How women in The Apothecary Diaries navigate patriarchy and class

Content warning: discussion of sexism, sexual violence, forced pregnancy, miscarriage, sex work

Spoilers for The Apothecary Diaries Season 1

Set in a fictionalized version of imperial China, The Apothecary Diaries follows Maomao, a young apothecary, as she is whisked off the streets of the red-light district and into the Inner Palace, a court housing the emperor’s female concubines. Maomao’s sharp intellect and extensive medicinal knowledge draw the attention of Jinshi, a high-ranking eunuch, who tasks her with handling various odd jobs and solving mysteries. As the show follows Maomao uncovering the secrets of the Inner Palace, it consistently parallels the lives of street courtesans and those of the imperial consorts. Despite the class disparity between them, these women share similar experiences attempting to navigate the patriarchal society that they live in. While some do their best to play by the rules, others find loopholes in social customs through which they can enact a semblance of autonomy. However, doing so is extremely risky, especially for those lower on the social ladder.

When Maomao first enters the Inner Palace, she hears from Xiaolan, another servant girl, about an illness befalling two of the consorts, Lady Lihua and Lady Gyokuyou, and their children. Despite their shared circumstances, the women cannot find solidarity with one another because the system places them in competition: only one child can be chosen as the emperor’s successor, promoting their mother to the top of the Inner Palace. There is a power struggle between them because Lihua’s son is the older child, making her the Empress Consort, but the Emperor favors Gyokuyou and her daughter. Maomao encounters Lihua accusing Gyokuyou of cursing her and her son while Gyokuyou insists she just wants the doctor to see her daughter. Lihua’s aggressive attitude toward Gyokuyou makes sense when viewing their circumstances through a political lens—the death of Lihua’s son would position Gyokuyou’s daughter as the successor to the throne. However, this argument holds no water when Gyokuyou and her daughter are also sick. Absent their political circumstances, one could see a world where the two women could work together as mothers caring for similarly ill children. The only reason they cannot come to one another’s aid is because the imperial consort system pits them against each other.

After learning about the consorts’ plight, Maomao deduces that their makeup is poisoning them, highlighting both the lengths to which some women will go to meet patriarchal societal demands and how their general lack of education and medicinal knowledge further endangers them. Maomao sends messages to the consorts about the makeup, but one of Lihua’s servants discards her note. This leads to her son’s death, while Gyokuyou and her daughter recover after following Maomao’s advice. When asked how she knew the makeup had been causing their illnesses, Maomao explains that she saw courtesans in the red-light district also fall sick from poisonous high-end makeup, commenting, “They tried to trade life for beauty and lost both.” This statement extends beyond the makeup being literally poisonous and brings to mind the many self-destructive behaviors women fall into while trying to pursue unrealistic feminine beauty standards and the ways that the social systems around them encourage this.

Maomao later visits Lihua on the Emperor’s orders, finding that she has grown extremely gaunt and developed eating difficulties, mirroring the aftereffects of eating disorders that afflict many women in real life, both throughout history and in pursuit of modern beauty standards. One of Lihua’s servants asserts that she continued applying the poisonous makeup to her because, “We want Lihua to always be beautiful.” The contrast of that statement against Lihua’s visibly deteriorating health recalls Maomao’s earlier comment and showcases the dangers women are willing to ignore attempting to satisfy a social system in which beauty defines their worth. While Lihua does not lose her life thanks to Maomao’s intervention, she does lose her son and, with him, her standing as Empress Consort.

Lihua’s recovery is in large part thanks to the Emperor’s orders for Maomao to visit her, reflecting a tradition of female consorts needing the favor of men in order to acquire necessary medical aid. Years prior, another consort, Ah-Duo, was giving birth simultaneously to the then-Empress. The palace forced the doctor to prioritize the Empress, leading to complications in Ah-Duo’s birth that necessitated the removal of her uterus. Ah-Duo only manages to save her child’s life by swapping him with the Empress’ newborn after the birth. A mistake by her servant kills the Empress’ child after the swap, leaving Ah-Duo infertile and, apparently, childless. She remains in the Inner Palace through the goodwill of the current Emperor, who was then the Crown Prince.

Similarly, Lihua only receives Maomao’s help at the Emperor’s request. Both women, having lost their children, are left in a socially precarious position for failing their duties as consorts. Ah-Duo was already deprived of necessary medical aid simply for being lower in status than the Empress. The consorts of the Inner Palace exist to have sex and birth successors to the throne. Failing that, there is no use for them. Ah-Duo, especially, is a consort in name only and eventually removed from the Inner Palace, despite her hysterectomy being no fault of her own. The deeply entrenched classist and misogynist values of the Inner Palace led to her infertility, and those same ideas punished her for it afterward. Through Lihua and Ah-Duo’s experiences, it is clear that the strict patriarchal rules governing women and their bodies are merciless, even to those who do their best to follow them.

Facing this reality, some women find more value in undermining the social customs that seek to regulate their bodies. Maomao herself lands on this side of the fence and uses makeup to appear less conventionally attractive by painting freckles on her face. This confuses Jinshi, to which Maomao says, “Cosmetics aren’t just for making a face more beautiful.” When living in the red-light district, Maomao, as a woman, is at high risk of being raped or assaulted by men in the area. Just as looking beautiful gives the consorts a form of social currency and security, looking ugly is an act of self-preservation from Maomao and other lower-class women in much more precarious settings.

Social custom that only values women in service to men encourages predatory behavior that makes women responsible for their own safety while shielding men from the consequences of their actions. As a man who grew up in high society, Jinshi has never been exposed to this aspect of the world until now, hence his genuine surprise. Maomao goes on to explain how her presence in the palace is a testament to these gender dynamics, since she was kidnapped and sold into service at the Inner Palace against her will. She hypothesizes that, having neglected her makeup, her kidnappers thought they could fetch a good price for her. This experience proves that Maomao’s practice is not an act of senseless paranoia, but a strategy rooted in reality. When women exist as commodities rather than people, knowing how to manipulate one’s worth is essential for them to navigate an oppressive social order.

Unattractiveness is not merely a means of survival, but one through which women can enact a sense of agency. Fuyou, a concubine in the Inner Palace, is set to wed a military man after fumbling her first meeting with the Emperor and developing a sleeping disorder. Most of the Inner Palace speaks of her with pity and regards her coming wedding as a shame for such a beautiful, skilled woman. However, Maomao deduces that Fuyou never intended to be a concubine of the Emperor to begin with. Fuyou and the military man are childhood friends, but the man was of significantly lower status than her, making their marriage socially unacceptable. Fuyou intentionally sabotaged her reputation by botching her dance for the Emperor and making a spectacle of herself by pretending to sleepwalk onto the castle walls. In this way, she is able to preserve her bodily autonomy as the Emperor then refuses to sleep with her. Fuyou is not altering her attractiveness through her physical beauty, but through manipulating her public image, playing on and leaning into existing stigma about mental and physical illness to her own ends. In this way, Fuyou could have a say in her fate without explicitly acting out against the system.

Fuyou is not alone in such endeavors, as the audience learns of Fengxian, a red-light district courtesan whose story parallels hers. Courtesan women need to be bought out by men to marry them, but Fengxian’s price is far beyond the reach of Lakan, a young man whose salary was barely enough to pay for her company every few months. Recognizing that a large part of her value came from her virginity, Fengxian slept with Lakan to get pregnant and drop her price by a large enough margin that he could afford her. Similar to Fuyou, Fengxian is in love with a man for whom she is out of reach, driving her to devalue herself and bring them to parity. The difference between these women’s approaches highlights the contradictory expectations that this traditional society has for women. Both Fuyou and Fengxian understand the importance of their virginity in a world where misogyny and purity culture go hand in hand. However, Fuyou’s shame comes from being undesired by the Emperor and maintaining her virginity, whereas Fengxian’s comes from losing it. This contrast reflects the inconsistency with which society polices women’s bodies. A woman must not be tainted by a man, yet she also holds no value unless she is desired by them.

The parallels between Fuyou and Fengxian also shed light on the ways class and gender intersect, as the risks they face for their actions differs widely in scale. While Fuyou succeeds in marrying her childhood lover, if her plan failed, she still would have lived a life of relative comfort and privilege as a concubine in the Inner Palace. Fengxian is not so lucky when her plans with Lakan fall through because of his being sent to study abroad. After giving birth to Maomao, Fengxian loses her pull as a courtesan and must resort to sex work to make a living. She eventually contracts syphilis, which goes untreated for long enough to rob her of her mind and body. Both women put their reputation on the line to pursue marriage with the men they desire.

However, the worst-case scenario for women in their respective positions differs wildly. Fuyou’s birth as a high-ranking noblewoman may have cursed her to be separated from her childhood sweetheart, but it also provided her with an invisible safety net that Fengxian did not have. As punishment for disgracing herself before the Emperor, Fuyou gets exactly what she wants and is sent into the waiting arms of her lover. The punishment for Fengxian’s disgrace, on the other hand, effectively ruins her life. Through Fuyou and Fengxian, one observes the ways in which women of higher status have more leeway to rebel against society and enact their agency.

The show ultimately sympathizes with the myriad hardships endured by its female cast as people just doing their best to survive. The first season of The Apothecary Diaries ends with Lakan finally buying Fengxian out to wed her, while Maomao gives Fengxian a dancing sendoff from atop the walls of the Inner Palace. Jinshi is brought to the scene when someone who saw Maomao reports that “another weird woman was climbing the outer wall.” While one immediately thinks of Fuyou, it is worth noting that Consort Ah-Duo also climbed these walls to drink before leaving the Inner Palace. Jinshi, as Ah-Duo’s real child who was swapped into the imperial family, is just as estranged from his mother as Maomao is from Fengxian.

Despite their strained maternal relationships, both characters find it in them to extend a degree of grace and affection to their mothers. Jinshi is obviously distraught when Ah-Duo leaves and, despite the abuse she suffered from Fengxian, Maomao orchestrates and celebrates her reunion with Lakan. These plotlines highlight a key element that underpins the storytelling and character writing in The Apothecary Diaries overall: solidarity and sympathy, even in the face of a system that endlessly dehumanizes women and pits people against one another. It is a small rebellion, working within the bounds of the system rather than upsetting or rebuilding it, but within the context of the setting and the broader narrative, it is a rebellion nonetheless.

The Apothecary Diaries recognizes the cruel rules set upon women and respects those who do their best to find happiness in spite of that. Some women will do their best to survive according to the rules set by the world around them, even if they find only bitter rewards at the end of their struggle. Others will seek to bend the rules of the system in their favor, no matter the cost— though those lower on the social ladder will have a higher price to pay. Whether she is one of the select few consorts chosen to live in the Inner Palace or a street courtesan, these women know the pain of living in a patriarchal world that refuses their humanity and it is that knowledge that drives them to fight for their futures however they can. Even as an oppressive iron fist tightens around them, there will always be those who seek out ways to prove the world wrong. There will always be weird women who climb walls and dance.