In the first year of the Hongwu era, beneath the vermilion walls of the imperial palace in Yingtian Prefecture, a battle between legitimate and illegitimate daughters begins, its edge concealed. The illegitimate daughter Lü Shi, born in the palace service quarters, becomes a palace slave after her father is implicated in the Hu Weiyong case. But at the betrothal ceremony of Crown Prince Zhu Biao and Chang Shi, daughter of the Prince of Kaiping, she witnesses her future “legitimate older sister” brazenly flout the rites. Twelve eastern pearls gleam on Chang Shi’s nine-pheasant, four-phoenix crown, while the gold leaf bearing the words “honor your parents” on a warming brazier has had the character for “parents” scraped away. This jarring scene becomes the starting point of Lü Shi’s revenge.
From a lowly figure scrubbing bricks in the laundry bureau to a secondary consort in an eastern palace annex, keeping a copy of Mencius with the annotation “The son is honored” hidden away, Lü Shi wields the Thousand Gold Prescriptions like a blade, navigating between poison plots and benevolence. When Chang Shi abuses her, Lü Shi hides a bloodstained lilac skirt; amid a miscarriage scandal, she offers blood in a divine rite to forge a confession edict; and when Empress Ma gives her a jade bangle engraved “Restrain haste and exercise patience,” she turns the scent of poria and polygala into a stepping-stone to power. The honeysuckle pattern embroidered into her collar represents both a medical woman’s restraint and her ambition, the emblem of “climbing until she becomes a spring vine.”
When Chang Shi dies from a slow-acting poison plot, Lü Shi steps over her legitimate wife’s blood and dons a vermilion-red robe embroidered with pheasants. Yet she sinks deeper into the maze of “a mother’s status depends on her son.” She poisons the calomel used to treat Empress Ma’s carbuncle, adds aconite to Zhu Biao’s medicine, and even teaches her own son, Zhu Yunwen, the political doctrine that “an illegitimate son is destined to inherit Heaven’s mandate.” When she rules from behind the curtain in the Golden Throne Hall, her ceremonial robe’s trailing feathers are embroidered with the Five Poisons, and her phoenix crown’s hairpin is set with blood amber melted from Chang Shi’s gold hairpin. Every step she takes is upon the bones and blood of palace servants, yet she too is trapped in the fated cage of “the son is honored”…
This book is very beautiful. Great