*A note before we begin. The tragic love between Zhen Huan and Prince Guo shown here is the drama’s fiction. The real Yunli, Prince Guo, was a literary prince loyal to the Yongzheng Emperor, and his romance with Zhen Huan never happened in history (→ [The Real Yunli, Prince Guo]). This piece is about savoring the beauty of that* story*.*

 “Hongyan Jie” — The Curse of a Beautiful Face

A monument of Chinese palace drama: *Empresses in the Palace* (甄嬛伝). Its theme song, **”Hongyan Jie” (紅顔劫 / Hóngyán Jié)**, carries in its very title the theme that runs through the whole story. Here I want to read the lyrics — and look at the paradox folded into that title: *the calamity of beauty*.

 The deep meaning of the title “Hongyan Jie”

*Hongyan* (紅顔), literally “rosy cheeks,” means a beautiful woman. Add to it *jie* (劫) — a Buddhist word for karmic burden and disaster — and you get a paradoxical fate in which beauty becomes not a blessing but a curse. Is beauty a curse, or a blessing? The title itself is already asking the question.

 What “a beauty is fated to be short-lived” really means

We often say “beauties die young,” but this does not simply mean that beautiful women are frail of body. Its real meaning is this: a woman who possesses beauty is drawn into power struggles and political scheming, and loses her life early.

In the drama, the heroine Zhen Huan and many other women are pulled — precisely because of their beauty — into the court’s struggles for power, forced into a fight for survival in the harem. Some lose their lives; some are swallowed by the whirlpool of power and lose themselves. Beauty, a gift of nature, becomes at the same time an unavoidable source of suffering. This is *hongyan jie*.

 The four themes woven into the lyrics

 1. The threads of feeling that cannot be cut

The opening lines speak of severing the threads of feeling only to find the heart still in turmoil — a thousand tangled strands that go on clinging even after they are cut.

To save her father’s life, Zhen Huan breaks off her bond with the man she loves, Prince Guo, and returns to the harem. She has made her decision, and still the feeling will not be cut. Trampled again and again by the emperor, she is driven at last to the point of having to raise her own hand against the one she loves.

That extremity is the scene of the poisoned wine. Commanded by the emperor to poison Prince Guo, Zhen Huan quietly sets the cup of poisoned wine on her own side of the table — not for the man she loves, but so that she herself might drink it and die. But Prince Guo, sensing that something is wrong, asks her, “Would you close the window for me?” — and in the moment she rises from her seat, he switches his own cup for the poisoned one. He drains the poison himself, and dies in the arms of the weeping Zhen Huan. After this, her heart falls into a still deeper disorder.

 2. Power, or love — the ultimate choice

The pivotal line pictures a man laying down the realm — *jiangshan* (江山), the empire, all worldly power — and, with lowered eyes, turning to love a beautiful woman. Here *jiangshan* means not only power but public duty.

For Zhen Huan, public duty meant her duty to her family and her clan. And so she is made to face the question: for the sake of love, may she cast her clan aside?

What she truly wanted was to run away with Prince Guo. But because her father’s life rested on her shoulders, she had to return to the harem, receive the emperor’s favor once more, and use that power to save him. It was to save her father that she wanted power. Receiving the emperor’s favor, while in her heart she could never forget her love for Prince Guo, she endured a revulsion that made her skin crawl.

 3. The turning of fate — calamity and blessing, braided like a rope

Fortune and misfortune turn and turn again — is this a calamity (劫), or is it a bond of fate (縁)? The will of Heaven cannot be fully reckoned; sorrow and joy are woven through each other.

The joy of coming to know love, and the sorrow of having to give it up — both, alike, were Zhen Huan’s fate.

 4. The trial of love, unchanging across the ages

Across all times, east and west, the men and women caught in the grip of feeling — who among them can cross the barrier of the heart? The anguish and conflict of love have not changed from antiquity to now.

 Reading “Hongyan Jie” from Prince Guo’s side

This song can also be read from Prince Guo’s side.

Take *jie* (劫) as a span of time so vast that the universe rises and perishes within it — a kalpa. And take *jiangshan* as the great work of a man’s whole life. Then: to love her, he would cast off even that great work, even his longing for power. Had he never met her, he might have left, as the emperor’s younger brother, a record of achievement in politics, in the military, in culture. And in fact he was a man whose political ability the emperor recognized, one versed in calligraphy and poetry.

And yet — why did they have to meet in this life, she in the position of the emperor’s beloved consort? Is this the “karmic bond stretched across many lifetimes”? Tasting that thought, Prince Guo drank the poisoned wine in her place.

But it was never, I think, “the suffering of a doomed love.” Rather, wasn’t it the joy of love? To be able to die in the place of the one he loved, to lay down his great work and his very life for her sake — for him that was not pain but a filled, contented joy. And it is for exactly this reason that, if they were to meet again in a life to come, he would surely do the same without a moment’s hesitation. *Lay down the realm, and with lowered eyes love the one you love* — that way of living, Prince Guo completed, quite literally, with his final cup.

 The last scene, and two poems

> 年年歳歳花相似、歳歳年年人不同
> — Year after year, the flowers bloom alike; year after year, the people are not the same.

(A famous couplet by the Tang poet Liu Xiyi.) The aged heroine, all her battles behind her, walks through the palace garden murmuring this line. What the couplet symbolizes is the cruel nature of the harem itself.

The harem was, in a sense, a single flower garden. The old flowers, the flowers no longer wanted, were thrown away, and in their place new and beautiful flowers were planted — and so the garden was kept forever beautiful. A flower was admired only while it bloomed; once its color faded, it was pulled up, and the next flower was set in. The flowers — the consorts — were nothing more than interchangeable.

*Empresses in the Palace* is full of such flowers: women who competed for favor, bloomed in their glory, and then were scattered. (I’ve begun a series that portrays them one flower at a time — “Flowers of the Harem.” The first bloom is [Shen Meizhuang = the Chrysanthemum] — a flower who chose the manner of her own falling, before she could be scattered by another hand.) Year upon year, young and beautiful faces bloom as if in contest, are used up, and fall. And again, a new flower blooms. Chosen into the harem for their beauty, and for that same beauty tossed about by the “calamity of the beautiful face.” The garden stayed beautiful only because it stood upon countless scattered flowers.

The heroine casts love away, fights through to the end, and seizes power. But was that truly what she had wanted? That question flows quietly on — into a line from the ending theme, [Feng Huang Yu Fei]: *what she gained was not what she had wished for, and what she had wished for she could not gain.*

 Why “Hongyan Jie” reaches the heart

Because it draws the eternal conflict of power and love. Because it draws the weight of a choice, and the conflict of heart that does not vanish even afterward. And because — in only three characters — it holds the paradox that beauty can become a curse, and love can become suffering. “Hongyan Jie” is Zhen Huan’s story, and at the same time, perhaps, a song of requiem for every “beautiful face” that bloomed and scattered in the harem.

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◀ The paired song: [Feng Huang Yu Fei (Empresses in the Palace — ending theme)] | Drama songs: “Full Moon” (*The Legend of Mi Yue*) / “Yiren Rumeng,” and others