This is a story set in the early years of the Republic of China, a turbulent era by nature.
The protagonist is called Han Bing, but she is not the Han Bing you might expect. The name is only an alias. Her true identity is Princess Suxuan, the daughter of the Qing emperor Guangxu and Consort Zhen.
Historically, Emperor Guangxu left no children, which is why the child emperor Puyi came to the throne later. I am simply speculating, from the perspective of someone fascinated by Qing history, that the ambitious young man trapped behind red walls and green tiles must have dreamed of escaping those high walls as he gazed up at the sky in solitude. He must have wished that someone could live freely in his place.
Or perhaps he loved the mottled golden yellow within those high walls, and fervently longed to one day truly stand above millions of people.
All of this has become insignificant.
The river of time has flowed on for more than a hundred years, and no one can know what the source once looked like.
The story was not actually inspired by Guangxu and Consort Zhen, but by Lin Juemin's Letter to My Wife. Its original theme revolved around the words, "If I die first, leaving you to suffer, I cannot bear it. So I would rather ask you to die first, and bear the grief myself." But as more and more ideas came to me, the story gradually strayed further from its original intent, until it finally came to center on the background of a princess of the last dynasty.
