The tragic beauty of the high Tang who held all favor in one person
Yang Yuhuan was originally the consort of Xuanzong’s son the Prince of Shou; taken with her, Xuanzong first made her a Daoist nun and then brought her into the palace, investing her as Precious Consort in 745 — holding all three thousand favors in one person. Skilled in song and dance and versed in music, she was a true artistic soulmate to the music-loving Xuanzong; her whole clan rose with her, her cousin Yang Guozhong reaching the chancellorship, and the realm resented them. When the An Lushan Rebellion broke out she fled west with the court and was forced to her death by the mutinous guards at Mawei Slope at thirty-eight. She herself never meddled in state affairs, yet the histories and the folk together made her the number-one specimen of "the beauty who topples the state" — Bai Juyi’s "Song of Everlasting Regret" wrote both the toppling of the state and the everlasting regret, making her the most famous victim in Chinese literature.
The consort loved fresh lychees, and Xuanzong had post-horses of Lingnan race them in relay, thousands of miles covered in days, men and horses dying along the way. Du Mu’s line, "A single rider’s dust, and the consort smiles — none knowing it is lychees come," turned the empire’s most efficient logistics into a poem of satire: the relay system, built for military intelligence, ran fruit down the golden age’s military express.
After the consort was strangled at Mawei Slope, Xuanzong abdicated as retired emperor and returned to Chang’an, where every sight recalled her — "her face like the hibiscus, her brows like the willow; how could he not shed tears at this?" Bai Juyi made the story into the "Song of Everlasting Regret," whose ending has a Daoist find her soul on a sea-borne fairy mountain and bring back the private vow: "In heaven, may we be birds that fly as one; on earth, may we be branches that grow as one." Here fact yields to literature — the political scapegoat reclaims, in poetry, the role of the heroine of a love story.