The Sage reviews: Story of the Yanxi Palace
Its very good, but flawed
(Many of the figures in the TV series. Left to right: Noble Consort Gao, Lady Wei, the Qianlong Emperor, his first Empress of the Fuca clan, his second empress of Nara clan, and Fuca Fuheng)
The Story of the Yanxi Palace is one of a set of palace dramas which - as a group - have been very popular in China, Korea, Vietnam, and other nations of East Asia. See a list of the best dramas at this site [as of 9/2022].
Yanxi Palace is one of the most historically accurate of the Chinese dramas which the Sonoma Sage has seen - this is worth a great deal to me. However, it must be acknowledged that much of the life of Lady Wei is unknown. Thus, the writer (a mystery women named Zhou Mo) had a great deal of freedom with regard to Lady Wei’s life story. {See an essay about the mysterious Zhou Mo here.}
Historians are confident that Lady Wei entered the palace around 1741. She served the Dowager Empress (the mother of the Qianlong Emperor) and then she served the chief consort of the Qianlong Emperor, Empress Xioxianchun (known as Lady Fuca).
For reasons that are hard to understand at this remove, the Qing imperial family ministry kept very limited records about the many women who entered the Huangdi’s palace (known rather inaccurately as the Imperial Harem). For example, the Household Ministry never mentioned the women’s given names, only their family association. In the TV series, Lady Wei is called Wei Yingluo, but no one actually knows what her name was, just as we do not know the names of any of the other women who were added to the Huangdi’s set of consorts.
The Remarkable Life of Lady Wei
Lady Wei came from an unimportant non-Manchu (Chinese) family. Her ancestors were likely from the Liaodong Peninsula, and they had been forced to join the Manchu as household slaves around 1625. Her family was officially part of the Bordered Yellow Banner. This makes her family one of the few ethnic Chinese families in the Bordered Yellow Banner, along with Gao E, the presumed co-author of the Dream of the Red Chamber. See my essay about Geo E here.
The Manchu banner system is hard to describe or understand. Briefly: all members of the Manchu’s extended tribes were reassigned to one of eight artificially created sub-tribe called Banners in 1615 by Nurhaci. These banners had a pecking order and the Bordered Yellow banner was at the top. Some Han Chinese and some Mongols were also members of the Banners, but they were generally the lowest ranked people within the individual Banners. I will write more about the Banner system at a later date.
The major consorts of the Manchu Huangdi were almost always women who came from important Manchu families. For example, the chief wife of the Qianlong Emperor was a daughter of the Fuca clan. Another major clan, Niohuru, was clan of the mother of the Qianlong Emperor, Empress Xiaoshengxian. She plays a major role in this TV series - as she did historically. In fact, the Niohuru clan came to dominate the last decades of the 1700s in China, exemplified by the enormous wealth gathered by Heshen Niohuru, one of the richest men in history.
However, Lady Wei was not part of one of the major clans, nor was she Manchu. By the time she entered the palace, there was already a Han Chinese woman as one of the major consorts of the Qianlong Emperor, so the hundred-year bias against enthic Han Chinese had already broken down (I refer to the Lady Huixian, of the Gao family). Still, the Qianlong Emperor had good reason to favor his Manchu consorts as he relied on the powerful Manchu clans to run the Qing Empire. Lady Wei must have been quite amazing to have charmed the Qianlong Emperor and survived the deadly opposition from other, much more powerful, Manchu consorts.
Lady Wei in the space of a few years moved up the ranks of women in the palace. She was given the title of Concubine in 1745, Consort in 1749, and Noble Consort in 1760. She gave birth to two daughters and four sons. Both daughters survived as did two of her sons, her eldest son became the next Huangdi of the Qing Dynasty, the Jiaqing Emperor. According to the Household records, the Qianlong Emperor spent nearly all of his time with Lady Wei from 1756 till her early death in 1775 at the age of 47. She traveled with him on his many tours across China and ran the Imperial household inside the palace.
Let me be clear: for a woman with no strong family support, and no wealth, to accomplish all this is incredible. Controlling access to the Huangdi mattered! For a major family like Fuca or Niohuru or Nara - to put their daughter’s son on the throne was critically important for the clan’s future wealth and status. These clans absolutely would kill young women that seemed to be attracting the attention of the Huangdi, just as they would kill the sons of rival clan to make their own chances better. This was not some amusing little game. Clans that lost favor were often stripped of their wealth and even destroyed.
The Huangdi was a very busy man, we know the Kangxi Emperor, the Yongzheng Emperor, and the Qianlong Emperor all worked from dawn till nightfall on matters of state. They could not supervise the 15+ women in the palace who they slept with. How did Lady Wei manage to triumph over her very unpromising background? We will never know but the TV show presents one possible answer.
The TV Series
The TV series starts with Wei Yingluo’s entry into the Beijing Palace as a member of the staff in 1741. She is given a job in the Household embroidery department (this is pure speculation). The embroidery department make the clothing for the various consorts, the ladies-in-waiting, and other select members of the massive palace staff. The historical research done for this series is quite impressive as it is mentioned that making a formal robe for the Huangdi is a task too great for the embroidery department as it involves the work of sixty experts and takes about three years! (This is true).
In the TV show, Wei Yingluo is on a mission, and this mission drives her for the entire series. Her mission is to find out who killed her beloved older sister and bring that person/persons to justice. This is entirely the invention of the scrip writer. However, this sense that she was on a mission is plausible, because Lady Wei had to survive an extremely hostile environment and she must have taken great risks .
The Chinese have a saying that the consorts of the Huangdi must have a hard hearts and brutal-cruel hands. The in-fighting between the various consorts was vicious and murderous. Young boys were especially vulnerable to being killed but the women were constantly under threat of being poisoned or defamed. Of the 17 sons of the Qianlong Emperor, only seven outlived him. Of the many consorts of the Qianlong Emperor, very few lived more than a decade after they attained a high status. His first empress, historically a very nice woman, died at the young age of 36.
The death of the first Huanghou (Empress) was extremely likely because the Qianlong Emperor had said that he wanted the next ruler of the Qing to be the son of his prime wife. She gave birth to two sons, both died from smallpox, and then she died.
His second empress of the Nara clan was dethroned at age 47 (she died less than a year later) and she gave birth to no known children. Noble Consort Gao died at the age of 34. Noble Consort Chun died at age 46. Noble Consort Shujia also died at 46 (she was from of a Korean family). Only the Mongol princess Noble Consort Yu lived to the age of 78.
In the TV show we see how Lady Wei avoids all the traps and schemes laid by her enemies within the Court. The historical record reveals that shortly after Lady Wei becomes a Consort (in 1745) a surprising number of other high ranked women in the Imperial collection die. This could just be a coincidence, but the plot of the TV series works quite closely with the historical record.
The show points out the key role played by the Imperial Eunuchs. The eunuchs clearly had the power to kill anyone in the palace. As a group they prepared the food, they served it, they delivered the medicine, and they could plant incriminating documents or objects at will. They could poison almost anyone, anytime. The penalties for crimes committed by the eunuchs was usually death by torture but they basically knew they were dead men upon entering the palace. The Imperial eunuchs were considered half-men, scoundrels, and as a group they had no respect outside the palace. Inside the palace, they had enormous power to harm and little to look forward to, either in this life or after they died.
The Sage enjoyed the sub-plot of the Fuca Fuheng, the brother of the First Empress and someone who was a friend of the Qianlong Emperor, from before he was the Huangdi. We actually see something of the life of one of the major Manchu clan leaders. These people had interesting lives and there is a great deal of drama yet to be explored in the lives of the powerful men who served the Huangdi. The TV show invents a totally imaginary love affair between Fuca Fuheng and Lady Wei. In reality, Fuheng had at least four consorts and six children. The idea that he knew or cared about Lady Wei before she became the Qianlong Emperor’s favorite is extremely unlikely.
The costumes and sets are all spectacular. All the little details about the Palace of Beijing (inaccurately known as the Forbidden City) seem correct to me. Just as Emperor is the wrong title for the Huangdi - Forbidden City is not a good translation for the Zi Jin Cheng. The Chinese characters: 紫禁城 actually mean: Purple + Home of the Son of Heaven + City. True, there were parts of the Beijing Palace which were off-limits to nearly most people, but every day hundreds - if not thousands - of men and women traveled into and out of the Palace of Beijing.
The TV show even makes a point about how much theft was going on as all sorts of items and other goods were stolen on a routine basis, and then sold under-the-table in Beijing.
Several other minor points:
The script-writer has Lady Wei say she doesn’t like the Huangdi’s poetry. Experts in Chinese history know that the Qianlong Emperor wrote a great many poems (over 40,000!) and they weren’t very good. The Sage thought this comment by Lady Wei was very funny, a bit of an in joke.
The script writer includes a statement about the annual revenue of the Qing Dynasty - about 35 million taels of silver. This is very likely correct.
The script writer keeps bringing up how the Empress Dowager is such a devout Buddhist. This is true. The writer also shows that the Empress Dowager is quite ruthless when it suits her, and this is a traditional Chinese intellectual attitude towards most Buddhists - they aren’t serious in their beliefs.
There is a follow-on short series - eight episodes - about one of the daughters of the Lady Wei. The Sage has not seen that series.
As usual, the Chinese script writers don’t know how to end their story. The Yanxi Palace is no exception and, at episode 64, the story skips ahead by 15 years. Still, the first 64 episodes are well worth watching.
For an essay about how women have most of the good roles in Chinese Theater see this essay.