Duan Zhengchun and Ruan Xingzhu

Duan Zhengchun and Ruan Xingzhu are former lovers whose daughters, A'Zhu and A'Zi, were born outside Duan Zhengchun’s marriage and sent to other households as infants. Their relationship joins a private history of affection and separation to the political standing of the House of Duan: the daughters’ origins are hidden, but recognizable signs of descent preserve the possibility of reunion. When the family history becomes clear, it also helps explain the chain of mistaken assumptions that leads to A'Zhu’s death.

Identity and Background

Duan Zhengchun is a prince of Dali, the younger full brother of its emperor and the South-Stabilizing Prince. In his youth he traveled in the Central Plains and formed relationships with several women. Ruan Xingzhu is one of those former lovers, and A'Zi is identified as her daughter with Duan Zhengchun. Their other daughter, A'Zhu, is one year older. The two girls’ parentage had been concealed from them while they were growing up in separate households.

Duan Zhengchun’s position also reflects the political weight of the House of Duan. His first wife, Dao Baifeng, was the daughter of a powerful Baiyi leader; the marriage helped secure Baiyi support for the ruling family in Yunnan. Since the Baiyi practiced monogamy, Dao Baifeng strongly opposed Duan Zhengchun taking another wife. He nevertheless continued to have romantic relationships, and Dao Baifeng eventually entered religious life. Ruan Xingzhu’s relationship with him therefore belonged to a wider pattern of private attachments shaped by rank, marriage, and political obligation.

Their Relationship and Separation

Duan Zhengchun and Ruan Xingzhu renewed their relationship when he visited her in seclusion beside Little Mirror Lake. He had traveled to the Central Plains on his brother the emperor’s order to investigate the killing of Venerable Xuan Bei. Suspecting that the evidence did not point simply to the Murong Clan, he went north with three senior officials and four bodyguards to pursue the matter. He used the journey as an opportunity to visit Ruan Xingzhu, and the two spent time together while his attendants kept watch nearby.

Their reunion did not undo the earlier separation. Duan Zhengchun was already married, and after A'Zhu and A'Zi were born, Ruan Xingzhu and Duan Zhengchun broke apart. A'Zhu later recounts that her mother and father quarreled when he wanted to return to Dali and that Ruan Xingzhu did not dare take the children to her own family. She and the girls’ maternal grandfather feared the consequences if the relationship became known. Ruan Xingzhu therefore sent both daughters to be raised by other people. The account establishes the circumstances of their separation through A'Zhu’s report of what she overheard, rather than through a scene of the parents making the decision together.

The Daughters’ Signs of Descent

Although the girls were separated from their parents, Ruan Xingzhu left each with a means of recognition. Both A'Zhu and A'Zi had a red Duan character tattooed on a shoulder, and each wore one of a pair of gold locks that Duan Zhengchun had given Ruan Xingzhu. When A'Zhu saw that A'Zi had the matching mark and lock, she understood that they were sisters and that the same signs identified their parents. The locks’ inscriptions, too, carried a clue: A'Zhu realized that the verse on hers contained her mother’s name, Xingzhu.

These objects make family descent legible where ordinary upbringing has failed to preserve it. The adoptive household that raised A'Zhu knew only that her mother’s surname was Ruan; A'Zhu herself had no memory of her birth parents. The mark and locks do not restore the childhood the sisters lost, but they allow A'Zhu to connect her own history to A'Zi’s and to identify Ruan Xingzhu as their mother. In this way, the relation between Duan Zhengchun and Ruan Xingzhu is disclosed indirectly, through the material traces left with their daughters.

Recognition and Its Consequences

When Xiao Feng later asks Duan Zhengchun about a past wrong that had left a child without knowledge of its parents, Duan Zhengchun admits that he has been troubled by the mistake throughout his life. He says that meeting a parentless child from that time feels like an opportunity granted by Heaven, but does not identify the child in the exchange. Xiao Feng connects this admission to his own history and initially interprets it as a reference to himself. That inference is wrong: Ruan Xingzhu later makes clear that Duan Zhengchun was speaking of A'Zi, not Xiao Feng.

The misunderstanding matters because Xiao Feng has already killed A'Zhu, believing that he was confronting the man responsible for the wrong to an abandoned child. When he learns the family history, he recognizes that he had misread Duan Zhengchun’s confession and struck at the wrong person. Ruan Xingzhu, finding him with A'Zhu’s body, confirms that she is A'Zhu’s mother and mourns her daughter. She acknowledges that she and Duan Zhengchun had wronged the child by sending her away, but rejects Xiao Feng’s assumption that this was the wrongdoing Duan Zhengchun had confessed to. The revelation clarifies the parents’ history only after its consequences have become irreversible.

Family Ties and Aftermath

A'Zhu’s recognition of her origins leads her to ask Xiao Feng to watch over A'Zi, whom she fears may go astray. She imagines that, once well, she and Xiao Feng will travel beyond Yanmen Pass and invites A'Zi to join them. The request gives the sisters’ newly discovered relationship an immediate future-oriented purpose: A'Zhu hopes not only to know her sister but to protect her. She dies before that hoped-for life can begin.

Ruan Xingzhu’s later words preserve both affection and grievance toward Duan Zhengchun. Speaking with Qin Hongmian, another of his former lovers, she jokes bitterly that he deserves slaps and kicks for fathering daughters without caring for them, then weeps over the loneliness she and A'Zi endured. Her remarks show that recognition has not repaired the absence of parental care. The relationship’s significance lies in that unresolved divide: love and reunion are present, but the daughters’ separation, the parents’ choices, and Xiao Feng’s fatal misinterpretation leave the family bond marked by loss.