The Story
In a separate story that will later cross Ximen Qing's path, a wandering fighter named Wu Song kills a man-eating tiger with his bare hands on a lonely mountain road. Word spreads fast, and the grateful county rewards him by making him a celebrated local constable.
Newly famous, Wu Song discovers that his elder brother, Wu Da, lives nearby — a short, homely flatbread seller married to a strikingly beautiful wife. Wu Song moves in next door, glad to watch over the brother who raised him after their parents died.
Pan Jinlian, Wu Da's wife, despises her plain, ineffectual husband and grows infatuated with his tall, powerful brother instead. One snowy evening she plies Wu Song with warm wine, drops her guard, and tries openly to seduce him in his own room.
Wu Song rebukes her sharply, furious that she would shame his brother's house under his own roof, and she recoils in humiliated silence. Soon after, business calls him away to the East Capital, and his departure strips Pan Jinlian of the one protector who kept her in check.
Walking beneath her window one day, wealthy merchant Ximen Qing is struck on the head by a falling pole — and looks up to see Pan Jinlian, beautiful and unguarded. Smitten at once, he pays the sharp-tongued teashop matchmaker Wang Po handsomely to help him win her.
Wang Po devises an elaborate pretext of sewing lessons and small errands to lure Pan Jinlian alone to her teashop, again and again, always with Ximen Qing conveniently near. The scheme works exactly as planned, and within days the two become secret, passionate lovers.
A sharp-eyed boy, Yun Ge, snubbed and insulted by Wang Po, decides to tip off Wu Da instead of staying silent. Wu Da rushes home, catches Ximen Qing mid-tryst, and blocks the doorway, demanding an explanation his wife and her lover never intended to give.
Panicked, Ximen Qing kicks Wu Da hard in the chest, and he collapses, badly injured and confined to his sickbed. Rather than risk him recovering enough to seek revenge or expose them publicly, Wang Po coldly urges Pan Jinlian to finish what the beating started.
Pan Jinlian stirs arsenic into Wu Da's medicine and watches, unmoved, as he dies in agony before dawn. She and Wang Po move quickly, arranging a hasty cremation that burns away the only evidence anyone might later use to prove what really happened.
With Wu Da's body reduced to ash and no witness left to accuse her, the affair no longer needs to hide. Ximen Qing brings Pan Jinlian openly into his household as his fifth concubine, one more rival among the wives already jostling for his favor.
Wu Song finally returns from the capital, learns the truth of his brother's death, and drags Ximen Qing before the local magistrate, accusing him outright of murder. But Ximen's money reaches the court before Wu Song's testimony does, and the case is quietly dismissed.
Enraged at being cheated of justice, Wu Song later kills an unrelated man during a separate dispute far from home. Corrupt officials seize on the killing, convict him unjustly, and exile him for years — removing him from the story and leaving Pan Jinlian entirely unpunished.
With his fiercest accuser gone for years, Ximen Qing grows bolder still, setting his sights on his own neighbor's wife, Li Ping'er — a restless, unhappy woman married to the sickly, ineffectual Flower Zixu, who can offer her neither wealth nor real affection.
When a ruinous lawsuit entangles Flower Zixu, Ximen Qing steps in offering help while quietly persuading Li Ping'er to hand over her husband's silver and treasures for safekeeping. The strain of the lawsuit breaks Flower Zixu's health entirely, and he soon dies, leaving her a widow.
Suspicious of the whispers next door, Pan Jinlian climbs the garden wall herself and spies Ximen Qing openly courting the newly widowed Li Ping'er. Furious at the betrayal, she confronts him, but he smooths her anger away with gold hairpins, buying her silence for the moment.
Ximen Qing keeps delaying the marriage, absorbed instead in the politics surrounding his patron's network in the capital. Li Ping'er, sick with waiting and humiliation, finally calls in physician Jiang Zhushan to treat her — and Jiang, seeing his chance, woos and marries her before Ximen can act.
Enraged at being outmaneuvered, Ximen Qing hires local ruffians to extort and beat Jiang Zhushan until he is stripped of his silver and driven out of town entirely. Free of her hasty husband once more, Li Ping'er is at last formally married to Ximen as his sixth wife.
On the crucial third night of their new marriage, Ximen Qing neglects Li Ping'er entirely, choosing to spend it in another wife's bed instead. Devastated by the public slight, she tries to hang herself in her room, and is cut down and revived only just in time.
In a separate affair unfolding within the same household, servant Lai Wang returns from a trip to Hangzhou to discover his wife has been seduced by Ximen Qing while he was away. He rages through the garden drunk with a knife, is read as a would-be murderer, and is arrested and exiled.
Disgraced by the scandal and separated from her exiled husband, the wife hangs herself in despair not long after. Her father tries to delay her hasty cremation to examine her body, but a magistrate bribed by Ximen Qing has him beaten for the interference, and grief soon kills him too.
Meanwhile principal wife Wu Yueniang, overseeing the sprawling household, prays quietly every night for a son of her own to secure her place. Beneath the household's calm surface, tension simmers steadily between her and the sharp-tongued, increasingly favored Pan Jinlian, neither woman willing to yield ground.
Li Ping'er becomes pregnant at last, though Ximen Qing privately worries whether the child is truly his, given her brief marriage to Jiang Zhushan. A physiognomist reads his face and predicts both an imminent promotion and a long-awaited male heir, and Ximen's hopes rise despite his doubts.
Through the patronage of the powerful minister Cai Taishi, Ximen Qing is appointed Deputy Commandant, official rank finally within his grasp. Soon after, Li Ping'er gives birth to a healthy son, fulfilling the physiognomist's prophecy twice over and setting off days of lavish celebration.
Wu Yueniang, also pregnant that same season and hoping to finally secure her own claim to an heir, slips on a newly built staircase in the household. The fall costs her the pregnancy, and with it her one chance to give Ximen a son of her own body.
Watching Ximen Qing lavish attention and gifts on Li Ping'er and her infant son while her own status stalls, Pan Jinlian's jealousy curdles into something darker and more vicious. She smiles pleasantly in company while quietly nursing a resentment that will not stay contained for long.
In an unrelated affair that reaches Ximen's wider circle, a servant elsewhere murders his own employer and conspires with river bandits to cover the crime. A survivor escapes the violence and reports what happened, drawing a government inspector into the case to investigate.
Ximen Qing and a corrupt inspector both accept bribes to bury the murder case quietly before it can spread. But an honest colleague, unmoved by the payoffs, keeps investigating regardless, slowly tracing the matter toward exposure back in the capital.
A traveling Tibetan monk sells Ximen Qing a potent aphrodisiac, and his sexual appetite grows increasingly reckless and unchecked, spreading across servants' wives, courtesans, and his own concubines alike. The excess deepens his repeated, bitter clashes with the ever-jealous Pan Jinlian.
Ximen Qing travels to the East Capital to attend minister Cai Taishi's birthday celebration and is honored there as his nominal adopted son. The gesture cements powerful political protection that will shield his corruption and excesses for years still to come.
While Ximen Qing is away in the capital, his own son-in-law, Chen Jingji, begins quietly pursuing Pan Jinlian, trading glances, small gifts, and stolen moments. It is the first thread of an affair that will ultimately outlast Ximen himself.
Jealous of the favor showered on Li Ping'er's son, Pan Jinlian deliberately trains her white lion cat to lunge and attack the infant while he plays. Terrified, the boy is seized with a fright-sickness that no household remedy can calm.
A botched moxibustion treatment, meant to cure him, only worsens the boy's condition, and he dies at fourteen months old. Grief-stricken, Li Ping'er collapses again soon after at a banquet, even as Ximen Qing openly dotes on a new musician seated nearby.
Physician after physician fails to stop her worsening hemorrhaging, and Li Ping'er eventually dies. Ximen Qing mourns her more elaborately than any wife before her, commissioning a lifelike portrait and staging a lavish funeral, burial, and purification ceremony in her memory.
Promoted once more, now a Thousand-Commander overseeing punishments across the region, Ximen Qing dreams one night of Li Ping'er's ghost warning him to curb his relentless excesses before they consume him. He wakes unsettled — yet changes nothing about how he lives.
Years of unchecked excess finally catch up with him all at once. Ximen Qing falls gravely ill, and no physician can save him; he dies at dawn on the twenty-first day of the first month, the empire of bribes and appetite he built already beginning to crack.
In that very same hour, elsewhere in the house, Wu Yueniang gives birth to a son at last, whom they name Xiaoge. Father and heir pass each other unseen in the dark — one leaving the world as the other enters it.
With Ximen Qing gone and his authority gone with him, Pan Jinlian resumes her affair with Chen Jingji openly, no longer bothering to hide it. Her loyal maid, Spring Plum, covers for the lovers and carries their messages, binding herself to their fate.
Another household maid, Qiuju, catches the two together and reports everything to Wu Yueniang without hesitation. Furious at the betrayal happening under her own roof so soon after Ximen's death, she sells Spring Plum away and expels Pan Jinlian from the household entirely.
Traveling to fulfill a pilgrimage vow at Tai'an, Wu Yueniang is assaulted en route by a local warlord. Meanwhile Chen Jingji lingers in the capital chasing bride money instead of hurrying back, leaving the newly homeless Pan Jinlian dangerously exposed and utterly unprotected.
Wu Song is finally released from his long exile and soon learns the full truth of how his brother really died. Methodically, he tracks down both women responsible — Pan Jinlian, who poisoned Wu Da, and Wang Po, who taught her how.
Showing no mercy, Wu Song kills them both, then cuts out Pan Jinlian's heart and liver with his own hands, laying the offering before Wu Da's spirit tablet. It is a brutal, private reckoning for a debt the bribed courts refused to settle.
For years the law had let Wu Da's murder stand as bribery's quiet victory, the case dismissed and forgotten by everyone but his brother. It is finally answered not by any court or magistrate, but by a blade wielded in private vengeance.
Now married to a Guard Commander and living comfortably, Spring Plum dreams one night of her old mistress Pan Jinlian, restless and unburied. Moved by the vision, she arranges to have Pan Jinlian's remains properly reburied at Yongfu Temple.
Elsewhere, former household concubine Meng Yulou has remarried a magistrate's son and rebuilt a respectable life. When the now-destitute Chen Jingji tries to extort money from her while passing through Yangzhou, her husband frames him instead as a common thief.
A fair-minded magistrate investigates the theft accusation carefully and exonerates Chen Jingji completely once the truth emerges. The husband who framed him is punished by his own father for the scheme, and Meng Yulou is quietly sent back to her family.
In another corner of the collapsing former household, a maid-turned-concubine elopes with a servant recently returned from exile, stealing valuable goods on her way out the door. The pair are soon caught and dragged back in open disgrace.
Sold into the household of Spring Plum, now a powerful commander's wife, the captured woman is beaten on Spring Plum's own order and resold into prostitution. Years later in Linqing, another man quietly takes pity and helps support her.
Destitute and wandering with nowhere else to turn, Chen Jingji drifts into a Daoist monastery and briefly becomes a monk himself under an elderly patron's guidance. But an old affair resurfaces there, scandal erupts around him, and he is forced to flee the temple.
Chen Jingji rebuilds his fortune as a wine-shop owner in the town of Linqing and marries again, seemingly settled at last. But an affair with a merchant's daughter is soon discovered, and a jealous retainer kills him outright over the betrayal.
Spring Plum's husband, the Guard Commander, dies fighting the invading Jurchen army at the border gate. Already living dissolutely on her own, Spring Plum follows him not long after, dying at just twenty-nine — her rise as brief as it was hollow.
Amid the chaos of the Jurchen invasion sweeping the countryside, Wu Yueniang and her household take shelter at a remote temple, where strange, unsettling visions trouble them through the night. There she meets a wandering Buddhist sage, the monk Puching.
Puching reveals a staggering truth to her: Xiaoge, born at the exact hour his father died, is Ximen Qing reincarnated, the family's tormented founder returned in innocent form. The monk takes the boy as his disciple, ending the bloodline to redeem the soul.
With the invasion finally repelled and peace restored across the land, Wu Yueniang returns home at last to what remains of her shattered household. She lives on to the age of seventy, the last survivor of a family that desire and bribery once built — and destroyed.
What it means
Every bribe Ximen Qing paid and every cruelty Pan Jinlian committed comes due eventually — not through the law he owned, but through private revenge, ruin, and a son surrendered to a monastery. A fortune built on appetite consumes itself; only that final renunciation offers any redemption.
🎧 Read-along audio is being prepared — text-only for now.
