Chinese Drama: Real History & Songs

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…

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? 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…

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…

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,…