The Qing Palace Has No Beauty: Prince Xiang's Residence

Their story is one of the Qing court's greatest mysteries, and one of its greatest legends. No one knows how she managed to captivate him. Yet in the thousands of characters of her lengthy biography, not one mentions her beauty. It speaks only of everyday trifles. She was not a peerless beauty, nor was she skilled in every art, as the legends claimed. She was not the bewitching seductress of those same tales, either. She was simply the ordinary daughter of a government official. Nothing more. Before she died, her only wish was for her ashes to be buried in separate places. She did not even mention punishing the murderer who had poisoned her own child. Yet overnight, the emperor demoted more than a dozen consorts to lowly concubines. He avenged her death and his own in this way. Months of reviewing memorials with a blue brush could not win him even one backward glance from her. How painful that must have been. Later generations told only of his caprice and his favor toward her, branding her a beauty who brought ruin to the state. But no one ever again read in that grief-stricken biography how well she had treated him.