#fuheng

MODERN DRAMA'S

Story of Yanxi Palace (2018)

Love Endures (2024)

Simple Days (2024)

MOVIES

Better Days (2019)

SHORT DRAMA'S

Tales of the Wild (2023)

And then, recently, I looked up information on Fu Heng, and it turns out he is the ninth (and youngest) son of his father. Which just makes the title Sixth Uncle Fu even more confusing. At first, I sort of chalked it up to Qiong Yao just being historically accurate because let’s be real this would not rank in the list of most glaring artistic liberties taken with history in Huan Zhu Ge Ge.

I mean, this assumption isn’t helped by the fact that The Story of Yanxi Palace has Fu Heng being like the third? son, and having a younger brother, when in reality Fu Heng was the youngest child in his family.

(Then again, Yanxi Palace also made it so that Fu Kang An is Fu Heng’s only “son” and the other three don’t even exist. I’m sure in Yanxi Palace, Yong Zhang isn’t supposed to be Consort Chun’s son either. Or just plain doesn’t exist. He Jing doesn’t exist in Yanxi Palace either.)

Anyway, either Fu Heng is ninth or third, neither of which is sixth, which is just made me go ????

So, it turns out, Fu Heng’s father died young, and he was raised mostly by his sister Lady Fucha aka Empress Xiao Xian. Fu Heng was 5 when his sister married the future Qian Long. Apparently, one day, Lady Fucha brought Fu Heng into the palace to meet the then empress (Empress Xiao Jing Xian?), and the empress liked Fu Heng so much that she would often invite him into the palace and grew very close to him. For that reason, people in the palace began calling him “Sixth Master” 六爷/liu ye, as if he were another child of the empress. Emperor Yong Zheng apparently didn’t object to this either, so the name stuck.

(I guess at the time, Yongzheng only had five sons and his sixth son Hongyan had not yet been born? The numbering for Yongzheng’s sons were all over the place anyway.)

So I guess that is a mystery I’ve been wondering about for 20 years solved. 

One of the most satisfying things to come out of the Yanxi Palace: Princess Adventures was the exposure of Erqing’s misdeeds and the subsequent downfall of her lover / partner in crime.

There were a lot of vagueness surrounding Erqing and Fuk’anggan in the original show. Naturally so, she was not the main character and was killed off rather unsatisfactorily midway through the series. Erqing claimed that she slept with the Emperor, and that he ‘took advantage of her’, which to be honest, while he could have, he was also really drunk that night. That particular night, Erqing herself dressed up as a maid and purposely sneaked in under the guise of serving the emperor. She did so primarily to punish the Empress and Fuheng as she blamed Rongyin for ‘never helping her’ and doting on Yingluo more than her and Fuheng for being in love with YingLuo. She could not have Fuheng’s heart or person and became mad with ideas of punishing and taking revenge against them all. While we would never know whether she was forced into it / if she seduced the emperor or if they even really did have relations or otherwise, we know that Fuk’anggan was a product of Erqing’s tryst with her brother in law, Fuheng’s half brother.

I am pretty sure that during their marriage, Fuheng never touched Erqing because he knew of her schemes and hated her very existence. Therefore he knew that the son she had was not his. But the fact that he continued to cover up for her and raised Fuk’anggan like his own deserves a mention. Fuheng is a genuinely good person and it was a pity (but understandable) that he died because he was, yet again, helping Yingluo out of love.