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Kaku Kai (Guo Kai): The Man Who Sold Li Mu and Lian Po — and Buried Zhao and Himself | Kingdom 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…

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 King…

  **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…

If you know Yoshiko Kawashima at all, you probably know her from Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor — the flamboyant “Eastern Jewel,” a spy in men’s clothing who supplies Empress Wanrong with opium. It is one of cinema’s most memorable villains. I was born in Matsumoto, in Nagano Prefecture, Japan. In Matsumoto, Yoshiko Kawashima is not a movie villain. She is a former local schoolgirl whose grave stands in a quiet temple on the edge of town, and whose memory…

> *This continues from [The Real Yunli, Prince Guo]. The romance and the revenge in the drama are fiction — but underneath them stands a woman who truly lived.*  The Real Woman Behind Zhen Huan  Introduction *Empresses in the Palace* (甄嬛伝), which aired in China in 2011, set off a wave that swept across Asia. Its heroine, Zhen Huan, still holds a firm place in viewers’ hearts as a kind of ideal — a woman people return to and admire.…

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…

  *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*…

> A companion piece to the Late-Qing series. Where the Chinese essays celebrate “being summoned by the Son of Heaven” as the supreme honor, this Japanese poem turns that same summons inside out. — A crab in hiding receives the sovereign’s call Book 16 of the Man’yōshū (Japan’s oldest poetry anthology, eighth century) holds an unforgettable poem, number 3886. Its annotation calls it “a song composed to voice the pain of a crab.” It was performed by hokaibito—the lowest of…

If you’ve watched Empresses in the Palace (the 2011 Chinese palace drama also known as The Legend of Zhen Huan), you’ve heard “Feng Huang Yu Fei” (凤凰于飞) — the haunting closing theme sung by Liu Huan. To me, it isn’t a song about the throne at all. It’s the secret love song of Prince Guo and Zhen Huan. A note for first-time viewers Empresses in the Palace follows Zhen Huan, a young woman who enters the harem of the Yongzheng…

> 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…