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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…

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…

> 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”…

“Full Moon” (Mǎn Yuè): The Meaning Behind The Legend of Mi Yue’s Theme Song When the Chinese historical drama The Legend of Mi Yue (芈月传) begins, the first thing you hear is this song — “Full Moon” (满月, Mǎn Yuè). Over the sound of the guzheng (a Chinese zither) and the breathy paixiao (panpipes), a melody unfolds that holds sorrow and warmth at the same time. Even before the story starts, the music already tells you what kind of tale…

If you found your way here from the C-drama Legend of Mi Yue, you may already know the line “so-called the one I long for, on the far side of the water.” It comes from a poem some 2,500 years old — “Jianjia” (蒹葭, “The Reeds”), from the Shijing, or Book of Songs, China’s oldest collection of poetry. Its most famous opening lines are: 所謂伊人，在水一方 Suǒ wèi yīrén, zài shuǐ yī fāng “The one I long for is somewhere across…

If you’ve watched the Chinese historical drama Legend of Mi Yue (芈月传), you’ll remember the quiet, aching melody that closes each episode. That song is “Yiren Rumeng” (伊人如梦) — roughly, “the beloved, like a dream.” Sung by Huo Zun, composed by A Kun, with lyrics by He Qiling, it gently carries the turbulent life of Mi Yue, the woman who rose to become Queen Dowager Xuan of the state of Qin. But behind this modern song lies something far older.…

Prologue — A 25-Year-Old at Chengde In the summer of 1861, the Xianfeng Emperor died at the imperial Mountain Resort at Chengde — the hunting retreat beyond the Great Wall, then called Rehe (Jehol), where the court had fled. He was thirty. He left behind a five-year-old heir and a single Noble Consort, twenty-five years old: the woman remembered as Cixi. Within a few months she had helped engineer a palace coup, swept aside the regents her dying husband had…

A Bodhisattva from the Northern Qi Dynasty Visiting the Tokyo National Museum — Oriental Gallery, Room 1 I recently visited the Oriental Gallery at the Tokyo National Museum — and it was wonderful! The moment I stepped into Room 1 on the first floor, a single statue caught my eye: a Standing Bodhisattva, created in Shanxi Province, China, in 552 CE during the Northern Qi dynasty. That predates even the beginning of Japan’s Asuka period. It is a piece from…