Is Empresses in the Palace Still Misunderstood?

Since 2010, only a handful of Chinese TV dramas have scored above 9.0 on Douban, such as Mao Pian, The Age of Awakening, and Parents' Love. Of all of them, looking at it today, Empresses in the Palace is an especially unusual case among the dramas of the past sixteen years.

First, it's the only drama about an ensemble of concubines and their struggles inside the harem that has scored above 9.0.

Second, it set the standard for palace-intrigue dramas. You can't talk about palace intrigue without talking about Empresses in the Palace.

Third, on top of its unusual subject, Empresses in the Palace is also very accessible. It's a show everyone, young and old, men and women, can get into and feel something from.

Fourth, it has had a remarkably long afterlife. It has become the Dream of the Red Chamber of TV dramas. There's even an online field of study called "Zhen studies," and interpretations of the show have gone on for over a decade.

Because of all these special qualities, I still want to ask, fifteen years later: is Empresses in the Palace still misunderstood?

Everyone understands a work differently. I'm not saying people are still reading the show the wrong way. What I mean is, how many people are still demonizing it?

I came to Empresses in the Palace fairly late, in 2022. That was the year I started working. I watched it during a Shanghai winter and couldn't stop. In 2023 and 2024 I watched it a second and third time.

Since then I've also gotten obsessed with watching all sorts of commentary on it, and whenever I'm absorbed in its story, I regret so much that I didn't watch it earlier.

The reason isn't hard to guess. My impression of it back then was the demonized one from online.

I'm sure plenty of people who know the show have seen a video online of a man complaining to his friends over drinks. The gist was that his girlfriend makes him watch Empresses in the Palace every day for two hours, and that it's brain-melting, that if you look away for even five minutes you can't follow the next five, that there are over thirty women in it and more than twenty of them die by the end, and so on.

Take that apart and you get one of the show's stereotypes online: Empresses in the Palace is a story where you scheme to harm me and I scheme to harm you.

As for the "brain-melting" part, I think a lot of male viewers feel that women are naturally troublesome. Over thirty women in one show? Wouldn't all of northwest Shanxi descend into chaos? Just thinking about it is exhausting, never mind watching it.

I'm sure it's not only some men. Some women must have the same stereotype of the show.

But is Empresses in the Palace really like that?

I don't think so.

Honestly, if Empresses in the Palace were just a show about "you hurt me, I hurt you," it could never have gotten a 9.3 on Douban, let alone still be this widely discussed fifteen years later.

Think about it. If someone told you Dream of the Red Chamber is just about a big family eating, drinking, falling in love, and then going bankrupt, wouldn't you find that summary absurd?

But that way of summing it up is exactly the same logic as saying Empresses in the Palace is "thirty women hurting each other."

It treats the most surface-level, easiest-to-see elements of a work as the whole thing.

Of course Empresses in the Palace has struggle, plots, and scheming, but those are narrative means, not the narrative's purpose. Just as Dream of the Red Chamber has plenty of eating and drinking and poetry, but no one thinks Cao Xueqin wrote it to record how a group of people ate.

So what is Empresses in the Palace really for?

To me, it's about a girl inside a system she can't choose, and how she loses her innocence, her love, and her friends one step at a time, until she becomes the very person she once hated most.

That process is what truly breaks your heart.

Go back to when Zhen Huan first enters the palace. She says, "I only wish for a man whose heart is mine alone, and that we'll never part until our hair turns white." That's not a throwaway line. It's the starting point of the whole show, and also the anchor of its tragedy. Because from the very first episode, the audience knows that in that system, this wish can never come true.

But Zhen Huan doesn't know.

She truly believes the Emperor loves her. She truly thinks she can be someone who stays out of the fray in the harem. She truly thinks sincerity can be repaid with sincerity.

Then the system gives her its answer.

Consort Hua's arrogance, the Empress's gloom, open attacks and hidden arrows, all coming at once. She finds that if she doesn't fight she'll die, if she doesn't scheme she'll be schemed against, and if she doesn't grow stronger she'll be crushed. She's forced to learn the system's rules, forced to protect herself the system's way.

In the end, she wins.

But what did she win?

She lost Chunzhen, lost Meizhuang, lost Prince Guo, lost the self who once said "a man whose heart is mine alone." She sits on the Empress Dowager's throne with the whole world in her hands, but she is no longer Zhen Huan...

That's the core of Empresses in the Palace. It's not a story about "who won." It's a story about "so what if you won."

On that note, as I mentioned earlier, a lot of people think Empresses in the Palace is a "women's show."

That label is deadly.

Frankly, besides the "they hurt each other" stereotype, I put off watching Empresses in the Palace because of a quieter feeling: it's a show for women, so why would I, a man, watch it?

I'm sure many male viewers have felt something similar. Harem, concubines, vying for favor. Those words naturally make a lot of men feel "this has nothing to do with me."

But when I finally watched it, I saw how arrogant that thinking was.

What Empresses in the Palace is about has never belonged to just one gender. The grinding of power, a system crushing the individual, how a person carries on when they have no say in their situation: what do these themes have to do with gender?

Swap "harem" for "imperial court," "concubines" for "ministers," and "vying for favor" for "vying for power," and you don't have to change a word of the show's core.

I'd even say that precisely because it chose the harem as its setting, it expresses these themes in an even more extreme form. The women in the harem have even less say than ministers at court. A minister can at least resign and retire. A concubine doesn't even have that option. From the moment she enters the palace, her life is no longer her own...

That extreme predicament lets the audience see more clearly how cruel the system is.

Speaking of the system, I want to go one level deeper on this.

Lots of people watching Empresses in the Palace debate who's good and who's bad. Is Consort Hua a villain? Is the Empress a villain? Is An Lingrong a villain?

After watching it three times, my biggest takeaway is that there are almost no real "villains" in this show.

Is Consort Hua arrogant? Yes. But her feelings for the Emperor are real, and so is the way she's torn between Nian Gengyao and the Emperor. The scene where she learns the truth about the Huanyi incense is brutal to watch. A woman loves someone with all her fire, and that person has been scheming against her children the whole time...

Consort Hua is not a villain. She's a pitiable person crushed by the game of power.

And An Lingrong? A lot of people think she's sly and calculating. But go back to when she first enters the palace, and she's an insecure, timid girl from a poor family. She becomes who she becomes because she can't find any security in this system, and the only thing she can hold onto is scheming.

Shen Meizhuang? "I'd rather die clinging to fragrance on the branch than be blown down by the north wind." She may be the clearest-eyed person in the show. She saw through the Emperor's hypocrisy early and chose to live in a kind of self-imposed exile. But in the end she still died, in a fight she never wanted any part of.

Even the Emperor himself isn't a classic "big villain." He's an emperor. He has to balance the court and the harem, use affection as a bargaining chip, and turn every private feeling into a tool in front of power. It's not that he can't love. It's that he's not allowed to.

That's the cleverest thing about Empresses in the Palace.

It doesn't give you a simple verdict of right and wrong. It shows you every person's situation, every person's struggle, every person's lack of choice. And then you realize the real villain isn't any one person.

It's the system itself.

A line comes to mind, I think from Lu Xun: tragedy is the destruction of things of value in front of people.

That's exactly what Empresses in the Palace does. It destroys the best part of every character, one by one, right in front of you. Zhen Huan's innocence, Consort Hua's passion, Meizhuang's clarity, An Lingrong's pride, Prince Guo's devotion. All of those are good things, moving things. And in front of that system, all of them are ground to dust.

That's why people watch it again and again. Every time you rewatch, you can see something new in a different character. The first time, you might find Consort Hua hateful. The second time, you start to sympathize with her. By the third, you'll cry for her.

A show that was just "they hurt each other" couldn't have this kind of depth.

Now, back to what I said at the start: Empresses in the Palace has incredible staying power. Why is its life so long? Why is it still being reinterpreted after fifteen years?

I think the answer is simple. What it's about has never gone out of date.

An individual struggling inside a system is still everyone's daily life today. At work, you don't want to take sides but have to. In relationships, you don't want to scheme but have to stay on guard. You want to be yourself and find the environment won't let you. How are those situations any different from what the concubines face in the harem?

They aren't.

So "Zhen studies" was inevitable. It isn't a bunch of idle people overinterpreting a TV show. It's a group of people who feel it in real life, finding a mirror in Empresses in the Palace.

Some people online say Empresses in the Palace corrupted people and turned workplaces into palace-intrigue arenas.

Honestly, that makes me laugh and sigh at the same time. The scheming in workplaces existed before the show aired, and it will still exist a hundred years after. As long as there are systems, hierarchies, and uneven distribution of resources, there will be people struggling and scheming.

Empresses in the Palace didn't corrupt anyone. It just took what was always there and showed it in an extreme, concentrated form.

Earlier I said Empresses in the Palace is the Dream of the Red Chamber of TV. That comparison isn't only about both having a field of study, with countless people researching and interpreting them.

The deeper similarity is that they do the same thing: within the frame of a feudal system, they write the tragedy of a whole cast of people.

Dream of the Red Chamber is about a great family's collapse at the end of the feudal age. Everyone is swept along by the tide of the times. Jia Baoyu, Lin Daiyu, no matter how they struggle, can't escape the limits of their era.

Empresses in the Palace is about a group of women's predicament under imperial power. Everyone is ground by the gears of power. Zhen Huan, Consort Hua, no matter how clever, can't escape the Forbidden City.

What they both point to is that the real tragedy isn't good people killed by bad people. It's that everyone is helpless.

Helpless.

I think those two words are the most important key to understanding Empresses in the Palace. They're also the fundamental reason it still moves people fifteen years later.

Because people today still understand the weight of those two words.

So, back to the original question: is Empresses in the Palace still misunderstood?

I think maybe it is. Some people still think it's a story of "women hurting each other," some still see it as a "women's pastime," and some still miss it because of those stereotypes.

Just like I once did.

But if you happen to be one of those people, if you happen to have never really watched Empresses in the Palace because of those impressions, I sincerely suggest you give it a try. Not because of its high score, and not because of how much people talk about it, but because it's worth it.

It's worth giving 76 episodes to watch a girl live out her whole life, step by step, inside a besieged city.

And then you might end up like me, sitting there afterward, unable to say anything for a long while.

Not because the plot is brain-melting, but because you suddenly feel that Zhen Huan's story is, in some small way, a little like everyone's story.

I only wish for a man whose heart is mine alone, and that we'll never part until our hair turns white.

Fifteen years later, hearing that line still makes my chest tighten.