Shen Yanqing came from an official family in Jiangnan. On the surface, she was a concubine-born daughter, but her birth mother was the daughter of a powerful former dynasty minister whose family had been confiscated. At nine, she was sent to a training house in the capital, a secret institution devoted to training concubines, advisers, and pawns for the powerful. Here, women did not study the Four Books and Five Classics. They learned how to listen, how to act meek, how to make men reveal secrets when they least expected it, and how to turn the tides at court with a cup of tea, a tune on the zither, or a single glance. It was a training camp for “female agents.” The girls who graduated were sent into the households of the powerful, becoming their most discreet pawns.
