Willow's Silken Grace

[The everyday ups and downs of ordinary Tang-dynasty folk + a warm, slow-paced domestic life + not a political intrigue or fast-paced power fantasy + Shangguan Wan’er is the heroine’s sister-in-law + Princess Taiping is the heroine’s younger sister]

Huang Awan was an abandoned baby left beneath the willow tree at the village entrance. Granny Hu carried her home to the Huang family and raised her on bowls of goat’s milk and rice broth, turning her into the kindest and most resilient girl in the countryside. At four, she began learning about herbs from the village doctor. By ten, she could practice medicine on her own, and at fifteen, she was the youngest female physician at the Jishitang clinic in Dingcheng County.

Then she met a dashing young man riding by in fine clothes: Shangguan Jinglan, the legitimate grandson of the chancellor. She called him “Elder Cousin,” never knowing that this one form of address would bind them together for a lifetime.

After a palace coup, the entire Shangguan family was sentenced to death. He fell from the heights of power and became a wanted fugitive. For him, she risked her life, secured him a new identity, and waited for him through ten years of uncertainty, not knowing whether he lived or died.

But neither of them knew that she was Princess Anding, whom Empress Wu had sent out of the palace herself to bring down Empress Wang, a princess who was supposed to have “died in infancy.” The jade pendant was the only keepsake her birth mother had left her, and it would later become proof that Gao Chuntao had impersonated her and passed off a cat as a prince.

And the man she loved, her Zheng Ada, was the eldest legitimate grandson of the Shangguan family, the clan Empress Wu had once sentenced to death.

One was a princess raised among commoners.

One was the orphaned descendant of a disgraced minister, living under an assumed name.

*You are the only person I have ever loved, the only one I want to marry, and the only one I would give my life to protect.*

*When everything is settled, be nothing less than my one and only wife, Zheng Ada.*