing she refuses to give up is the name. There is no one to hear it. The emperor has said he does not wish to hear anything concerning her, and he does not come.
She says her own name in a place where no one is left to say it.
And this single line is why Hua Fei is loved.
Two languages, colliding
Just before that moment, the heroine tells her something. The emperor favoured you, she says, because you were your brother’s sister.
Love, explained as politics.
Hua Fei cannot answer it. What comes out instead is the cry.
So the scene sets two languages against each other. The heroine is speaking in analysis, causation, transaction — the language of the institution. Hua Fei has only a name.
And the cruel part is that the heroine is right. The historical marriage really was a placement made by an emperor with the succession in mind. What she says is factually correct.
The audience sides with Hua Fei anyway.
The woman who wins the argument loses the scene. The one with no logic at all takes the room.
And the heroine is not the only one who has changed
There is a further turn here, and I think it is the sharpest thing the series does.
The way the heroine speaks in that scene is a way she could not have spoken when she arrived. Dissecting someone’s love as a transaction, aiming precisely at what a person’s whole life rests on — that is how the people she was once frightened of used to talk.
In the process of destroying Hua Fei, she has been becoming Hua Fei.
But the viewer has changed too.
By this point in the series we have been quietly agreeing with a great deal. That she has to harden. That she will be crushed if she doesn’t. That the manoeuvring is regrettable but necessary. We have taken the logic of the harem on board — that is simply what following a story means.
Then the word Shilan arrives.
A sentence with no calculation in it at all, from a woman who only ever wanted to be loved. And the moment it moves you, you notice how far along you have come. You see that the heroine has changed. And you see that you changed with her.
That, I think, is the real horror in this drama.
There is a famous song from the series about beauty as a curse — the idea that being lovely is what destroys these women. But perhaps the curse is not that.
It is the garden itself: that inside the cage you stop being who you were.
And that you do not notice it happening.
A woman who hurt so many people, who was so unbearably proud, turns out in her final moment to have been living entirely for love. The arrogance, the cruelty — the audience understands all at once that it was all attachment to one man.
The worse she was, the harder that lands.
Perhaps she was written proud in order to arrive here.
The name and the record
The historical woman has no personal name in the record. There is a surname and a posthumous title, and that is all.
This is not remarkable. Women’s given names are generally absent from East Asian historical writing — in Japan too, the great writers of the classical period are known by nicknames or as the mother of or the daughter of someone. The absence is the norm, not an injustice done to her in particular.
And a public name is not the same thing as a private one.
There is a scene in The Tale of Genji that shows what I mean. Genji, having already become a woman’s lover, asks her afterwards what her name is. She will not tell him. She turns the question aside in a poem — I am only a fisherman’s child, she says, meaning her birth is too low to be worth naming — and she dies without ever having told him.
The ordering is the whole point. In this tradition a name sits further inside a person than her body does. It is withheld not because it is trivial but because it is the innermost thing.
The same holds across the region. Japan’s great classical writers are known by nicknames, or simply as the mother of or the daughter of someone; the given names are gone. This is the norm, not an injustice done to any one woman.
So a surname and a posthumous title is not the residue of a person stripped of her identity. The name was kept where names were kept. One person needed to know it.
And Imperial Noble Consort Dunsu is a name inscribed in history, which she has. By the standards of the tradition that is an achievement — to leave a name is what the dead are given.
Which is why I do not think the drama’s Shilan is an attempt to recover something lost. It is a name supplied for the purpose — and what the writers built around it is the place a private name occupies. The word the emperor uses only when they are alone. The word she reaches for when everything else has been taken.
The record kept her public name. The story took custody of the private one.
The rest of it
The drama’s Hua Fei dies learning that she was never loved.
The evidence suggests Lady Nian was.
Five days when the government stopped. A character used until then only for emperors. Officials broken in rank over a shabby funeral procession. A brother whose sentence waited on her breathing. A son cherished after her death and buried above his station.
That is the sort of thing the record contains.
She received none of it. She died before the ceremony that would have raised her; every one of those honours came afterward.
But her name survived, in a form nobody could have predicted. Three centuries on, a woman modelled on her stands at the centre of one of the most-watched dramas in the world, and people are looking her up in every language there is.
The likeness is distorted. But a distorted likeness is what sends people looking for the real one — this article exists because of it. The words he wrote about her, the five days, the two characters of her posthumous name: none of it was visible to anyone while she lived, and all of it is being read now.
History kept her name. The story sent people back to find her.
◀ Related: [Empresses in the Palace: The Blank in the Record] ｜
[Why the Fourteenth Prince Lost] ｜
[The Woman Who Never Played the Game]
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