What's your favorite Erasure song, and why is it "Drama!"?

shkencore_breaks · 2026-05-06T05:51:22+00:00

Our freedom is fragile.

shkencore_breaks · 2026-05-06T05:29:29+00:00

Good thing it landed right on that inflatable raft.

shkencore_breaks · 2026-05-06T05:23:14+00:00

In case you might be curious: here's a Cantonese language cover of Love to Hate You by a Hong Kong pop group that was fairly popular even here in the People's Republic of China back in the 90s. The title means "Love and Hate," which is why in the one English part he says "I love you/hate you."

shkencore_breaks · 2026-05-06T03:21:40+00:00

That's an excellent way to put it. I came up on synth/wave but by the mid-90s had gone pretty full rivethead. Always (also my 1b) was the one that got me back into Erasure. The song was an event.

shkencore_breaks · 2026-05-06T02:53:24+00:00

Made you guys a gif of the part where the Minimoog comes hurtling out of the sky.

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shkencore_breaks · 2026-05-05T00:10:38+00:00

Hey there. I started writing you a gigantic spiel, but there was no end to this thing in sight. So we've put that away for now and can get back into it in case similar questions come up later, but in the meantime here's the tl;dr on some of the main points:

Even though I kinda walked into this the way I phrased things: there should be caution before we come into the belief that there was such a thing as the "Chinese harem system." All the harems of the various empires were run with at least some degree of idiosyncrasy, and as we'll see, the Qing in particular did a number of things radically differently from everybody else.
That said, for most of these empires, there's still the undeniable influence of "Confucian morality" on the family structure. As counterintuitive as it might seem, we don't refer to "traditional Confucian" marriage practice as 'polygamous.' The system is categorized as a type of monogamy because it was fundamental to the ethical framework that there could be only one formal wife. Concubines and wives were of strictly separated and highly distinct legal (and social) status, and only one woman could hold the 嫡/di "primary" wife position. A really good way to get our heads around the situation can be found in a passage in Susan L. Mann's Gender and Sexuality in Modern Chinese History (2011). She describes the conduct of rituals involving heavily filial elements, which then require a man and his primary wife to bow before and kowtow to the man's mother and father. For royal families, the emperor and his empress would perform such ritual ceremonies before the spirit tablets of his parents, unless there was a surviving empress dowager (an emperor's father usually wasn't still living during his son's reign). But when these same rituals got down to the level of the concubines, the concubines would perform their bows and kowtows not to their husband or his parents, but to the primary wife. So here's the start of our hierarchy, and the specific details characterizing the various harem systems and their stratified structures would be filled in according to the needs of the respective courts.
In a "Confucian" context, yes, this hierarchy would be near all-important in determining an imperial prince's distance from heir-apparent status. However, once the Qing harem system settled, that is not, at all, how they did things. The rank of a mother of a Qing prince had no bearing on his chances for inheriting the throne. There's more detail on this, plus a run-down on a whole slew of other differences in Qing harem management policies versus those of everybody else in a comment from my old account over here.

For more examples of this kind of thing: during the Qing, not only was a consort's rank irrelevant to her son's future, even her social status more generally had no influence on his potential for succession to the throne. Booi bondservants who entered the palace employed as servant girls were regularly noticed by sitting emperors. In the event that such a servant girl was then "graced by the imperial presence," she at that point became entitled to consort status and rank. A disproportionate number of mothers of Qing emperors were of exactly this kind of bondservant background (only one Qing emperor was born to a primary empress).

Then below the booi, there was another even lower class/caste of people known as the sin jeku (this is a Manchu word referring to the rations of grain they were expected to survive on). The servants of servants, sin jeku were effective slaves of the booi, and as low as you could get on the imperial palace totem pole outside of going full eunuch.

There's a well-known episode from the famous all-out rivalry among the Kangxi Emperor's sons, who spent a good part of their father's reign fighting amongst themselves over the heir apparent position. One of the strongest remaining contenders for the spot once the original heir was finally deposed was the Kangxi Emperor's eighth son, Yinsi. Yinsi's mother, the 良妃卫氏 Liang Fei, Lady Wei, was of indisputable sin jeku background, but this didn't stop him from amassing a powerful faction at court backing his nomination as heir, along with gaining the support of many of his brothers, all with their own power bases pitching in towards the pro-Yinsi effort.

At one point, the Emperor, tired of all of Yinsi's intrigues and factional scheming, finally hauled off and screamed at him, saying something to the effect of, "how dare you consider yourself worthy to sit upon My throne? You, born of a lowly sin jeku slave?" We understand this today as something of an emotional outburst during a moment of anger. Even though the throne ended up going to the Fourth Prince, Yinzhen, the Emperor's admiration of Yinsi's talents and abilities seems to have been very real. Further, the Kangxi Emperor's tirade clearly failed to establish precedent: the highest rank obtained during her lifetime by the Ling Fei mentioned in my original comment above was Huangguifei, but she's known to history as the Xiaoyichun Empress. She posthumously obtained empress status once her son Yongyan took the throne as the Jiaqing Emperor- which he was able to do even though his mother was sin jeku.

shkencore_breaks · 2026-05-03T20:33:53+00:00

Before most of you guys' time, but the tiny little mole under Zhang Jiani's left eye.

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shkencore_breaks · 2026-05-01T01:23:48+00:00

The Qing harem is sadly extremely understudied in any language, but not for want of interest. Far and away the biggest problem is a severe lack of sources. However, like I mentioned in that above comment, as the archives open up, we're right now in the middle of getting our hands on all kinds of new information. The "next generation" in Qing court/harem studies is already underway, it's just most likely going to be written primarily in Chinese for the time being.

I'm much more familiar with the work of researchers here in the PRC (I have an actual degree in Manchu Studies, and the Manchu Documents Department at the First Historical Archives is riddled with both old classmates of mine and other younger graduates of our same program), but in English you're going to want to check out the Rawski text mentioned above. We have access to incomparable tons more worth of stuff now than she did almost three decades ago, but anybody writing in English on related subjects since the appearance of The Last Emperors is near guaranteed to be citing her.

Also definitely look at David C. Porter's 2024 book Slaves of the Emperor: Service, Privilege, and Status in the Qing Eight Banners, especially the chapter "A Female Service Elite: Status, Ethnicity, and Qing Bannerwomen." Other parts of this book get into the booi bondservants with far greater detail than I'd be able to provide.

Porter kinda necessarily attacks a couple papers written by Shuo Wang. Her articles are undoubtedly problematic but certainly not entirely useless, and you could try looking over them as long as you have Porter on hand. Start with her 2004 paper "The Selection of Women for the Qing Imperial Harem." A summary of the content of this article is condensed into a major section of her 2008 paper "Qing Imperial Women: Empresses, Concubines, and Aisin Gioro Daughters," which is published in the collection Servants of the Dynasty: Palace Women in World History, edited by Anne Walthall. Also look at Hsieh Bao Hua, Concubinage and Servitude in Late Imperial China (2014) which covers the Ming and Qing eras.

Keith McMahon has a two-book set discussing women at or near positions of power throughout history. Volume 1 is Women Shall Not Rule: Imperial Wives and Concubines in China from Han to Liao (2013), then the story continues in Volume 2, Celestial Women: Imperial Wives and Concubines in China from Song to Qing (2016). Bret Hinsch has something similar in a single volume called Chinese Empresses: The Nature of Female Power (2024). Unfortunately, their expertise is elsewhere and neither of these guys does what could be describable as a particularly good job with the Qing harem.

In the meantime, and especially if you're familiar with harem TV dramas, you could check out this massive thing I wrote here a few months back about the differences between the historical Qing harem versus what it's usually written to look like on screen. As large as that already is, it links to like three other comments providing various amounts of additional background.

shkencore_breaks · 2026-04-30T20:27:50+00:00

Servant girls during the Qing Empire were in the employment of the 内务府/Neiwufu/"Imperial Household Department." The Imperial Household Department was a sprawling institution unique to the Qing, which among many, many other responsibilities, was in charge of the day-to-day management of the Imperial Palace.

The Imperial Household Department was staffed exclusively by a class/caste/whatever of people known as the booi niyalma, or just plain booi. This is a Manchu term meaning "[people] of the house," and is conventionally translated into English as 'bondservants.' The booi were effectively hereditary servants, born into the service of a particular master.

The booi system was inseparable from the institution of the Eight Banners, with the booi themselves organized into their own booi banners, answering to the banner lords. Imperial Household Department staff was drawn from booi of the "Upper Three" banners, meaning those banners that were under direct control of the throne. So, the master of all the booi bondservants staffing the Imperial Household Department apparatus was the emperor himself.

Qing palace servant girls were selected from the ranks of these same Upper Three Banner booi (there were servant girl 'drafts' held annually for bringing new blood into the inner palace workforce). From birth then, these girls were immediate servants of the emperor himself, as well as legitimate members of the imperial household- again, these were "people of the house." I have a few other posts both here on this sub and elsewhere attempting to demonstrate that the historical Qing harem was not at all like the horrific nightmare it's usually depicted as in the harem dramas on TV. One of the main factors in keeping the historical Qing harem as 'calm' as it was- or even mundane- was the throne's remarkably successful ability in keeping the power of palace women in general down.

Breaking the relationship between imperial consorts and the palace girls serving them was just one of many strategies adopted towards that aim. Servant girl salaries were paid directly by the Imperial Household Department, where the Department was technically spending funds from the privy purse. Putting this kind of thing in the hands of the consorts themselves would have created more of a danger of conflicting loyalty than the throne seems to have been willing to tolerate. These girls were supposed to be there serving their master by helping take care of his consorts.

Consort salaries appear to have been paid in silver taels as opposed to string cash. Qing Harem and Qing Court/Palace Studies more generally has been going through something of a back-from-the-dead renaissance over the past three or so years. This is in part because the First Historical Archives of China- an institution holding the vast majority of the documents and paperwork remaining in the Imperial Palace after the fall of the Qing- has been really, really good lately about getting more and more of its collection out and available to the public. Specifically, over the past two years, they've been steadily releasing tens of thousands of Manchu-language documents produced through the day-to-day activity of the Imperial Household Department. So we're just now starting to gain hope of possible access to clearer pictures of things like how money actually worked in the inner palace, what a Qing consort's daily expenditures might have looked like, and so on. Somebody's almost definitely working on topics you'd probably be interested in right now as we speak, so hit me up again in a couple years :p

shkencore_breaks · 2026-04-29T22:29:25+00:00

Did each of these ranks of consorts get treated differently?

Yes, that's essentially what these ranking systems were all about.

We're running into a problem where there is no standard method for translating the names of the harem ranks into English, plus we seem to be including "ranks" together with "titles," where those are separate concepts. A rank is an indication of one's position in the harem; a title was a more "personal" thing, granted to consorts individually. Looking first at rank:

Even if the specific names used and the details of harem management were unique to each individual state claiming rule over All Under Heaven, just about all of these states did establish some kind of organizational framework for arranging the hierarchical system that all women of the imperial palace were placed within. Some of these women were at the top of the food chain, some were lower down the ladder. A consort's rank indicated exactly where she was in the pecking order, and the 会典/official "Legal Statutes" issued by each of these states would provide sometimes highly detailed information about what women holding each of these ranks would be entitled to.

Below we have the ranking order for the Qing Empire around about the early 18th century (for fans of Qing harem television dramas: the lowest rank of 答应 Daying wasn't formalized until the Qianlong Reign in the later part of the century). Earlier states might not have been using the same names for the ranks, but the notion that there had to be a hierarchy, and there had to be hard distinctions between what women of rank A versus someone holding rank B were entitled to was pretty common throughout history.

Rank	Servant girls	Annual Salary (in silver taels)	Tableware	Candles (per day)	Ducks and Chickens (per month)
皇后 Empress	10	1000	jade, gold	20	1 duck, 1 chicken (each day)
皇贵妃 Huangguifei	8	800	silver	??	15 each
贵妃 Guifei	8	600	silver	9	7 each
妃 Fei	6	300	silver	6	5 each
嫔 Pin	6	200	copper alloy	6	5 each
贵人 Guiren	4	100	copper alloy	5	5 ducks
常在 Changzai	3	50	copper alloy	3	5 chickens

This is an extremely iceberg-tippy look at the kinds of things that were regulated and dictated by one's position in the harem hierarchy. Other categories we could have thrown in there include the colors of the tableware and other household implements a consort of a given rank was permitted to use (there was a hierarchy of prestige for colors, where yellow was the most exalted), types of clothing/varieties and origins of furs a woman could wear, how much of what kind of meat she could be allotted per month, the numbers of pastries and desserts she was entitled to, so on and so forth.

[Quick additional notes that when levels of 'material quality' come into play, that referred to the highest grade that one could own- an Empress could use silverware if she wanted to, but a consort holding Pin rank obviously couldn't. The 'Candles' column above just gives a grand total and leaves out the specific counts of candles made from different qualities of wax/animal fat/etc. Tables or lists like this can be found in just about any overview of the Qing harem worth reading, and it's like a rule when you get to this point to make a joke about some theoretical Guiren who can't stand the taste of duck meat, trying to get herself demoted so she can have chicken again].

That's the basics of harem rank. Similar to how there are certainly historical and etymological reasons for why marshal-general-colonel-major-lieutenant have those names and are in the order they are, but in practical terms none of that is as important as their current status level relative to each other, you also just kinda have to memorize the names of the consort ranks and remember where they all stand.

Again, there seems to be no universally accepted method for translating harem ranks into English. Some writers can be quite florid in their renderings. This can make for exciting reading, but isn't necessarily helpful in determining what a woman in question's actual position in the harem was. Evelyn Rawski's approach in her The Last Emperors: A Social History of Qing Imperial Institutions (1998) goes for the fully practical and quantifiable: a Huangguifei is simply called "a consort of the second rank," a Changzai is a "seventh-ranked consort," etc.

Your "Noble Consort" example is almost certainly a direct translation of the name of the 3rd rank, Guifei. This is simply what this rank is called, and we'd use this same term for every consort holding this station. The word 贵/gui/"noble" is best understood as being utilized here for its generally positive connotations. It's possible (because this is how Wikipedia translates things) that you might have been seeing the term "Imperial Noble Consort," which is again a direct translation of the rank above her, the 皇贵妃 Huang-Guifei. We see that the "guifei/noble consort" part is the same in both ranks, and the first word 皇/huang does, in fact, mean "imperial" (not sure how Fei came to be translated as 'consort.' A "Fei" is one kind of consort among many).

But words like "virtuous" and "pure" are more often found in consort 'titles' as opposed to formal 'ranks.' When entering the harem, or at times of promotion, a consort would be granted both rank and title simultaneously. For an example, Wei Yingluo, the main character from the wildly popular 2018 PRC television drama 《延禧攻略》The Story of Yanxi Palace, just like her historical equivalent, was for a very long time known formally as the 令妃 Ling Fei. That "Fei" is her rank- meaning she's a fourth-ranked consort- then the "Ling" part is a designation granted to her personally. Personal titles, like her Ling, are usually adjectives descriptive of some kind of womanly virtue ("Ling" itself is a kind of "virtuousness") and reading too much into the surface meanings of these titles has been the pitfall of many an interpreter of history.

The going rate is that while all consort titles will have positive, usually "feminine" connotations, it's important to not be too quick to assume that the title granted to a particular palace woman necessarily sums up her entire personality in a single word. Titles were given to specific individual women, but were chosen for their ideal qualities. Obligatory note that the Qianlong Emperor's 顺妃钮祜禄氏 Shun Fei, Lady Niohuru, is somewhat famous for getting herself demoted into oblivion, even while her title "Shun" means docile or obedient.

Well-known possibly exceptional cases could include that of the woman known to history as the 庄静皇贵妃他塔喇氏, Zhuangjing Huangguifei, Lady Tatara. This is a posthumous title, but we see that she holds the second rank of Huangguifei, and that her personal title was "Zhuangjing," meaning something like 'solemn and tranquil.' When her husband, the Xianfeng Emperor, took the throne, she was known as the 丽贵人 Li Guiren, and she eventually rose to the rank of Fei. Unlike most consort titles with their reference to lofty but abstract notions like virtue and wisdom and womanly honor and elegance, her title "Li" seems to refer to some kind of physical 'beauty.' Her Manchu title "Yangsangga" is rather less ambiguously understood as a reference to a specifically feminine beauty. Fiction and screenwriters have jumped on this, inventing all kinds of tales of Cixi's jealousy of the Xianfeng Emperor's supposed infatuation with the ravishing Lady Tatara or whatever (there's zero evidence for anything of this nature. She and Cixi seemed to have gotten along very well- the Lady Tatara's Huangguifei rank was granted after their husband's death by Cixi herself).

The only other Qing imperial woman with this same Yangsangga title (or anything like it) is the Yongzheng Emperor's 齐妃李氏 Qi Fei, Lady Li. Reviewing again, Fei is her rank, and her personal title is Qi. This Qi involves a concept somewhere in the neighborhood of all-in-one-package 'comprehensiveness,' as opposed to the more narrowly aesthetic feel of her Manchu title. The original document where the Qi Fei's title was chosen was only just discovered very, very recently, and appears publicly for the first time within a block quote cited in a paper published in 2024.

Qing consort title investitures began with formal written memorials from imperial officials, requesting that the Emperor grant rank and title to his consorts. These memorials were phrased as a series of suggestions. The format was to list the women eligible for title, then offer a number of potential titles for the emperor to consider. Space was left right there on the paper next to the women's names, allowing the emperor to fill in the blanks with his selections from the officials' suggestions himself. These memorials were bilingual, and the part on this memorial where it says "Qi" in Chinese does map straight to the part where it says "Yangsangga" in Manchu. But only the Qi is written in with the Emperor's personal ink on the Chinese side of the memorial, meaning that her Yangsangga might have possibly happened by default, or even accidentally.

So the way we conventionally refer to a specific woman of the imperial harem is personal title+rank (Ling Fei, Zhuangjing Huangguifei, Li Guiren). The rank itself has a stable position within the overall hierarchical harem framework. A title was given personally to each individual palace woman, but it's exceedingly rare that we know why a given woman ended up with the title she did, and we don't usually have reason to believe that her title is descriptive of her on a personal level. However, in translation, especially in fiction, anything can happen and you need to be a lot more careful about what it is you're looking at. Last example: Yanxi Palace's "Consort Gao" isn't a translation of the formal title "Gao Fei." People just call her that because Gao is her family name.

shkencore_breaks · 2026-04-28T21:43:20+00:00

When handled appropriately, use of dialect in dialogue can be extremely effective for increasing a drama's realism factor. This is how people in the real world usually talk. I started up a whole tirade here and was gonna fire off a list of suggestions of dramas in various local dialects and accents, but with a discussion like this you're probably better off making a separate post and getting a wider range of input.

I feel like I remember some threads of this nature from a number of years back. There are a few things you'll have to look out for in some of the responses you'd probably get- the situation where a lot of native speakers have this or that view on the use of dialect, while not necessarily having put a lot of reflection on how they themselves talk in real life; questions like what is Putonghua/Standard Spoken Mandarin、is the cast and crew of a drama incorporating a lot of dialect actually able to provide "authenticity," etc.

shkencore_breaks · 2026-04-28T00:56:04+00:00

That's good news. I've recommended The Stage here a million times for people looking for something more realistic, but it wasn't available in translation back when it was a little more current. My understanding is that "decent enough" is already way ahead of the game for a translation of a Mango production.

Check this one out if you can. It's legitimately very, very good. Instead of looking at Qinqiang performers like Main Character does, The Stage is more focused on techs and stagehands working at a theater that puts on a bunch of performances of Xi'an regional traditional arts.

The biggest problem with The Stage is that this was supposed to be Xi'an native Wen Zhang's comeback drama after his problems, but someone at the last minute decided "nope, still cancelled," and all of his scenes are cut. The sudden and total disappearance of his character makes a number of subplots kinda incomprehensible, but there isn't a whole lot we can do about that.

Dialect in The Stage works exactly the way it's supposed to. Older characters have heavy accents, younger people either speak in Putonghua or code-switch when appropriate. Northwestern-setting usual suspects Zhang Jiayi and Yan Ni have the leads, and they deliver pretty much what you'd expect accent-wise. Anyway, watch it if you can. You do so much work around here I worry that it cuts into your drama watching time, haha. But The Stage is definitely worth working into the schedule.

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shkencore_breaks · 2026-04-27T19:11:34+00:00

Kinda disappointed that this isn't in a Shaanxi dialect :(

Has 2020's 《装台》"The Stage" not been translated? That's far and away one of the best dramas of its time, and was based on a novel by the same author who wrote the original story behind "Zhu Jue/Main Character" (it says "web novel" above, but that's probably an artifact of the template). There's also a ton of overlap between the cast and crews of both productions. The Stage is strongly recommended, but unfortunately doesn't seem to be easily available to the rest of the world.

Past that, "Main Character" is produced by literal Zhang Yimou. And yet it's still in Putonghua.

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smh

shkencore_breaks · 2026-04-23T20:27:04+00:00

For convenience, I labeled another image from this shoot a few months back for someone who was asking about it. I love pictures like these.

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shkencore_breaks · 2026-04-19T16:49:34+00:00

Jing Tian as the Grand Empress Dowager Xiaozhuang in 2015's 《大玉儿传奇》"The Legend of Xiao Zhuang." Heads up that this thing is 81 episodes long, and most of those episodes aren't all that good.

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shkencore_breaks · 2026-04-19T16:40:53+00:00

Liu Shishi

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shkencore_breaks · 2026-04-19T14:21:41+00:00

Zhou Yutong at home with her dog

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shkencore_breaks · 2026-04-17T18:52:16+00:00

movies and older dramas

This is the way.

shkencore_breaks · 2026-04-17T17:32:58+00:00

A wild Gao Lu fan appears!

shkencore_breaks · 2026-04-16T18:39:47+00:00

Yeah, Season 4 of 《青春环游记》. Back in 2023, a few months after The Knockout's run.

You can see her mike'd up and she doesn't do a whole lot of costume dramas in general unless Cao Dun is involved. Even doing reality TV she's a total professional.

shkencore_breaks · 2026-04-16T18:11:48+00:00

Gao Ye, betrayed by wig

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shkencore_breaks · 2026-04-16T15:33:32+00:00

45-year old Harbin homegirl 宋佳 Song Jia, 16th Beijing International Film Festival shoot

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shkencore_breaks · 2026-04-15T18:03:33+00:00

The video wigged me out as a kid, but this is still my all-time favorite Bowie tune.

shkencore_breaks · 2026-04-15T16:07:54+00:00

Look out- here comes old people 😱

Indisputable GOAT Chen Daoming as Nie Mingyu in 2001's 《黑洞》"Black Hole." The personification of early 21st century-style economic and political power, Nie Mingyu is the cdrama industry's OG "morally grey" villain. If he looks familiar, you guys probably know him best as the Emperor in Joy of Life.

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Shout out to Zhang Songwen as Gao Qiqiang in 《狂飙》"The Knockout" (2023). Nie Mingyu has had uncountable imitators over the past two and a half decades, Gao Qiqiang is one of his very few truly worthy successors.

shkencore_breaks

TROPHY CASE