The Broken-Thread Phoenix: Tanchun’s Tale

At seventeen, Tanchun was carried into the Eastern Palace of the Southern Dynasty in a red bridal sedan. Who could have guessed that three years later, the Crown Prince would be murdered, leaving her to live on the edge of a blade? By day, she was an obedient widow; by night, a wounded beast licking its wounds. While teaching the young emperor to read, she wrote beside the character for “benevolence”: “Benevolence without claws and fangs is that of a lamb.” When the lesson reached Empress Lü, she erased her words and wrote instead: “When a woman rules, the brush of history is a blade.”

The historian would record: Empress Dowager Jia ruled from behind the curtain for ten years. When she finally returned power, only a round silk fan remained behind the screen. The peonies on it were still intact, but its threads had snapped and its silk had torn.

In the end, she became a phoenix with a broken string, escaping the small sky of the Jia household only to fall into the ninefold palace walls. Yet in the dead of night, when she faced the southern window, she could almost hear the sea breeze, its salty tang carrying freedom as it swept through the seventeen-year-old girl she could never be again.