A Glimpse of Beauty: Every Step a Gambit

Lu Ciyuan was born in Lujia Village, Juzhou, during the Song dynasty. His ancestors were all farmers through and through. His father, Lu Xuqian, had made his living hunting since childhood. His mother, Chen Meilan, was the illegitimate daughter of a merchant family in Huangping Prefecture. Unable to bear her stepmother’s schemes to marry her off as a second wife to a sixty-year-old man, she fled Huangping. After running out of money, she was passing through Songjia Village in Juzhou when a venomous snake bit her and she fell unconscious. Lu Xuqian rescued her. He insisted on marrying Chen Meilan, who claimed to be an orphan and was three years his senior. His parents strongly opposed the marriage, so they forced the newlyweds to establish a separate household. Two years later, when they saw that the couple’s life had improved and they had even renovated their house, Lu Xuqian’s father assumed his son was secretly hoarding money. In a fit of anger, he asked the clan elders to strike Lu Xuqian from the family register. Lu Xuqian was an honest man, but he treated his wife exceedingly well. The couple were deeply devoted to each other and had six children. His mother knew a little how to read and write, and spent her days running the household and raising the children, teaching them all to recognize a few characters. From a young age, their eldest son, Lu Ciyuan, knew that he could only change his fate through his own efforts. With his mother’s explanations and the hunting and archery skills his father taught him, he bought military manuals to study whenever he went to town to exchange his game for money. When the Northern Song fell, Lu Ciyuan drew on the skills he had honed as a hunter and resolutely joined the army. Step by step, he rose to become a general and saved Emperor Gaozong of the Song, Zhao Gou, earning the emperor’s trust and esteem and becoming his close confidant. In the name of resisting the Jin, Lu Ciyuan continually expanded his forces until he gradually took command of the Southern Song’s elite troops. He eventually became a prince of a different surname, wielding immense power throughout the Southern Song court…