Empresses in the Palace: The Blank in the Record — 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 part almost nobody knows — a story assembled over a real death that nobody bothered to explain.
The first poem: a compliment that was a death sentence
The Third Prince is a young man under pressure. His father tells him he is slow and orders him to study harder. His stepmother tells him that a dull bird must work harder than others if it hopes to fly first. He is already studying for hours. It is never enough.
Then a marriage is arranged for him, designed to strengthen his stepmother’s family. The candidates are haughty; the one his stepmother favours loses her temper when his small sister brushes against her clothes.
He leaves with his sister, who asks him what sort of woman he would actually want. He has no answer — and then Lady Ying appears. A few ordinary sentences, and something in the room changes. The weight lifts.
And he quotes Li Bai:
A famous flower and a kingdom-toppling beauty, delighting in each other; the sovereign, always, watches and smiles. The spring wind dissolves his boundless sorrow — north of the aloeswood pavilion, he leans on the railing.
On the surface this is one of the most gorgeous compliments in Chinese poetry. Written for the Tang emperor Xuanzong, it sets the peony and the imperial consort Yang Guifei side by side and lets each make the other more beautiful. The third line — the spring wind dissolves his boundless sorrow — is exactly what has just happened to him.
And it is a death sentence.
Because everyone in the audience knows how Yang Guifei ends. During the An Lushan rebellion, with the court in flight, the emperor’s own guards refuse to move until she is dead. He gives her up. She is killed at Mawei Slope.
The most loved woman in the empire, destroyed because she was loved.
Lady Ying will die the same way — and for the same reason, which is to say for no reason of her own at all.
The second poem: an oath that became evidence
Unable to let it go, the Third Prince takes to reciting a Han-dynasty folk song called Shang Ye — “Oh Heaven!”
I want to know your heart, and let this never fade or fail.
The original is a woman’s oath. Until the mountains wear flat, until the rivers run dry, until heaven and earth close together — only then will I part from you. It is one of the fiercest love poems in the language.
He puts it in a letter.
And the letter becomes the evidence that kills her. An oath of undying love, converted into a legal document.
Who was on the drama’s side of this
Her death is not a simple romantic catastrophe. Several people needed it.
The prince’s stepmother — the Empress — was responsible for his upbringing, so a scandal involving him could be turned into a charge of negligence against her. The heroine’s allies saw an opportunity: with the Third Prince disgraced, the heroine’s own son moved closer to the succession. The emperor found the affair convenient for reasons of his own, since Lady Ying had come from a princely household he wanted broken. And Lady Ying herself had no family standing, no allies, and no protection.
In the harem, beauty without a faction is not an asset. It is exposure.
Now: what the record actually says
Here the article turns, because this is where the drama and history come apart in a way that is more interesting than either.
Lady Ying existed.
There was a woman in the Yongzheng Emperor’s household ranked daying — First-Class Attendant, the lowest rank a consort could hold. The drama promotes her several steps. Her birth and death years are unknown. What survives is a name and a rank.
She is also said to have been given death by the emperor. The reason is not recorded.
Not concealed. Not disputed. Simply never written down — because a woman at that rank was not the sort of thing a dynasty kept notes on.
(A caution: the record of her is so thin that even the circumstance of her death is not firmly established. I would not build anything heavy on it.)
So the drama took a woman who was almost nothing but a name, and a death that came with no explanation attached, and supplied the missing reason.
That much has been said before. But it is only half of what happened.
The Third Prince was not a blank
He was real, he was destroyed by his father, and we know a great deal about how.
Hongshi, born 1704, was the Yongzheng Emperor’s eldest surviving son. And what the record says about his fall is this:
- 1725 — expelled from the palace
- The eighteenth day of the second month, 1726 — ordered to be made the son of the Eighth Prince, his father’s defeated rival, and struck from the imperial clan register
- The sixth day of the eighth month, 1727 — dead at twenty-four
Read the second entry again. His father did not disown him in the ordinary sense. He reassigned him. You are not my son. You are that man’s son.
And look at what else happened in that same year, 1726. In the first month, the Eighth Prince was stripped of clan membership and forced to take a new name as an insult. In the same year his wife was ordered divorced, ordered to die, and ordered to have her bones broken and scattered. (→ “[The Woman Who Never Played the Game]”)
The household the Third Prince was assigned to was being dismantled as he was assigned to it. He was not handed to an enemy family. He was handed to something that was, by then, no longer a family at all.
In the space of one year, the emperor took his brother’s name, erased his brother’s wife from existence, and made his own son that brother’s child.
One character in the genealogy
There is a detail in the clan register that says more than any narrative.
Hongshi’s death is recorded with the character 卒.
This is not a neutral word. An emperor’s death takes 崩. A prince or noble takes 薨. 卒 is for a man with no rank at all.
The Yongzheng Emperor’s eldest surviving son was never granted a single title in his life. The dynastic history records only: stripped of clan status for being dissolute and imprudent; no enfeoffment.
(The view that he was formally ordered to die was first proposed by a Qing historian in 1923, not stated in any contemporary source. It is a modern inference, and worth flagging as one.)
And his mother said nothing
His mother, Consort Qi, had once ranked immediately below the Empress and the Noble Consort. She was known for her beauty. She bore four children; three died — one at three, one at eleven, and now this one at twenty-four.
She said nothing. There was nothing available to say. Before an absolute sovereign, a mother has no standing whatsoever.
She died in 1737. Her funeral is reported to have been conducted well below the specification her rank called for.
✦ Satoe’s Take
What follows is my reading, not established fact.
Why anyone needed to rewrite him
Only four of the Yongzheng Emperor’s sons reached adulthood, and the youngest was born far too late to matter. In practice the succession came down to two: Hongshi and his brother Hongli, who became the Qianlong Emperor.
Hongshi was the elder. He was married and had had a son. By the logic of seniority he should have been the presumptive heir.
So it is important that he was not capable.
If the elder brother was able, then Qianlong’s accession stops being the selection of the best man and becomes something else. The record needed Hongshi to be a fool.
The first rewriting: four characters
The official verdict on him is fangzong bujin — dissolute and imprudent.
Look closely at what that actually says. Dissolute: unrestrained, lacking self-control. Imprudent: lacking caution. Neither word is about ability. They describe a manner of conduct, not a capacity of mind. And the specific conduct is never named.
Now recall what he is thought to have actually done: as his father destroyed one brother after another, he asked for mercy for them.
From the standpoint of an absolute ruler, that is precisely the sort of thing one would file under dissolute and imprudent.
So the same four characters support two readings. A stupid son. Or a son who could not keep his mouth shut when he saw something wrong.
Both are interpretations. Neither can be checked.
And I think the impossibility of checking is not a gap in the record — it is the outcome of the event. No material for his defence survives because nobody who might have preserved it had any reason to.
The second rewriting: the drama
Three hundred years later, Empresses in the Palace arrives, and its heroine is modelled on the Qianlong Emperor’s birth mother.
Which means the series is a story told from the winning side, with the winner’s mother as its protagonist.
In a story where the heroine’s son must become emperor, anyone who could have taken that place has to be cleared away. So the Third Prince is written as a fool, and his mother as a figure of fun.
The drama repeats, scene for scene, what the eighteenth-century historians did.
And viewers experience it as her story, so there is no vantage point from which to notice that a rewriting has occurred.
Once you see this, Lady Ying’s death changes shape too. She dies on a false charge of seducing a prince — but structurally, what her death accomplishes is the removal of the Third Prince. With him gone, the heroine’s son has a clear path.
She is not collateral damage. She is a required component.
The pattern
This is the third time I have found the same operation in this series.
| Character | What history records | What the drama makes of it |
|---|---|---|
| Prince Guo | An heir adopted in to save a title | A secret child by a forbidden love |
| The Eighth Prince’s wife | Executed, her bones scattered as punishment | She walks into the fire herself |
| The Third Prince | A political purge | A forbidden romance |
Empresses in the Palace is, among other things, a machine for translating politics into love stories. It is very good at it. That is why we cry.
The coldest fact
When the Qianlong Emperor came to the throne, he restored his brother’s place in the clan register. Perhaps that was feeling.
But he left the official assessment standing. Young, ignorant, dissolute.
He gave the name back. He did not give back the man.
Why I keep writing about the losers
History is written by the winners. In this case it was written twice, and both times by the same side.
I am not able to tell you that the Third Prince was clever, or brave, or kind. That is exactly the point. The evidence that would settle it was never allowed to exist.
What I can do is say that the question is open, that it was closed by force, and that the woman who died alongside him was a person and not a plot device.
That seems worth doing.
◀ Related: [The Real History of Prince Guo] ｜ [The Woman Who Never Played the Game] ｜
[Why the Eighth Prince Lost] ｜ [The Nine Princes’ Contest]
◀ Series index: The Qing Dynasty — Complete Guide