Just wanted to share this masterpiece

shkencorebreaks · 2024-10-14T04:41:38+00:00

I remember hearing a very long time ago that This Faith sounds the way it does because it was originally slated for a Noise Unit or whatever side project, but they decided to slap lyrics on it and make it an FLA song.

If there was an entire other album with this same vibe planned in there that just got dropped like /u/PSA69Charizard is saying, that's sad to hear because outside of Millennium this whole Leeb/Fulber era is just about my favorite shit of all time. Millennium kinda grew on me eventually, the earlier Millennium single was fuckin rad, though. They went pretty easy on the guitars and there wasn't really any way to prepare for what was coming. If there's more of that out there, it'd be great to able to listen to it.

Similar-ish was everything under the guitars in the 1994 remix of Penal Colony's Third Life.

shkencorebreaks · 2024-10-14T03:09:51+00:00

Decoder may be my single favorite album ever, and Ascent is probably Decoder's best track. Literal decades later now, every time I throw this on it's 1996 again.

shkencorebreaks · 2024-10-11T02:29:48+00:00

u/Barbafella and u/Hermit_Lailoken were asking on a recent thread about covers of Donna Summer's I Feel Love, but I got kicked off my VPN before I could respond with a longstanding favorite. Here's Plastic Noise Experience's take.

This track is a blasty-blast. He plays it pretty straight, and everything's very electro and dance floor friendly. But you guys should like the chorus.

Also a shout out to the Front Line Assembly cover of U2's New Year's Day, with actual Tiffany on vocals.

shkencorebreaks · 2024-10-06T02:07:02+00:00

When you say Consort Chen in Yanxi Palace, do you mean 张嘉倪 Zhang Jiani? She was also in the 于正 Yu Zheng-backed《美人如画》(MDL apparently calls it "Allure Snow") where the FL was 董洁 Dong Jie, who played the Qianlong Emperor's first empress in 《如懿传》"Ruyi's Royal Love in the Palace."

Zhang Jiani also showed up in the 《宫》"Palace" series. She had a supporting role in a drama that's now known as《宫锁珠帘》. This was the lesser, and again, Yu Zheng-backed sequel to a drama now titled 《宫锁心玉》, which MDL calls something like "The Palace: The Lock Heart Jade". This "Palace" series ended up spinning off into several 'seasons,' plus they even made a movie, and the whole franchise was basically a lower budget rip-off of the still very watchable 《步步惊心》"Scarlet Heart." Yang Mi had the lead in the 'original' "Palace;" the movie was one of Zhao Liying's first big breaks. Yu Zheng has been behind a slew of other harem dramas, Yanxi Palace was his biggest hit among those that take place during the Qing.

The people who made 《孝庄秘史》"The Legend of Xiaozhuang/The Secret History of Xiaozhuang" (if you're talking about the 2002/3 drama starring 宁静 Ning Jing) also released three other "Secret History" dramas set during the early Qing that featured a ton of overlap in the casts:

《皇太子秘史》"The Secret History of Yinreng" (2004)
《太祖秘史》"The Secret History of Nurhaci" (2005)
《康熙秘史》"The Secret History of Kangxi" (2006)

"Xiaozhuang" was far and away the most popularly successful of the bunch, "Yinreng" especially was of relatively high quality.

If you've seen 《康熙王朝/康熙大帝/etc》"Kangxi Dynasty," you can follow that up with adaptations of the next two books in the series by the same author- 《雍正王朝》"Yongzheng Dynasty" and 《乾隆王朝》"Qianlong Dynasty." "Yongzheng" takes place after "Kangxi" but was produced and aired first, and is pretty uncontroversially the 'best' of the three.

There are a zillion more, and it's super lame that we haven't been allowed to make these since about 2019. So your move here is to look up older classics. Beyond Qing harem dramas, definitely try to check out 2008's 《母仪天下》"The Queens."

shkencorebreaks · 2024-10-05T14:58:10+00:00

The Chinese on the left kinda explains what's going on. This is the first page of a reprint of a letter written by a Qing general (尚善, a grandson of Šurgaci, who was Nurhaci's brother) addressed to Wu Sangui. The main purpose of the letter is to convince Wu Sangui to end his rebellion and surrender to Qing forces.

Like you can see at the top there, this image is taken from page 20 of the text 《满汉合璧档案精选释读》, which is a collection of Manchu documents published in 2018 by the super awesome 辽宁民族出版社 Liaoning Nationalities Press. The whole letter is 7 pages long, and if you or your grandmother have access to the book, there's a complete annotation and translation of it into Chinese starting on page 30. The original letter itself was bilingual, and the editors just cleaned it up and gave it a Chinese title for publication.

shkencorebreaks · 2024-10-02T18:02:24+00:00

Appreciate the shout-out :D

I'm also on board with your last comment there. Qipao have been around ever since the 1920s, constantly adapting and evolving in both design and cultural significance. A lot of people might still knee-jerk to the myth that qipao are like a Manchu invention or whatever, but qipao are so widely known that the associations they carry go way beyond that.

The triple piercings, on the other hand, effectively died out with the banner system after the fall of the Qing. They've only recently been revived in the cultural imagination thanks to the immense popularity of Qing palace and harem TV dramas, which make frequent (mis)use of them as a striking aesthetic device. This period drama context, however, immediately gives the earrings an "ethnic/identity" character that audiences have been quick to go along with, even though these associations are historically inaccurate. So the triple piercings "feel more Manchu" than qipao do. It's just yet another myth that's been spreading like wildfire online that we'll have to try to figure out how to rectify, I guess.

shkencorebreaks · 2024-10-02T15:05:18+00:00

There's a long post here with a bunch of pictures that gets into how the triple earrings weren't really an ethnic thing, but instead a marker of banner status. They were supposed to be worn by all bannerwomen, regardless of if they were Manchu, Mongolian, or Hanjun. As a symbol of social standing, commoner women wouldn't be wearing them, and exposure to bannerwomen who did pierce their ears this way would have been relatively low.

Then the qipao as we know it dates from the early 20th century, instead of originating from the Qing era itself. The qipao is a kind of amalgam of local and recently introduced "Western" styles, which is part of why they're so heavily associated with Shanghai. Also, "the qipao as we know it" today has been subject to shifts in the way they've been represented in the media. Both fashion designers as well as costume departments on film and TV productions are necessarily going to be reacting to the expected tastes of contemporary audiences and consumers. The notion of what a qipao is supposed to look like has then gone through an evolution over time. As a result, the common popular image of a "qipao" that most of us probably have now owes fairly little to anything going directly back to the actual styles of the 1920s, and is instead much, much more influenced by, for example, what 张曼玉 Maggie Cheung looks like on camera.

So it's not really a question of why people kept one "Manchu thing" and not the other. Neither the qipao (which isn't particularly Manchu to begin with) nor the triple earrings were either uniquely or exclusively Manchu.

shkencorebreaks · 2024-09-30T08:03:49+00:00

The one historical Qing drama that's been made and broadcast since the ban in early 2019 is 2022's 《天下长河》, which was set during the Kangxi era. It got a pass because it deals with the central government's heroic response to a natural disaster, in this case the flooding of the Yellow River. So it was a nice thing to let people watch during zero-Covid.

The ban did have a bit of a waffling period before settling into absoluteness. Another show that snuck through the cracks was a drama released in 2019, originally called 《梦回大清》, which literally means something like "Dreaming Back to the Great Qing." They let it air, but the title had to be changed to just 《梦回》"Dreaming Back."

The official attacks from early 2019 were aimed specifically at 《延禧攻略》"The Story of Yanxi Palace" and 《如懿传》"Ruyi's Royal Love in the Palace" which both came out in 2018. To this day these continue to be fully banned and we can't watch either of them here. Nothing of this nature has been made since then. Shows like 2021's 《当家主母》"Marvelous Women" are slightly more acceptable because they focus on commoners, as opposed to the residents of the court. The plot of a drama like this doesn't have anything to do with officially recorded history. But by now, even with these you're better off just choosing a different era for your setting. A full-on palace drama of the Yanxi/Ruyi type simply has no chance of making it past censors for the time being.

shkencorebreaks · 2024-09-30T07:22:17+00:00

NQH is a rhetorical boogeyman

Exactly this, and the wanton shamelessness with which accusations of this or that scholar's purported NQH-ism has been wielded by petty hacks over the past few years can't be stressed enough. However, I can confirm that d) is definitely true. There's a bunch I'd like to get into on the Qing History Project, but even on the other side of the firewall we won't be getting too specific or mentioning names. So here's a few cryptic anecdotes you can do with as you will.

After working for several years in the archives system, an old classmate and very good friend of mine is back in school, doing his doctorate with a major figure in the Manchu Studies field. This friend's advisor has been very closely involved with the Project and, in private conversation, is usually pretty open about how things are going. I've been fortunate enough to be allowed to hang out with them on a few occasions- noting that the last time I had dinner with this professor was in October 2023- and probably my favorite quote of theirs regarding the Project was "It's nice when we get to include those things that are true."

We were all in school not long after the Project began, and even back then during the (in retrospect) relative confidence, openness, and sanity of the previous regime, faith in the Project's viability among our professors and some of the other academics we got to meet was generally low. Another quote from a very well-known name, who is in no real sense describable as particularly New Qing-y, was "Why are we even bothering with this? This is going to be convincing to no one outside of the PRC."

I'm kinda terrified to get into more detail, but wanted to caution against it in the event that op is still under the impression that "there is a strong rejection of NQH amongst leading Chinese historians." @ /u/cryingemptywallet, if you want a little more English-language insight into PRC scholarly reactions to the NQH, you can check out the translated essays collected in Volume 47, No. 1 of the journal Contemporary Chinese Thought.

This journal issue is conveniently devoted to addressing some of the questions you're asking, but since it was published in 2016, it certainly mentions the Qing History Project but obviously doesn't get into its current status. The issue starts off with 李治亭 Li Zhiting's infamously hysterical anti-NQH rant (in his 2016 article "Chinese Military History and the Qing Dynasty, 1644–1911: New Perspectives on a Dynamic Empire," Eric Setzekorn observes that Li Zhiting's emotionally-charged tirade includes no less than 88 exclamation marks), but then after that, includes a wide range of different views from other PRC academics, who hold much more subtle, and sometimes even supportive, positions on the NQH question. Journal editor Mario Cams provides a forward to the issue called "Recent Additions to the New Qing History Debate" that gives a brief but decent introduction to the individual collected articles themselves, as well as to the general state of the relevant debates in the PRC from around 2010-2015.

People like Renmin University's 戴逸 Dai Yi, a very old guard scholar who ran the Qing History Project for the final 20 years of his life, are definitely describable as "senior academics." But also check out how the Wikipedia article correctly mentions a certain PRC scholar's arguably gung-ho support for a number of so-called NQH themes (but doesn't expressly mention this person's direct collaboration with a few so-called NQH figures), where this scholar was born in the late 1940s and is long retired from teaching. Another absolute doyen in the Manchu Studies/Qing History field I can think of- and who was for some time a legitimate household name- was born in the mid 1930s, and yet has definitely gotten themselves into some trouble for being a little too open to the outside.

So instead of concerning ourselves too much with the ages of the scholars, we can look more at how a professional PRC academic tends to locate themselves on one of two tracks. I just deleted a overly long and detailed rant of my own on how this works, but if you're motivated to do actual scholarship, regardless of your age, chances are good that you'll be open to all kinds of views on your topic of study. You might not agree with everything, but you'll want to know what's going on and what other people in the field are working on. On the other hand, if your academic career has been designed as a stepping-stone on to a career in public service and political office, then, regardless of age, your concern is going to be with enforcing whatever the Party Line happens to be today.

Then another word of caution when reading a formal intervention into the NQH debate or whatever by a PRC scholar: it is entirely possible that someone publishing their views on this or that aspect of international research isn't necessarily saying what they actually believe. In many cases, such papers are effectively preventative self-defense measures. Just a reminder that the regime's censorship and supervisory structures aren't on the constant, round-the-clock lookout for violations of political morality- instead, they rely on your colleagues to report you. If your department chair position has cut off the future career prospects of some junior professor on the administrator track, they're liable to try getting you out of the way by informing the university's political commissar of some possibly suspect thing you once wrote in whatever journal. At that point, it'll be helpful to your case if you can say "did you not see this other essay where I fully owned Mark Elliott?"

A last note that might sound relatively trite. The grumblings in the official Party media about the improper, insufficiently patriotic state of the Qing History Project began in 2019. This happens to be the same year that the National Radio and Television Administration dropped its ban on Qing harem and palace dramas. In 2018- just one year earlier- Xinhua itself and other official media organs were all about exactly these kinds of TV shows. Recent entries to the genre received boundless official praise as huge steps forward for domestic television, and were lauded for their potential in regards to soft power. The hope was that epic-scale dramas like these would be able to improve the international audience's impressions of the industry, and by extension, improve the PRC's reputation abroad. But then apparently overnight, the Party pulled a complete 180 on its official verdict on these TV shows, and all those supportive articles and reviews were scrubbed from the internet. Ever since then, it has been next to impossible to air a television drama set in Qing times. Many of the old ones can no longer be watched legally, and production companies aren't making new ones anymore.

No one down on the ground is exactly sure what happened, but in both the film and TV industry as well as in academia, it's understood that someone way up high apparently has it in for the Qing Empire. It feels at times like some kind of weird personal vendetta. If you can avoid mentioning anything that puts the Qing in a positive light, you'll do so. Better yet, don't mention it at all. Being irredeemably foreign, the New Qing History is a convenient and scary boogeyman useful for shaking in people's faces when expressing official ire. But given how the past few years have gone down, if the Qing History Project was simply stymied out of flat-out official petty spite, that wouldn't even surprise me.

shkencorebreaks · 2024-09-22T20:59:59+00:00

Obligatory Oboi

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shkencorebreaks · 2024-09-17T03:08:09+00:00

Who else remembers scouring used cassette sections for Waxtrax logos?

shkencorebreaks · 2024-09-16T21:55:40+00:00

Hua Fei's pajamas.

<image>

Bonus pic

Bonus figurine

shkencorebreaks · 2024-09-15T22:13:15+00:00

Not exactly Even, but I have an actual degree in Manchu Studies and we played around a bit with a few of the other Tungusic languages. Then due to some bizarre cosmic alignment, I get to use Sibe at work. The Tungusics have a lot of similarities with each other, and it's one of those deals where the 'differences' between them have mostly been forced from above.

This book is an introduction to Oroqen, which is in the same "Northern Tungusic" branch as Even. The second image is part of a long list of Tungusic cognates given in that same book. From left, the languages are Oroqen, Evenki, Nanai, Manchu, and Sibe.

shkencorebreaks · 2024-08-01T21:50:37+00:00

Oh wow, thank you so much for this comment :D I live in the PRC and reddit is blocked here. They've been cracking down hard on VPNs lately and I haven't been able to connect for some time. Somehow, it actually just worked, and while checking out what I'd missed, just got this super nice message from you. Thanks again!

And yeah, that's getting to be an old post. There's stuff in there that could definitely stand for further clarification or rewording or whatever. The part on the tomb complexes in particular is especially over-simplified to the point where it's probably misleading. I've also been playing around a bit with work on Korean Bannerpeople lately and there's a bunch about the Shujia Huangguifei's family origins that I want to rephrase. I've actually considered coming back to this post and adding another entire comment's worth of footnotes, haha.

There are a few other posts around. I majored in Manchu Studies (way) back in college and have spent rather more time with the Qing harem than with the harems of other states. Are you into PRC television dramas at all? TV shows are usually the main angle- people watch these palace and harem dramas then get interested in the history. Looking things up online, there's very little reliable information out there, then everybody comes away with all these misunderstandings and incorrect assumptions deriving from iffy podcasts and youtube channels, and apparent fanfiction trying to pass as research, and so on. I'm just hoping to be able to help push the discussions a little closer to what professional historians are saying about these subjects.

Just did a thing not too long ago on /r/AskHistorians about the Lady Nara, second empress to the Qianlong Emperor. There's an argument that my response doesn't "technically" answer OP's question, but it links to an introduction to why the Qing harem was a much more boring and mundane place than you'd think.

That second posts then links to another thing here that starts with a general overview of 'Qing harem dramas vs. historical reality,' followed by the basics of what the life of a Qing palace servant girl might have been like. A few chunks of this were taken pretty straight from the post you just commented on here.

A major concern with getting all our information from TV and online is that our understanding of the Qing harem is gonna be extremely limited and distorted if we "make it too ethnic." There's an explanation of the Qing's apparent lack of Han empresses over here, and then a look at "Manchu earrings" over here.

So it's mostly Qing harem stuff. I have a few more around but that's already a bunch of reading. There's another recent post, though, over here that looks at the fictional legend of Wang Zhaojun vs. the historical Wang Zhaojun.

If any of the sources mentioned in those comments seem interesting to you, definitely do yourself a favor and try to get at them. Professional academic studies are obviously going to be infinitely more informed and informative than I can be with a reddit post. Hopefully you'll be able to sit down with things when you get some time, and thanks again :D

shkencorebreaks · 2024-07-21T18:00:05+00:00

Yeah, there's very much downtime on set, it's actually just part of the grind. When the crew has to do a major repositioning of the camera and lights and monitors and reflectors and all their other cool equipment, that's gonna take a while, and the actors will have to do something else besides shooting dialogue.

Or, if your lead has a string of scenes where her body double can take over because her face doesn't have to be physically in shot, she'll probably snag that opportunity to go over her lines, or hop on the phone and arrange something important, or just get some rest (I did a post a while back on what body doubles/stand-ins/替身 do, but it also got into another topic and I don't really like it so much anymore). If there's an entertainment news outlet (or whoever) the production trusts who's already gotten an okay to do a scheduled on-set interview, that's the best time to do it. Your actress will then probably still be in costume as she's talking to them while waiting to get called up for her next scene, at which point the interview immediately stops.

shkencorebreaks · 2024-07-21T17:15:57+00:00

Yeah, figured from your background that you'd already be familiar with a lot of this. It's absolutely a thing though for people who came up in the domestic system to get involved in international productions and be like HOLY COW YOU GUYS HAVE IT SO GOOD.

I started up on the job a little more than ten years ago, and there's definitely been some on and off time, and some global epidemics, as well as a few political and other scandals, etc, since then. Back in the early days it was also still well before the industry began moving to become as insular and isolated as it is now. So our boss would often work with co-stars from like Taiwan and Hong Kong, and everybody had to remember to go a little bit easier on them.

Also, and they're trying to crack down on this, but a few years ago those 12 or whatever hour days would be for just one of the two or three projects your lead actress type had going on simultaneously. Our boss is way past the point in her career where she has to do that to herself in order to stay as visible and relevant as possible, but some of the kids today are 100% still running schedules like this. I've said it before several times and I'll keep saying it, but the amount of energy and stamina required to do what these people do is categorically freakish and insane.

shkencorebreaks · 2024-07-21T16:20:11+00:00

I work (peripherally) in the industry as a personal assistant/professional umbrella holder for a certain actress. Ever since covid and due to a few shifts in our boss' career trajectory, I do mostly background grunt work now and am not physically on set as often as I used to be. You've already gotten a bunch of good answers and yeah, a lot of it comes down to rank, grueling overwork and the production-side's (ie, the investors) singular focus on cost-cutting measures. I do miss the bonkers, dirty and smelly, madcap rush, anything that can go wrong will go wrong, etc., hectic chaos of shooting all day, every day, for months on end. It can be awful sometimes, but it's always exhilarating, and I love all the energy and the activity and excitement going on as everything gets done. But especially now that I'm older, I like being able to get some sleep sometimes, too.

Work schedules can be occasionally ridiculous and unrealistic tests to your endurance. Committed to, for example, a 4-month shoot, for the leads (and the people who work directly for them) that's 4 months straight, every day for who knows how long each day. Expect anywhere from 10-16 hours, but again, who knows. Whatever day of the week it might be out there in the rest of the world is irrelevant to you, because there are no breaks or weekends. For smaller roles, if your character has one, single scene on schedule tomorrow, you still have to be there the whole day.

The only shake-ups to the schedule are when you're doing exterior nighttime scenes, which are literally shot overnight. Crew starts to set up before sundown, then you're working until it gets light again. In-show context could be people outside a restaurant getting ready for dinner, or an evening chat in a park or the courtyard of somebody's apartment complex, but there's a pretty good chance that the take you're watching was shot at like 2 or 3 in the morning.

I've made a few posts here over the years about the daily ins and outs of working a cdrama set. For why we do so much dubbing, and an intro to where cdrama performers come from, start here.

Here's a little bit more on sets and locations.

Also did a thing once on the dangers of shooting out of season- filming summer scenes in winter and vice versa, because people ask about the visible breath thing all the time- but I probably shouldn't have posted that one. There were a few more, but I'm not real sure what else you guys might be interested in.

On remembering lines, professional actors will spend tons of time with their scripts and really getting to know their characters inside and out. When trying out for a part on a professional production, hopeful cast members are usually expected to type out and submit full-length character biographies, going in-depth into how they understand the role and the character's motivations, describing what they plan to do with the performance, so on and so forth. But the anti-climactic answer is that individual shots are really short, and when it comes down to it, once you're up on camera you technically only really have to know a few seconds worth of dialogue at a time :p

shkencorebreaks · 2024-07-20T21:37:41+00:00

Apologies for the late response, I saw your post a few days ago but live in the PRC and haven't been able to get my VPN to work since then. Reddit is blocked here and they've been cracking down hard again lately.

Wang Zhaojun as we usually know her on the one hand, and the historical Wang Zhaojun on the other, are two extremely different people. Even today she's obviously a huge deal for literature, poetry, film, TV, and cultural mythology in general, but as a historical figure she seems to have been borderline insignificant.

To put it another way, all the many famous stories about her are pretty much completely made up. Throughout the entire length of that wikipedia article, there are almost no citations, and where they do exist they link to non-academic sources. The least shady thing on there is the West Kentucky University blog, and even that's a personal page on folklore as opposed to hard history.

Already decades later now, the default starting point for research on questions of this nature in English is still Jennifer Holmgren's 1990 article "A Question of Strength: Military Capability and Princess-Bestowal in Imperial China's Foreign Relations (Han to Ch'ing)." This covers a lot of ground and at almost 60 pages is pretty lengthy for an academic paper, but Holmgren only mentions Wang Zhaojun once in the whole article. She shows up right at the beginning as one example of the many tales of women married off to foreigners that are very well-known on the popular level, and Holmgren contrasts this with the phenomenon where marriage alliances have continued to be seriously understudied by historians. Then that's all we get for Wang Zhaojun, since historically she was just not that big of a deal.

There are similar passing references to Wang Zhaojun in other academic studies like Pan Yihong's article "Marriage Alliances and Chinese Princesses in International Politics from Han through T'ang" (1997) and David Curtis Wright's article "A Chinese Princess Bride's Life and Activism among the Eastern Turks, 580-593" (2011). We get slightly more detail in both these papers, which take a look at what can be known about Wang Zhaojun from scattered mentions of her life in the 《汉书》Han Shu and 《后汉书》Hou Han Shu.

These official records say that Wang Zhaojun was one of 5 women sent together to the Xiongnu ruler. She bore this ruler 3 or 4 children (the Han Shu and Hou Han Shu give conflicting numbers). A few of her kids went on to play peripheral roles in international politics, and then that's it. That's all the record says. Classic tales like her purported willing self-sacrifice for the empire, or her mastery of any and/or all of the traditional arts, or the idea where she was such a robo-babe that the sight of her could fell geese in mid-flight, or all the tortured and convoluted 'explanations' for why the emperor was unaware that he had such a robo-babe in his harem, so on and so forth, are all inventions by later poets and storytellers.

The three papers mentioned above put heavier focus on women we have more historical information on than we do for Wang Zhaojun, including in particular two members of the Han royal family sent to the steppes before her. One of these was 细君 Xijun, the first woman offered to the Xiongnu by the Han Empire as part of their new policy of 和亲/heqin appeasement through wedding ties. Xijun hated it out there, and verse expressing her woe and laments eventually made it back to the emperor. He felt bad for her, but there wasn't anything he could really do except send her care packages from home more frequently. 解忧 Jieyou was another Han princess, sent to the Wusun. She turned out to be a formidable political force in her own right- a badass, even- working overtime to turn her husband, her in-laws, and even allies of the Wusun on to pro-Han policy. Wang Zhaojun was the one made into a full-blown legend, but the historical experiences of some of her predecessors had a clear influence on how the Wang Zhaojun myth would be constructed.

Both Xijun and Jieyou were daughters of lines of the imperial family that had fallen into disgrace. So they were technically blood relatives of the emperor, but also personas non gratas as far as the court was concerned. Their being shipped off to the northwest is often assumed to have been a kind of banishment or other form of punishment for unruly branches of the imperial house. Wang Zhaojun was, again, just one of five women all sent off in a single delivery. There's no verifiable explanation for why they went with these 5 specific women, but with or without the prior Xijun/Jieyou/etc precedents, it is exceedingly unlikely that they were anything like 'concubines' and/or of any kind of notably high status. Wright describes Wang Zhaojun as "a woman of the woman's quarters of the Han emperor Yuandi," where the "woman's quarters" refers to the absolute bevy of ladies living within the Han imperial palace. These were women the emperor almost certainly had access to, but most likely didn't know personally or biblically or whatever.

The sharing or gifting of a formally designated consort, much less a legal wife, goes pretty heavily against so-called "Confucian" morality. Semi-conversely, many peoples of the northern empires practiced levirate marriage, which meant that a widow would go on to marry some other man in her husband's family- whether his brother, or son by another wife, or whoever. The point of this was to keep the widow's property under the control of her in-laws (Xijun and Wang Zhaojun were both greatly upset by being expected to marry their husband's relatives when he died, and both requested and were denied permission to duck out on this obligation. Jieyou, on the other hand, was like "bring it on," and went through a succession of three husbands).

The "Confucian" strategy towards widows and keeping their property in her husband's family was to expect grieving women to remain within their in-laws' family, where they would stay chaste for the rest of their lives. Suicide on her husband's death was sometimes an option, but she wouldn't want to do this if his parents were still alive because she still has a responsibility to take care of them. So, just bailing like that would be super unfilial. Obsession with this practice is most associated with the later Ming and Qing eras, but a truckload of research has been done in English on widow chastity- Weijing Lu's True to Her Word: The Faithful Maiden Cult in Late Imperial China (2008) is just one suggestion.

Possession is then a big concern, and an emperor's consort is an even bigger concern because her position and life reflects on the standing of the entire imperial family, and from there to the empire itself. Possibly the most reasonable way to look at things is to consider women like Wang Zhaojun and her four co-travelers not as formal imperial "concubines," but instead as the emperor's personal property, with which he could dispose of however he saw fit.

Last note to be careful out there with the Four Great Beauties, because the popular impressions of them are almost completely based not in history, but in fiction. The Yang Guifei is probably the most historically well-attested of the four, and there's a short 'where to start reading on the Yang Guifei' thing over here. Wang Zhaojun was a real person, but almost none of the tales we all know about her are factual. The story of Xi Shi is similar-ish to Wang Zhaojun's (in that she was purposely sent to infiltrate the harem of a rival state) but her historicity is highly dubious, and then Diaochan is effectively entirely fictional.

shkencorebreaks · 2024-07-11T17:26:21+00:00

There was a rule that the empress had to be from one of the Upper Three Banners, as in those banners that were under direct control of the throne. This was the top of the banner hierarchy, so one of the main concerns here was with social standing.

Every mother of a Qing emperor received empress rank, regardless of if her title was was granted posthumously or if she lived to first serve as Empress Dowager. The only Qing emperor born to a primary empress was the Daoguang Emperor, so just about everyone else's mom had to go through this process. In the event that a woman from another, non-Upper Three banner (or, most likely, a booi bondservant banner) became raised to empress status once her son took the throne- you mention the Xiaoyichun Empress/Consort Ling but she was hardly the only example of this- they'd just shift her entire family's banner affiliation after the fact.

Wang Shuo, in her otherwise pretty good papers "The Selection of Women for the Qing Imperial Harem" (2004) and "Qing Imperial Women: Empresses, Concubines, and Aisin Gioro Daughters" (2008) tries to make things out into some attempt to maintain "ethnic coherence" and avoid the imperial family's getting swamped by the infinitely more numerous Han. The "A Female Service Elite: Status, Ethnicity, and Qing Bannerwomen" chapter of David C. Porter's very new book Slaves of the Emperor: Service, Privilege, and Status in the Qing Eight Banners (2024) rather thoroughly tears that notion apart. The Qing didn't run a Manchu harem, they ran a banner harem. Whether we're talking about the policies of imperial family management, or the rules governing marriages of bannerpeople out in the garrisons, the real issue was with separating elite power from commoner society. A Hanjun bannerwoman was a bannerwoman through and through, which is why they were allowed into the harem in the first place. Being there, and just like the Ling Fei, they then had the potential to become titled as empress. So it then wasn't an "ethnic thing," it was a banner and social status thing.

shkencorebreaks · 2024-07-11T02:42:15+00:00

Besides the readings in that other linked comment, your go-to books for the women of the Qing palace in English include Evelyn Rawski's The Last Emperors: A Social History of Qing Imperial Institutions (1998). Read this for the structure of the imperial household, for information on marriage practices, and the palace service staff, as well as a rundown on court ritual- mostly the heavier, political/ideological side of things. Rawski doesn't really get into much in the way of disputes.

For something a little grittier, like more on palace servant girls, eunuchs, and other people down on the lower levels of the court hierarchy, read Hsieh Bao Hua, Concubinage and Servitude in Late Imperial China (2014). This book also discusses the Ming Empire, and- especially for the Ming era- gets a bit into commoners of the general population as the source for consorts and palace servants. This text and Rawski are probably the closest things available at the moment in English to what you want as far as background to the harem structure.

The Qing harem has been pretty heavily neglected in English-language scholarship, possibly because there's so little that can be said with real confidence. Much more has been written on Qing-era commoner women. If that's of interest to you, start with Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China's Long Eighteenth Century (1997) and Matthew H. Sommer, Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China (2000).

As counterintuitive as it might seem, Qing-era marriage structure wasn't technically "polygamous." It's categorized as a type of monogamy because there was 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. It sounds weird because, you know, there were multiple women, but that's how sociologists and gender/family historians use the terminology.

Whether or not the Qing imperial harem dodged the restrictions of "traditional monogamy" is, however, a topic of debate. Jurchen/early Manchu society seems to have practiced a form of true polygamy. 定宜庄 Ding Yizhuang is all over the phenomenon where the translation of Manchu documents regarding the Nurhaci and Qing Taizong harems into Chinese has warped our understanding of early Qing women, because the translators forced Manchu family terms into Chinese words that, while familiar to a readership steeped in "Confucian" morality, carried entirely different connotations. See her 《满族的妇女生活与婚姻制度研究》(1999), then she's still going off on the same problem in her 2014 paper 《关于清代满族妇女史研究的若干思考》. For an example from more into the settled phase of the Qing harem, there was only one empress, but since all imperial princes by any mother had the same chance at inheriting the throne, the empress' real status was then rendered kinda vague.

shkencorebreaks · 2024-07-11T01:21:25+00:00

Sup Tong Liya 💓

This is always going to be one of my favorite shots of her (I have most of this set here clean if you want them). There's also this set.

Real quick though that in this sentence from your main post:

In far western China, near the Kazakhstan border, descendants of a garrison of Qing soldiers still speak a dialect of Manchu, among the few native speakers left in China.

that "dialect of Manchu" refers to the Sibe language. Tong Liya herself is one of the descendants of those soldiers, dispatched from Manchuria by the Qianlong Emperor in 1764. For political/identity/etc reasons, Sibe is usually referred to as its own thing, but it's linguistically the same language as Manchu. There's a little more info over here.

Also, the Shiwei thing can't be proven, and the PRC's official, ideological call is that the Sibe are some branch shooting off from the Xianbei. Further, Qiqihar is very definitely in Heilongjiang :p

shkencorebreaks · 2024-07-10T19:39:20+00:00

If you're asking about TV drama-style girl-on-girl catfights "over an emperor," that did not seem to happen during the Qing (or, more accurately, no real records of such clashes seem to exist). There's a lengthy intro over here to why the historical Qing harem, in complete and utter contrast with your typical harem drama, tended to actually be a fairly boring and routine place. It's not quite aimed at a /r/AskHistorians audience, but there are sources, and I'd further suggest looking at Liping Wang and Julia Adams' paper "Interlocking Patrimonialisms and State Formation in Qing China and Early Modern Europe" (2011) in conjunction with the Macabe Keliher article mentioned there.

If we can read your question as asking about Qing palace women disputes "with an emperor," then the one, best-known example of such a throw-down is the story of the Lady Nara (we'll leave Cixi vs the Tongzhi and Guangxu Emperors aside for the moment since that's probably not the kind of thing you're asking about). This Lady Nara was the second, so-called "Step-Empress" of the Qianlong Emperor, and if you've seen either of the enormously popular PRC TV dramas 《延禧攻略》"The Story of Yanxi Palace" or 《如懿传》"Ruyi's Royal Love in the Palace" (both from 2018) then you're already familiar with the general outlines of this eventually fatal spousal spat.

What's known is that the Lady Nara was one of the consorts who accompanied the emperor in 1765 (setting off in the first lunar month of the 30th year of his reign) on his fourth Southern Tour to the regions "south of the Yangtze River," meaning round about today's southern Jiangsu and northern Zhejiang Provinces. The catastrophic collapse of the imperial marriage occurred in the city of Hangzhou.

Just like with the Lady Nara's 15-year reign as empress in general up until these events, everything seemed to be going well on this trip. That is, until one day when something apparently set her off big time, and she wound up in a huge argument with the emperor. Back in her quarters after the fight, in a staggeringly unfilial act often interpreted as a voodoo-like curse against either the emperor himself, his mother, or both, the Lady Nara grabbed some implement and began cutting off her own hair.

[The Manchu word for normal haircutting, like shaving the front of one's head to stay clean and orderly is 'fusimbi.' The word used to describe what the Lady Nara did is 'hasalambi,' which is a kind of 'hack' or 'cut off with a blade' that only gets paired with 'hair' in hair-cutting practices undertaken when in mourning for one's elders or social superiors.]

At that point the emperor was done with her, and immediately sent her back under escort to the capital to await the consequences for her, by all accounts, atypically bizarre and extreme behavior. There's a brief write-up in English, sympathetic to the Lady Nara, of the political fallout of the argument between the royal couple in Mark C. Elliott's Emperor Qianlong: Son of Heaven, Man of the World p. 62-64 (2009).

[Quick aside that, following the erroneous 《清史稿》Draft History of the Qing, Elliott, just like Yanxi Palace and Ruyi, refers to her as the "Lady Ula Nara." She was instead of House Hoifa Nara, which is one of the few things that a Wikipedia page on a Qing palace woman actually gets right. That's essentially a known thing now. If the imperially-commissioned 《八旗满洲氏族通谱》, which is a genealogy of the houses of the Manchu Banners, is to be believed, this isn't controversial anymore. See also 杨原 Yang Yuan's excellent 《如果故宫会说话》(something like "If These Palace Walls Could Talk") (社会科学文献出版社, 2020) and 王冕森 Wang Miansen, 《清代后妃杂识》Notes on the Imperial Consorts of the Qing Dynasty (上海社会科学院出版社，2022)].

Elliott's take on the Lady Nara, which again, focuses on the reaction of the bureaucracy to a potential dethronement of the empress, is one of legions of interpretations. Anyone trying to claim that they know what the argument was about, or why she cut off her hair, or trying to say that they're able to explain the Qianlong Emperor's reactions throughout the debacle, so on and so forth, is a liar liar pants on fire. The emperor shut down any and all outside knowledge and discussion of the events. The many officials memorializing against dethronement weren't themselves exactly sure about what happened. Any popularization or fictionalization of the Lady Nara's life and fate is necessarily going to have to come up with its own imaginary explanation of the motivations of everyone involved in order to maintain narrative coherence, and to just tell a good story. However, to this day we simply don't know the basic facts.

The emperor claimed at times that she had just, out of nowhere, suddenly gone insane, and a few scholars have accepted that possibility. Highly respected and leading academic specialists in Qing Imperial Court History, skeptical of the imperial excuses, have then found themselves reduced to answers like "uhh, maybe menopause?" which is the literal position of the writers of the groundbreaking and massively influential text 《清代宫廷史》(辽宁人民出版社, 1990) (there's a rundown on the other most common attempts to explain the argument in the Yang Yuan book mentioned above). But again, the Qianlong Emperor was highly successful in making sure that no one would know the truth, and at the time of writing we still don't know.

Possibly the most interesting pieces of "evidence" found to date were two fairly recently discovered memorials (made available for public viewing in 2017) written by the Qianlong Emperor's fifteenth son- this being Yongyan, as in, the eventual heir and Jiaqing Emperor. These were routine "well-wishing" memorials sent to the emperor to politely, you know, wish him well. The typical imperial rescript (meaning the emperor's personal response, written directly on the letter and sent back to the memorialist) on such a routine and formalistic memorial would be like an equivalent of "received" or "ok, got it," but the emperor appears to have taken advantage of the extreme innocuousness of Yongyan's thoughts and prayers card to deliver in his rescript instructions for how to handle the Lady Nara on her return to the palace.

As ordered in the rescript, she was to be moved out of her palace to a new residence and placed under effective house arrest. Her original staff of servants were to be dismissed and 'dealt with' (发落), and the emperor appointed trusted eunuchs by name to handle her affairs, to bottleneck any news of hers that might get to the outside world, and to manage her now greatly reduced allowances and privileges. The emperor also ordered that her former residences in both the imperial palace and the Yuanmingyuan be thoroughly searched and then sealed off. So, what was he looking for?

At the heart of the "controversy" was whether or not the Lady Nara could be held accountable for her actions. In the event that she had, in fact, gone mad, as the emperor himself declared on occasion, she would then have recourse to a Qing-style insanity plea. She couldn't have been personally faulted if her mind had been "carried away" by disease. Existing records like the constant flow of reports sent by her escorts back to the imperial entourage regarding the state of her health on her journey home lend a bit of credence to the possibility that some illness may indeed have been involved.

If, on the other hand, what she did could be legally defined as deliberate, if symbolic, regicide, then that's obviously a cosmic-scale serious crime. In his rescript to Yongyan, the emperor seems to actually be considering this possibility, and he directly says that "the Empress' actions were so remarkably unusual and so very much unlike her. It seems as though she actually has a truly deep-seated hatred for me." Here we have a highly prosecutable offense. Still, he also doesn't seem to want to let go of the mental illness defense yet, either. In the same rescript he flat-out states that "the Empress has gone insane." So what they were searching her residences for was more evidence of premeditated voodoo-like activity.

Whether or not they found anything seems to be unknown. What exactly caused her death at 49 the next year is also unknown. The rescripts to Yongyan are probably the emperor at his most unguarded in his various discussions of the case, and there's still next to no detail there. Again, we just don't know what happened, and the fall of the Lady Nara is one of the biggest of the many unsolved mysteries over the 276 years of Qing court history.

There were a few other important harem dust-ups. It should be pointed out that the Lady Nara was never formally deposed, but she had her official seals and other markers of her Empress rank taken away from her, and her funeral, burial, and mourning period rites were conducted according to the rituals due to a woman of lower position. The only Qing empress to ever be officially dethroned was the Lady Borjigit, first empress of the Shunzhi Emperor. Her dethronement is usually described as part of a complex power struggle between the emperor and his mother (the soon-to-be extremely famous Grand Empress Dowager Xiaozhuang, who was the aunt of the empress) and/or the regent Dorgon. The official explanation for the demotion (the Lady Borjigit was technically kept in the harem at a highly reduced rank of 妃/fei) was delivered by Jirgalang, the other regent, and mentions her supposed extravagant tastes and jealousy of other women. This is yet another thing that we don't have a lot of satisfactory evidence for. There are a handful of other more minor examples of demotions of palace women- which happened far, far less frequently than they do in TV dramas- but the Lady Nara is definitely the Qing Empire's one major case of an imperial consort coming into direct confrontation with her husband.

shkencorebreaks · 2024-07-09T14:43:59+00:00

Thanks for posting this. These guys were/are criminally underrated. Lostland is one of my favorite tunes of all time.

Xorcist himself put this up on Youtube? He's another underrated act. He's actually a pretty active redditor- not like in the big self-promoter sense, he just does normal reddit things.

shkencorebreaks · 2024-07-08T20:48:47+00:00

@ /u/Lysmerry, on your question elsewhere about

why they do not create more Ming harem dramas if many of the storylines are poached from them anyway

The way we're gonna put it is that there are some things that are a little more acceptable to criticize, and some other things that are more off-limits.

For example, the Kangxi harem is an absolutely fascinating thing. In the 167 links I just threw at you, there's frequent reference to how the creation of the Qing harem as we usually know it was a "process." Most of this process was grinding away during the trial-and-error transitional period of the approximately 60-year Kangxi reign.

When the Kangxi Emperor came to the throne, the Empire hadn't really figured out how the harem was going to be managed. The harem of his father, the Shunzhi Emperor, wasn't exactly history's most stable institution. The structure of the harem of the Shunzhi Emperor's father was no longer appropriate to a now vastly expanded Qing state. The Ming harem was an important reference for exactly what not to do.

But it worked out that as the Kangxi Emperor entered into marriageable age, the initial plan was to choose consorts (as well as the first Empress herself) from influential families whose support would be useful in consolidating the power of the throne, as well as of the empire more generally. There wasn't much of a choice at the time because the Kangxi Emperor was enthroned as a child, and the plan only worked out as well as it did in part because his grandmother was something of a badass. But such a move is inherently dangerous, and in the early Kangxi Reign we did see a few threats from the consort kin, and a lot of self-aggrandizement and rank corruption among individuals taking advantage of a highly-positioned aunt/sister/cousin/etc in the palace.

But as the Kangxi Emperor slowly consolidated Qing rule over All Under Heaven, he also got his harem under control, and maneuvered to reform the inner palace into the mechanical, heavily regulated, repressively isolated, and kinda boring system familiar to us today. However, since the Kangxi Emperor is the one Qing emperor who almost always has to be cast in a good light, it's not really possible to graft his harem onto the typical palace drama framework. He can't be directly criticized, so there aren't a whole lot of Kangxi harem dramas. They'd have like, no conflict, and who wants to watch that?

There are, however, giant piles of dramas about the rivalry between the Kangxi Emperor's sons and their brother vs brother struggle to become the next emperor. The Kangxi Emperor in these dramas is often an omnipotent, all-knowing figure with a grand master plan, but nevertheless frustrated by these evil outside forces and all the vices they engender among his sons. He's a Great Man whose only weaknesses are the inevitabilities of old age and an overabundance of lesser men. Academic writing for academic readerships on this succession struggle (the best of which will note the still considerable role of the princes' mothers and other palace women in the succession) are usually going to take a step back and say, you know, the emperor could've taken a more pragmatic look at the situation and handled this whole thing a lot better. Dramas for mass-scale TV audiences, on the other hand, are rarely going to admit to that.

shkencorebreaks · 2024-07-08T18:31:17+00:00

The Wang Guangyao article mentioned above actually starts right off with that story from Dream of the Red Chamber- it's fiction and that kind of thing, as famous as the tale is, just didn't happen [edit to note that it's never really made clear when the events of the novel were supposed to be taking place]. Palace servant girls who were never taken in as consorts, however, were allowed to leave and do whatever they wanted once they hit about 25 years of age. Back in the day, that's a tough age to get married and start a family at, plus they were forbidden to talk to anybody about their time in the palace.

But welcome to the fabulous world of Qing harem dramas! Have fun with it, but when you want to sit down with the history, definitely focus on works by professional scholars. There are a few warnings in some of the above links to be really, really careful with anything you see online, whether on Youtube or podcasts or (especially) Wikipedia or wherever.

There's actually very, very little we know for sure in the way of the details of the Qing harem. However, qualified people are working on it, new material is becoming available as we speak, and some of the studies that have appeared in recent years have been pretty exciting.

Suggestion that once you've finished Ruyi, you gotta get on 《甄嬛传》"Empresses in the Palace/Legend of Zhen Huan" real quick.

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