A Song to Drown Rivers

The Four Great Beauties of Ancient China are four legendary women (Xi Shi, Wang Zhaojun, Diaochan, and Yang Guifei), living in disparate times and places, whose beauty is said to have been so great that it changed the course of history. All except Diaochan (a fictional character from the Ming-era novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms) are thought to be based on real people, though their lives and characters have been heavily embellished by legend over the centuries. Xi Shi is chronologically the first of the Four Great Beauties, having lived between the 7th and 6th centuries BCE, in what is known as the Spring and Autumn period of ancient Chinese history—a time when the centralized power of the Zhou dynasty was eroding as local lords asserted their own independent power.

Xi Shi was a peasant girl from the state of Yue, which had been conquered by the neighboring state of Wu. With the help of his advisor Fan Li, the Yue king, Goujian, formulated a plan to train beautiful women as spies and give them to the Wu king, Fuchai, as concubines. The two women chosen for this mission, Xi Shi and Zheng Dan, trained for three years before traveling to the Wu kingdom to begin their mission. Traditional stories of Xi Shi end in radically different ways, with some legends holding that she died by suicide, overcome with guilt at her betrayal of Fuchai, while others hold that she spent the remainder of her life happily sailing Lake Tai with her lover, Fan Li. 

Ann Liang’s version picks up on many aspects of the legendary Xi Shi, such as her association with water, the name of her lover Fan Li, her chest pain, and the dual nature of her fate. However, Liang rejects the notion that Xi Shi died by suicide, instead depicting her murder by the Yue king Goujian. This turn of events emphasizes the theme of The Dangers of Unquestioning Loyalty, as Xishi’s loyalty to her kingdom is repaid with murder. Meanwhile, by depicting Xishi and Fanli living happily together in the afterlife, Jiang combines the happy and tragic endings found in traditional legends of Xi Shi.

Details and places from the legend also are included in the text, such as King Fuchai’s palace built in Xishi’s honor, and the facts that he executed his advisor and took his own life when he found out his error. Liang embellishes character and plays up the romantic tragedy by having a conflicted Xishi (spelled differently to differentiate) execute the fatal blow. Another key way A Song to Drown Rivers is different from the legends is that it is told from Xi Shi’s perspective, imagining what it would be like to be a tool for the men around her and how it feels to use one’s beauty as a weapon. 

Current iterations of Xi Shi remain in popular culture, such as a popular Chinese expression equivalent to the English aphorism “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”: (In the eyes of a lover, Xi Shi appears). The name of a beloved Chinese dog breed, the Shih Tzu, means “Xi Shi dog.” In the modern era, the character has appeared in numerous video games and movies. Her hometown of Zhuji City in the Zhejiang Province is a national tourist site and is on the intangible cultural heritage list.