"Where there are people, there are rivers and lakes." "Three women in one play." So, where there are many women, can it be called "women's battlefield"? If we add a hypothesis to this inference – this place is the king's harem. Then, the "battlefield of women" is worthy of the name.
In the domestic court costume dramas, crane top red, arsenic cream and Ichijo Aya are almost the standard configuration of every play. However, living in peacetime, we often wonder whether such a scene is exaggerated and imagined by the screenwriters, or whether it is really true, in fact, many people have given answers to this question. Although domestic court dramas have exaggerated elements, the harem is indeed often a dark tide, and various forces use various means to "get out of their minds" in order to seek benefits.
However, today I would like to tell you that not only is the harem of ancient China called sinister, but the harem of our neighbors is also often filled with "smoke of gunfire".
Taking the residence of the shoguns during the Tokugawa shogunate in Japan as an example, the construction area of Edo Castle Honmaru (the imperial residence where the army lived and handled government affairs) was about 11,300 pyeong, while Ōo accounted for 60%, or about 6,300 pyeong. In this space of about 6,300 pyeong, there are no other adult men who can freely enter and leave and move around freely except the general, because this is the general's harem.
In this harem, inhabited by the general's biological mother, children, main chamber, side chamber, and numerous female officials and handmaidens, similar to the Chinese harem, but more restrictive than the Chinese harem. Throughout the Edo period, there were at least five hundred women in the Oku, and as many as a thousand at the end of the shogunate. It is said that at the height of Ōo, about 1,600 women lived in it.
Unlike the relatively natural formation of the Chinese harem, Japan's Daiao has a clear human-led origin. In other words, the establishment of the Great Olympic Is already the result of multi-party confrontation. After the establishment of the shogunate, Tokugawa Ieyasu, the first shogun of the Tokugawa shogunate, the most worrying question in his later years was how to formulate a system to consolidate the status of the shogun and how to preserve his bloodline. At that time, the grandmother of the third generation of shoguns, Kasuga Bureau, because of the weight of Tokugawa Ieyasu and the understanding of Ieyasu's distress, began to establish a standardized Ōo.
In the early days of the establishment of Ōo, its role was not only responsible for the living of the shogun and his family, but also for communicating with the main chambers of the daimyo and their children in various places. In the eleventh year of Kanei (1634), the third shogun, Tokugawa Iemitsu, stipulated that the wives and children of daimyōs in various regions should live in Edo Castle as "hostages", while Ōo was responsible for daily contact with the daimyo's families in order to achieve the political goal of maintaining stable relations with the daimyō.
With the close connection with the politics of the "former dynasty", it has become a luxury for Da'ao not to be infected with the bloody storm in the political arena.
Within The Great Austrian, its own system of female officials is also a driving force that makes it full of struggle. In order to maintain order, there are about twenty kinds of female officials in the Oku. Some of these female officials, some of whom had high status and were from famous backgrounds, were responsible for external social and cultural ceremonies, but did not have real power; some of them controlled the entire Daio, and even influenced the personnel movement of the shogunate in the former dynasty, and could sit on an equal footing with the shogun without adhering to the general etiquette; some would become the general's concubine after being recognized by the shogun and the main chamber, and the concubine room had the best chance of giving birth to an heir...
Therefore, in such an interweaving of the main room, the concubine room, the female official with real power, and the female official with virtual power, in order to compete for power and become a concubine or a concubine who is qualified to produce, the parties often collude with the former dynasty's important ministers and break out various factional struggles. The bluntness of such a struggle can be said to be far superior to that of the harem in ancient China.
And the more prominent point of the Da'ao compared to the Chinese harem is that the female official of the Da'ao must be "the daughter of the qiben or the royal family". In other words, those who can enter the Daio as female officials are all the families of the magnates, or the families of the magnates in name. And these big ladies will also hire their own maids for their own messengers after entering Da'ao, so at this time, some ordinary women have the opportunity to enter Da'ao.
However, regardless of their origins, these women will do their best to get the favor of the general. Entrusting people's feelings, drilling doorways, and bribing high-ranking female officials to let the general "see" themselves are all common means they use. However, there is only one general, and whoever spends it will have to rely on the people themselves to fight for it.
In addition, in Da'ao, once a woman becomes a general's side room, then not only can she have glory and wealth for life, but her biological parents, brothers and sisters, and even the adoptive parents and relatives who originally spent money to enter Da'ao will be promoted to knighthood, promotion and salary increase. With such huge interests clearly in front of us, the struggle of the Da'ao faction can be imagined.
Although the occupants of the harem were mainly women, most of them gathered here for profit. And there is only one monarch, and the real power of the harem is only so much, it is obviously unrealistic to let everyone share this big cake in a kind way. Therefore, for the sake of their own interests, the common plots, party strife, framing, and flattery of the former dynasty were not few in the harem.
Domestic court costume dramas often take mutual framing and suppression as the growth path of the protagonists. This is not only for the appetite of today's audience, but also for those who lived in the harem back then. Otherwise, Da'ao would not have appeared in the pre-dinner test of poison.