An alluring, independent heroine and a scheming hero clawing his way to power weave a fatal love song, each twist bound to the next. Everyone laments the intoxicating love and hatred of this mortal world, where people lose themselves in dreams and desire. Yet court intrigue, palace power struggles, and the rise and fall of nations abound.
It was the final gasp of the late Ming dynasty: a moving romance, a tragic elegy, and a history steeped in conspiracy. Here are courtesans who struggle, a beautiful empress who takes her own life, a ruler who dies for his country, a treasonous Imperial Guard, eunuchs who seize power, and stillborn children.
And yet there is also more tenderness and longing than words can tell, beneath bright and boundless skies…
Their meeting was marked from the very beginning by countless hidden dangers and foreshadowings.
She was Xue Cuiqiao, a Ming-dynasty courtesan hailed as a woman of ten talents.
She met Dong Yanchang, a great scholar unknown to the world at the time who would later rise to become Minister of Rites. He was her first love, but they never married. She looked back on her youth and could never stop lamenting the pain of longing.
Later, a general named Li Yuanfu took an interest in her, and she became his favored concubine. She could only sigh that everyone was lost in the world’s intoxication.
The talented and versatile Xue Cuiqiao also met and befriended the Jiangnan scholar Shen Defu, embarking on a passionate romance between an older woman and a younger man. Yet its sweetness was threaded with sorrow.
She had three marriages in her lifetime.
In her later years, she spent her final days as a vegetarian, praying to Buddha.
But what she could never forget was her secret affair with Ji Gang of the Imperial Guard…
“I turned her down before because I didn’t love her enough. I’m turning her down now because I don’t want her to die with me.”
Those who defy imperial authority and plot rebellion are sentenced to death by slicing.
He had thought his schemes would let him toy with her in the palm of his hand, but neither time nor fate could be defeated.
The city fell, the country perished, but love remained a priceless treasure.
