The Seven Emperors' Palace: The Azure Phoenix Regent's Chronicle

Li Qingluan, a princess of Xixia, was sent to Yan as a political hostage at eighteen, the most insignificant piece on the chessboard. Yet the Great Yan royal family had an old custom known as the “Luan succession marriage”: if the emperor died without an heir, his widow could marry the prince who succeeded him to stabilize the ancestral temples. Thus began her astonishing journey: seven marriages to seven emperors, seven unions, seven blades. From the gloomy Seventh Prince Xuan Li, who lived in the Cold Palace, to the sunny, lively Sixth Prince Xuan Jing; from the frail, gentle Fifth Prince Xuan Yi to the bold, battle-hardened Fourth Prince Xuan Zheng; from the rakish, talented Third Prince Xuan Jin to the calculating, deep-thinking Second Prince Xuan Mo, and finally to the benevolent, magnanimous Crown Prince Xuan Lie. She saw seven men to their graves and bore seven sons, transforming from a political hostage into the one who wielded the sword amid blood and fire. When seven memorial arches stretched from the imperial mausoleum to Yan’s capital, their inscriptions recorded the dying words of seven emperors, as well as her name: “Mother of the Seven Emperors of Great Yan, Regent Empress Dowager Li Qingluan. Seven emperors linked like pearls, one Luan holding the realm together.” This was no curse that doomed husbands to die, but a tale of political intrigue in which a woman wielded seven marriages as blades to carve a path to peace and prosperity.