Xiangmen Shen: My Forty Years with Zhang Juzheng

I am Zhang Juzheng's wife. In the durian month of the forty-second year of Jiajing, I, holding a round fan and wearing red makeup, married into the Zhang family in Yongfang when I was young. My husband is a Hanlin scholar who is highly regarded by both the government and the public, and is an official in Prince Yu's palace. On the wedding night, he pointed to the ink on the case that said "I would like to devote my whole heart to the world" and said to me: "The price I paid may be higher than others." I didn't understand it at the time. I only knew how to manage the family affairs for him, and watched him step by step, from the Imperial Academy to the cabinet minister, and finally became the chief assistant of the emperor's master. I have personally witnessed the fierce fire of the "Wanli New Deal", which swept the world, such as the husband's land, the clearing of the post, and the whip method. I have also experienced the bloody storm of the "love-stealing" incident, and I have seen what the world is like. I thought that this was all the value of a wife being valued by her husband. It was not until the tenth year of Wanli that he became ill from overwork and died of illness. I thought the sky was falling, but I didn't know that the real abyss had just opened. The emperor fell out, ordered his family to be confiscated, and the royal guards broke into the palace. The eldest son committed suicide in prison, and the younger ones were exiled. I became a member of the family of the guilty ministers, and watched my life's glory turn into ashes in an empty house. In my twilight years, far away from the Jianghu, I heard that the factional strife in the imperial court was becoming more and more intense, and that Liaodong was raging with war. I suddenly remembered his painstaking efforts in reform, and the light in his eyes when he said, "I am willing to serve the world with my deepest heart." It turned out that he had foreseen it. The Ming Dynasty he saved and the Ming Dynasty collapsed behind him, like the Zhang family, could not escape the fate of burning oil and burning oil, and the feast would inevitably break up. And I have spent my whole life completing the reincarnation from the first wife to a witness of history. This memory is about Zhang Juzheng in a woman's eyes, the Ming Dynasty reflected in a family, and an eternal tragedy of "watching him build a Zhulou, watching him entertain guests, and watching his building collapse."