Saorin

If you have been watching The Elusive Samurai, you have met Suwa Yorishige. He is the strange, laughing man who takes in a hunted eight-year-old boy and announces that this child will one day rule Japan. The manga makes him a prophet. That is fiction. But the real Yorishige was something stranger than a prophet, and the truth is not a softer version of the story — it is a harder one. He was a god. Not metaphorically. Institutionally. What…

Near the end of Scarlet Heart, the Fourteenth Prince performs a sword dance and then recites a poem — a Song-dynasty lyric about the reckless honour of a young man’s life, remembered from the far side of losing it. A great many viewers have cried at that scene. Underneath it is a simple question. How does a man with that much lose? A hundred thousand troops. His father’s confidence. A faction behind him. Ceremonial honours no other prince in the…

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…

 The Real History Behind Lady Ying and the Third Prince In Empresses in the Palace, the Yongzheng Emperor’s third son falls in love with one of his father’s consorts. She refuses him throughout. She is executed anyway, on a charge of having seduced him, and given no chance to speak in her defence. It is one of the cruellest sequences in the series, and it is built almost entirely out of two poems. It is also — and this is…

The Woman Who Never Played the Game: The Real Minghui of Scarlet Heart Empresses in the Palace, Story of Yanxi Palace, Scarlet Heart — these are excellent dramas. The heroines are clever and formidable, and they fight their way up through the imperial harem with real style. But watch enough of them and something starts to press on you. The win condition never changes. Win the emperor’s favour. Bear a son. Rise in rank. However brilliantly a heroine is written,…

A note before we begin. The doomed romance between Prince Guo and Zhen Huan in Empresses in the Palace is fiction. My articles on the songs “[Hong Yan Jie]” and “[Feng Huang Yu Fei]” are about the beauty of that story. This one is about the man who actually lived. Prince Guo — Aisin Gioro Yunli — was the seventeenth son of the Kangxi Emperor. He was a real person: a scholar and artist by temperament, with little appetite for…

— “They Built a Garden with the Navy’s Money”: Re-examining the Summer Palace and the First Sino-Japanese War Every guide tells you the same thing When I visited the Summer Palace in Beijing, our Japanese-speaking guide told us that this garden was the reason China lost the war against Japan. Walking on, I passed an English-language tour group. Their guide was saying the same thing. The story is told with remarkable consistency: Empress Dowager Cixi diverted the navy’s budget to…

Better to Die on the Branch: the verse she used to answer an emperor The painter who left out the ground Sometime after 1279, a Chinese painter named Zheng Sixiao began producing ink orchids with no soil beneath them. The flowers float. The roots hang in white space. When people asked why, he is said to have answered: the land has been taken — did you not know? The Song dynasty had fallen to the Mongols. Zheng Sixiao, who had…

“Smoke Opium and Stay Quiet”: The Jiang Family of Gold Leaf, and Filial Piety Without Blood Introduction The Taiwanese drama Gold Leaf (茶金) takes its inspiration from a real tea merchant: Jiang Axin (1901–1982) of Beipu, Hsinchu. But you cannot tell this family’s story with Jiang Axin alone. Put his father and his daughter’s husband beside him, and a shape appears. None of the three was born a Jiang. All three were brought into the house from outside, by adoption,…

The Lesser Jade: Huanbi, the Sister Who Was a Servant This is the companion piece promised in “[The Real Prince Guo (Yunli)]” — a look at the historical model behind Huanbi. Her model is Prince Guo’s dijin, his primary consort. And the historical primary consort is said to have come from a family connected to the clan of Zhen Huan’s own model, Empress Xiaoshengxian — or to the line of the Ulanara empress. (Accounts of her clan differ; see “[The…

The Chinese historical drama *Empresses in the Palace* (甄嬛伝) won a huge following — and the name of its heroine, “Zhen Huan” (甄嬛), in fact carries a deep literary background and an aesthetic all its own. This time, let’s trace where this beautiful name comes from, back through classical poetry.  The image of beauty folded into the surname “Zhen” The surname “Zhen” (甄) calls to mind Zhen Mi (甄宓, zhēn mì), the peerless beauty of the late Han. Zhen Mi…

Was Ruyi a Real Person? Short answer Yes. Ruyi is based on a real woman: Lady Nara (1718–1766), the second empress of the Qianlong Emperor, known to history as the Step Empress (继皇后). Her real name was not Ruyi. In 1765 she cut her hair during the emperor’s southern tour, lost his favor, and died the next year — the only Qing empress never given a posthumous title. The same woman also appears as Consort Xian in Story of Yanxi…