The most memorable example of this in Japan was Like a Cloud, Like a Breeze, another tale of harem intrigues that won a literary competition in 1989, the prize for which was to be turned into an anime TV movie. However, that’s not all that unusual in publishing, where oft-times writers will spare both readers and themselves from the inconvenience of due diligence by setting everything in an imprecise dream-time. Author Natsu Hyuuga might say this is set in a “fictional realm”, but she could just as easily have called it Yanxi Palace or Empress Wu fan fiction. China has had poison tasters since the Bronze Age, and inner-palace intrigues for more than two thousand years. Asides referring to New World foods, including cacao and the potato, suggest that this is supposed to be the late Ming or early Qing dynasty, but there are no real indicators of time or place.

It was hence something of a disappointment to discover that it isn’t “accurate” at all, being set in an unspecified fantasy realm that happens to look a bit Chinese. I first heard about The Apothecary Diaries when a colleague asked me how historically accurate it was. From the moment she suggests that Gyokuyou eats off silver plates, which would be visibly discoloured by certain toxins, she proves her worth to her new mistress. But Maomao has a long history with poisons – her arms are riddled with pockmarks and scars from experimental skin tests and snake-bites, and she has a forensic grasp of how poisoning works. None of the other ladies-in-waiting really appreciate what this means they regard Maomao as a pathetic and disposable pawn, whose sole duty is to die in her lady’s place if someone slips some arsenic in her porridge. Amid much skulduggery among the women of the palace, Maomao is appointed poison taster to Consort Gyokuyou. This gives her a rare skill in the ever-paranoid harem – a knowledge of the uses and abuses of herbs and poisons. Before she was abducted and sold into what we might as well call slavery, she was an apothecary’s daughter.

Throw in scheming eunuchs, bitter sister-wife rivalries, and the ever-present danger that years of careful seduction will be ruined by the next young dollymop to sashay across the threshold, and it’s a heady mix of teen drama and intrigue. It is the ultimate in blood-sports – hundreds of the most beautiful women in the world, locked away in a palace where their sole chance of advancement is to catch the eye and bear the heir of the Emperor.

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