laleia | Story of Minglan Rewatch

This is a full two months after my last writeup so clearly I'm running out of steam (I did also take a detour to fall in and out of obsession with Love Like the Galaxy and Heart of Genius), but nevertheless I persist!

Episode 13

(Note re: any observations I make on English subtitles — I’m watching episode 13 on YouTube on the CN DRAMA channel.)

Scene - Gu Tingye’s family pisses me off!

I’m just very upset at Gu Tingye’s entire family. That his brother would use something he said years ago when he was a child and poison his entire career with it and his father just sits back and does not care???
There’s this moment when Gu Tingye lets go of his brother that you see him blink away how upset he is.
Asshole Father literally said that if your brother reported to the Emperor something you said to him in confidence when you were 12, it’s your fault for saying it in the first place. Asshole Father literally said, you always claim everyone else is at fault but I don’t believe that it’s possible for you to not be at fault for everything because I inherently believe you must have done something wrong. Asshole Father deserves to DIAF!!! He just makes me so angry every time.
Gu Tingye correctly identifies that the problem is that Asshole Father is prejudiced and that trumps everything.

Scene - Gu Tingye is sad and Manniang schemes!

I swear, I do not understand how Manniang’s brain works. She knows that Gu Tingye can’t be an official, and that his dad doesn’t like him. So her plan is to … make the Gu household come face-to-face with his misdeeds (a mistress and illegitimate children) and piss them off even further??? How will that improve things???
Gu Tingye talks about how he’s letting down his maternal grandfather and mother by not becoming an official, only for Chang-momo to tell him his mother only wanted him to be happy and safe — just like how later on he says to Minglan that his mother must be happy because of what he was able to achieve for her (the posthumous title), only for Minglan to tell him that all his mother would want is for him to be happy.
Gu Tingye wants to separate from the Marquis family, and live on a farm in the middle of nowhere with his family. His ideal life is to be anywhere doing anything as long as he has the people he loves around him. But Manniang didn’t target a rich young nobleman in order to live in obscurity. I guess that’s why she interferes, because she realizes that he is actually poised to go live in the middle of nowhere, which is not what she wants.
Manniang legit is willing to risk her children getting totally and completely lost (and kidnapped! This is an era where children are kidnapped / trafficked) as long as it means she gets her shot. Incredible (pejorative).
OK so Manniang shows up at the Marquis’s manor specifically to get the Gu family’s attention. I know she doesn’t want Gu Tingye to move her and her kids to the middle of nowhere, but I still don’t really understand what her long-term plan is after getting their attention.
Gu Tingye so optimistically says that Manniang would come back immediately if she couldn’t find Rong’er but if course he is wrong about that
On closely watching this scene between Manniang and Asshole Father, it seems like Manniang really did think that if she showed up and emphasized that she had borne children (including a son!), the Gus would let her be a concubine. But of course, her origins are so lowly that Asshole Father wouldn’t even let her join as a servant. This was incredibly naive of her, the idea of “keep the kids and get rid of the mother” shows up all the time on these historical webnovels. I wonder if this is the difference between the level of wealthy people Manniang would have had the most exposure to at the brothel (wealthy merchants) compared to the level of wealth/class that the Gu household (a marquisate!) represents. They are so snobby that wealthy merchants marrying in was considering polluting their blood; they would never accept someone like Manniang even as a concubine. (P.S. I typed the word “marquisate” as a made-up placeholder and went to look up the actual word I needed … only to find out that it was in fact “marquisate” …)
The subtitles translate what Gu Tingye wants as “accepting her into the family” but the specific verb he uses means “take her as a concubine”. I’ll have more thoughts on this later when Manniang spoils one of his marriages after another, but it’s interesting that even given how much he thinks he loves Manniang (though cf. my earlier supposition a few episodes ago that he just loves the idea of being in love with her), he never considers making her his wife because that was just unthinkable to him.
And here’s the thing. If Manniang was satisfied with being a concubine, she wouldn’t have disrupted Gu Tingye’s marriages down the line. Was her plan here to start out as a concubine (because she’s scared by what Gu Tingye is describing re: living in the countryside) and then she gets greedier and wants to be a main wife?
I really feel like Gu Tingye should have refused to submit to beatings sooner if that was always an option on the table. But I know it wasn’t that easy.

Scene - Papa Sheng gets detained!

Papa Sheng’s Detainment
- We have FINALLY moved on from Gu Tingye’s family drama, thank fuck.
- In retrospect, the Emperor is an absolute troll for this. Keeping Papa Sheng in a room all night for no reason, making him pee in a vase, not actually harming him in any way but letting him spend a night in fear / uncertainty …
Big Madam and Rulan chat
- I know Rulan is talking about how cute and stylish her shoulder harness/belt is (for keeping all the bulky sleeves out of the way), but I think it looks weird. I know this was a very common accessory (I even saw a photo of the Japanese equivalent, for pulling back the Japanese equivalent of hanfu) and I know it’s very practical (I’ve seen modern hanfu-wearers with douyin videos of how it allows them to do things like move their arms without sleeves getting in the way of everything), but I just think it looks ugly.
- Rulan mentions the Count of Yongchang’s Madam Wu and her polo matches, seeding many plotlines to come.
- Seriously, how many shoulder harness belt things does Rulan need, there are so many on that rack! Or I guess is this like a personal shopper sending Rulan a bunch for her to pick and choose for, but she only keeps / pays for the ones she likes?
Gu Tingye’s domestic bliss gets interrupted
- Changbai goes to Gu Tingye for help because they’re BFFs! But Gu Tingye is very aware of where things stand with his family.
- Poor Changbai is such a nerd, the way he falls when he hurries away looks exactly like when Big Madam fell the day the exam results came out.
Yuanruo’s News / Big Madam’s News
- Yuanruo really is thoughtful, alerting Minglan of the latest news of her father, but (and this is my bias against him showing), I’m not really sure that sending his servant along with a message and then having that servant lie in wait to convey that message until Minglan’s servant happened to be out and about, was the most effective way or efficient way of helping the Sheng family. Frankly he could have sent a message to Changbai directly and by alerting the Sheng household as a whole, Minglan would have found out.
- I do appreciate the narrative beat of Minglan coming in to tell Grandmother the news, only for Big Madam to interrupt with histrionics.
- OK, the anecdote that Grandmother shares now, about the Emperor not wanting his servants to be reprimanded for not having tea and hiding his thirst comes up again later in this drama but I’m also pretty sure I heard it come up in some other drama in reference to the same historical emperor this is supposed to be, so I think it might be a real historical story?
Big Madam Schemes
- Big Madam thinks really poorly of Grandmother and thinks the reason she’s not more concerned about Papa Sheng being missing is because he’s not her biological son. Honestly, the accusation is quite hurtful.
- Liu-mama mentions to Big Madam that if something happened to Papa Sheng, the entire Sheng family would suffer (that one loss is a total loss), which is consistent with some of my previous points about how Big Madam has many flaws but she does understand and internalize that the survival of the entire Sheng Household is a collective priority (something to contrast against Concubine Lin, whose goal is always her personal survival and that of her children, thus the upcoming “selling land” subplot).
- I love how excited Big Madam is about the ~secret message~ Grandmother gave her while Liu-mama is … not convinced.
- By the way, I’ve been watching 20+ episodes of Big Madam’s actress playing someone else in The Heart of Genius, and watching her in Minglan again is very cognitively dissonant.
- Big Madam does have a good point (and does have a good plan) here though — sitting back and waiting for Concubine Lin to mess up (and thus not herself sparking any issues as long as Concubine Lin doesn’t mess up) is quite clever for her!
- Also, I gotta say, even speaking as someone whose Mandarin is pretty standard northern Chinese and incorporates 儿化音 (erhuayin, the northern Chinese and “standard Mandarin” practice of adding an “r” sound at the end of a bunch of nouns that otherwise in “n”) pretty naturally, even I find Big Madam’s “kuar” (款儿)very funny the way she says it with such emphasis.
Grandmother and Minglan chat
- Minglan’s kind of cute when she talks about being scared. On reflection, Zhao Liying must be a pretty good actress to pull off “young and vulnerable” so convincingly in this scene when she pulls off “older and more mature” just as convincingly later on.
- I’m not entirely sure I buy Grandmother’s logic as to why they shouldn’t be concerned.
- I do love that Grandmother notes that Papa Sheng is “prudent in conduct and speech”. Because even though he is, his son isn’t! And that’s why he’s in trouble!
Concubine Lin and Xueniang chat
- I don’t recall if this is the first time in the drama that we get Concubine Lin’s backstory, and it’s interesting if you think about it. Certainly her actions in this plot arc are eminently understandable given her background. I think even a lot of her motivations and her selfishness can be explained by her background — she went from fancy lady to slave basically over night, and from them on had to survive based on her own wits with nobody else to rely on. So to her, to say that her continued well-being depends on the family’s (the Sheng household’s) continued well-being is a joke because even her blood family ended up causing her harm in the end instead of help, much less this family to which she’s only related to her own children (and therefore only cares about her own children). That said, I have no sympathy for her because she made the deliberate choice to be a concubine in a rich household rather than the main wife in a poor household and that’s because of nothing other than her desire for creature comforts. And frankly, just because she was a favored concubine didn’t mean she had to be such an asshole.
- You can really hear / see Concubine Lin’s desperation here.
We meet Landlord Xu
- Concubine Lin dropping the price further makes her seem very desperate and very sketch.
- I do wonder how land transfer was validated in ancient China such that a buyer could be assured they were buying real deeds (vs. fake ones or stolen ones). But I haven’t bought a house yet so I don’t even really know how they do it in modern day (I think there’s a land title office???)
- Poor Landlord Xu was just trying to get a good deal without being scammed and instead he’s locked up for days.

Story of Minglan Rewatch - Episode 13