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 watched several Qing palace dramas in a row, her image tends to blur. In one hit series she is a scheming villain; in another she is a wronged, tragic heroine. What confuses viewers is that these are the same real woman, wearing different costumes written by different screenwriters.
Let me untangle it. Below I separate the historical woman from the woman the dramas invented, and then, at the end, I add my own reading.
First, the map: three names, one woman
The root of the confusion is that all three of these are the same person.
| Name you see | Where it comes from | How she is portrayed |
|---|---|---|
| Step Empress, Lady Nara | History | The only Qing empress with no posthumous title |
| Ruyi (played by Zhou Xun) | Ruyi’s Royal Love in the Palace | A tragic heroine destroyed by her husband’s changing heart |
| Consort Xian / Nara Shushen (played by Charmaine Sheh) | Story of Yanxi Palace | A kind woman who “turns dark” into a villain |
“Ruyi” and “Consort Xian” both point to one real person: the Qianlong Emperor’s second empress. Because the name splits into three, we feel as if we are watching three different women.
Let’s start with the real one.
The History: the Step Empress, Lady Nara
Even her surname is uncertain
Her strangeness begins with her name. The official Draft History of Qing records her clan as Ulanara, but recent scholarship favors Hoifa-Nara. Sources often write simply “Nara,” which is part of why the confusion took hold. She came from the Bordered Blue Banner of the Manchu; her father was named Nerbu.
A woman whose very surname is disputed — that alone tells you how thoroughly her record was later thinned out.
She became empress not by her husband’s wish
She was born in 1718, seven years younger than the Qianlong Emperor. In 1733, while he was still a prince, she entered his household as a secondary consort. Over the years she rose through the ranks — Consort Xian, then Noble Consort Xian. Her turning point came in 1748, when Qianlong’s first empress, Empress Xiaoxianchun of the Fuca clan, died. Lady Nara was elevated to Imperial Noble Consort, and in 1750 she finally became empress.
Here is a detail the dramas often soften: this promotion was not what the emperor himself wanted. The records suggest it was arranged largely by his mother, the Empress Dowager Chongqing. She was not a wife her husband had chosen from the heart — a quiet fault line laid down at the very beginning.
Even so, the next fifteen-odd years were not unhappy. On the southern tours, the ancestral rites in Shengjing, the autumn hunts at Mulan, Qianlong took her everywhere. She bore him three children. For a long stretch, at least outwardly, they were a settled couple.
The three children
Their fates, however, were harsh.
Yongji, the twelfth son (born 1752) was the empress’s eldest child, and Qianlong is said to have written a poem of joy at his birth. In 1771 Yongji was even entrusted with compiling the master outline of the Imperial Manchu–Mongolian Dictionary, which he completed in 1775 to a measure of imperial approval.
But his real misfortune lay elsewhere. After his mother’s fall, Yongji was never granted the rank of prince of any grade. The empress’s own son died in 1776 at just twenty-four, still without a title. The rank of beile was granted only long after his death, under his half-brother the Jiaqing Emperor.
The fifth princess died in early childhood, while her mother was still empress and pregnant with the youngest child.
Yongjing, the thirteenth son (born around 1755) died of illness at only two. His mother could not even reach him in time.
The hair-cutting incident — what actually happened
Then, in 1765, came the event that undid her.
While accompanying Qianlong on his fourth southern tour, the empress suddenly provoked his fury. She was separated from the imperial procession and sent back to Beijing alone, escorted by an imperial son-in-law. No formal decree of demotion was ever issued — yet in practice she was stripped of the position of empress.
Why the emperor was so enraged is not recorded with certainty. But one folk account is widely repeated: that at a stop on the tour Qianlong wished to take a woman from the south as a new consort, the empress objected, and in protest she cut off her own hair.
Why would cutting hair carry such weight? In Manchu custom, a woman cut her hair only in mourning — when an emperor or empress dowager had died. To cut one’s hair in front of a living emperor and living dowager was read as a curse of death upon them, the gravest possible insult. Qianlong later described her conduct as unreasonable, “as if driven mad.”
There is also a different account, found in the Korean Rehe Diary: that a rival consort accused the empress of stealing the emperor’s East Pearls, the pearls were “discovered” in an official’s house, and the empress was confined. The dramas’ “stolen pearls” plot grows out of this version — but it appears in no official Qing history, and is best treated as an outside rumor.
After her death — an empress erased
Confined to a rear hall of her palace, the fallen empress died the following year, 1766, in despair.
Her funeral was conducted at the rank of Imperial Noble Consort, not empress. She was not buried in Qianlong’s own mausoleum but placed as a secondary burial beside Imperial Noble Consort Chunhui. And she was given no posthumous title at all — the only empress in the whole of the Qing dynasty to be denied one. Her portraits and traces were quietly removed from the record.
The Qianlong Emperor set out to erase this wife from history.
The Fiction: the “Ruyi” and “Consort Xian” the dramas built
Now for the costumes that later ages draped over the real woman.
Ruyi’s Royal Love in the Palace — where the name is the theme
In Ruyi, the heroine first appears under the name Qingying (“green cherry blossom”). Early in the story the Empress Dowager Zhen Huan grants her a new name — Ruyi — and she is, in effect, reborn. This renaming is the engine of the entire drama.
On screen, the dowager traces the character 懿 (yi) to a line in the Book of the Later Han: a person of “quiet, beautiful virtue” who never places herself where propriety forbids. So 懿 means serene, noble virtue. The character 如 (ru) means “resembling, like.” Put together — Ruyi — and a chilling paradox is built in. The gloss fans pass around says it best:
“Resembling virtue — yet not virtue itself.”
To the very end she is only like the ideal wife; she never becomes the emperor’s ideal itself. The name foretold her whole life.
The drama also plays on a homophone: Ruyi (如意), “as one wishes,” everything going your way. She is not that lucky ruyi; she is the ruyi that only resembles what is good. A single different character carries a lifetime of things that did not go as she wished.
Story of Yanxi Palace — the opposite face
The very same historical woman appears in this drama as Consort Xian, Nara Shushen, played by Charmaine Sheh.
What is striking is that the portrayal is the reverse. She begins as a gentle consort, but in the second half she “turns dark,” becoming a rival and antagonist to the heroine. The woman Ruyi frames as a straightforward tragic heroine, Yanxi Palace frames as a woman sinking into villainy.
How to spot the invented parts
A few markers of pure dramatic license:
- A rival consort engineers the stolen-pearls affair — history has only the outside rumor from the Rehe Diary.
- Yongji is scolded and forced to abandon his dictionary project — in fact he completed it and was even commended.
- She is buried in a shabby coffin as a “lodger” — history records a secondary burial beside Imperial Noble Consort Chunhui; the demotion is real, but the description is theater.
- Her aunt is the deposed empress from Empresses in the Palace — a device Ruyi uses to tie itself to the earlier series, not a fact of the historical family tree.
✦ Satoe’s Take: the same woman, both villain and saint
Here is my own reading.
What stays with me most is that one real woman is drawn as a villain in one drama and a saint in another. Precisely because so little of her record survives — and because what did survive was deliberately thinned — later ages could dress her in whatever story they liked. This is, to me, a living illustration of the idea that history is made by the one who tells it.
I come from Matsumoto, and I lived years in Nagaoka — both places that were on the losing side of Japan’s Boshin War. “History is written by the victors” is not an abstraction to me; it is closer to a family memory. The story of the Step Empress looks like the same shape in miniature. And there is an irony in it: because Qianlong worked so hard to erase her, later ages paid her more attention, not less.
One more thought — on the hair-cutting itself. She surely knew it was the gravest taboo in Manchu custom. If she cut her hair anyway, knowing exactly what it meant, then it was not an impulse but an act of resistance, the last of her dignity staked on a single gesture. Many scholars now read the incident as a symbol of a woman’s defiance under imperial power, and I am drawn to that reading too.
✦ Satoe’s Take: Perhaps she was, in her way, a woman with an almost modern sensibility. European missionaries moved through the court in those years, and it is not impossible that modern ways of thinking brushed against her. This is only my speculation — but seen that way, her wish to be loved as an equal begins to look ahead of its time.
Finally, a note on the name-play. Among Ruyi fans there is a reading that breaks the character 懿 into its parts and hears in it “a heart of one time” — so that Qianlong’s love is “the heart moved once in a lifetime” (a single passion), while Ruyi’s love is “one heart held for a whole lifetime” (a lifelong bond). This is not the on-screen etymology the dowager gives (that was the Book of the Later Han); it is a fan interpretation. But it captures the mismatch in their two ideas of marriage so well that I have grown fond of it.
There is also this: before the renaming, Qianlong gives Qingying the melody “Over the Wall, on Horseback.” It looks like a romantic, love-at-first-sight moment — but its source, a poem by Bai Juyi, is actually a warning about a woman who elopes and is later abandoned, left to regret it. Disguised as a sweet gift, it quietly foretells Ruyi’s ending. Once you notice touches like that, you want to watch the whole thing again.
The Step Empress, Lady Nara, was an empress stripped of her posthumous title, her portraits, her very traces — a woman history nearly erased. And yet today, through three dramas, we talk about her more, not less. Two centuries on, the Qianlong Emperor’s intention may have been quietly overturned.