"The Romance of Two Phoenixes" is a chapter-length novel written by the master of Xueqiao in the Qing Dynasty.
The story begins when Emperor Yuan of the Han Dynasty met a beautiful woman in a dream and issued an edict to select a concubine.
Queen Qiang (Zhaojun) of Wang Zhong, the prefect of Yuezhou, was both talented and beautiful. Because she refused to bribe the treacherous prime minister Mao Yanshou, she maliciously put a mole on a beauty picture, falsely accusing her of being unlucky, and was demoted to the cold palace.
Fearing crime, Mao Yanshou defected to the Huns and presented the portrait of Zhaojun to King Fan. He lied that the Han emperor was unwilling to offer his beauty and instigated King Fan to raise troops to demand Zhaojun. King Fan then sent envoys to provoke the Han court with riddle poems, and eventually launched an army to invade the south.
At the same time, in order to retaliate against Wang Zhong and frame Zhaojun, Mao Yanshou also devised a poisonous plan to lure Lu Yuanwai, a wealthy family in Yuezhou, with large sums of money, and sent his daughter Lu Jinding to the Han Palace pretending to be Zhaojun. Lu Jinding was favored and given the title of West Palace (Fei Lu). However, she was narrow-minded and colluded with Mao Yanshou to further frame Zhen Zhaojun, causing him to be trapped in the cold palace for a long time and suffered a lot.
The novel is named after "Two Phoenixes", which on the one hand refers to Wang Zhaojun and Lu Jinding, who are both talented and good-looking but have very different destinies; on the other hand, it also symbolizes the opposition between loyal and traitor, and the confrontation between good and evil. Wang Zhaojun was in adversity, adhered to integrity, and cared about his family and country; while Lu Jinding became an accomplice of treacherous ministers because of his greed for vanity.
The main line of the story revolves around the redress of Zhaojun's injustice, the war caused by Fan Bangsomei, and the struggle of loyal ministers and generals (such as Li Ling, Li Guang and his son) to protect their family and country and clear their grievances. The first twenty-eight chapters have laid out Mao Yanshou's evil deeds, Zhaojun's suffering, Lu Fei's rise to power and conspiracy, the powerful invasion of Fan Bang, and the plot of Li Guang and Li Ling's father and son fighting bloody battles at the border and encountering repeated setbacks. The conflicts are fierce and set the stage for the development of the subsequent story.
