Harper in training

Legend of the Magnate is the first historical cdrama I've watched that's interested in the middle class, and for this alone tbh I'd recommend it. The Qing Emperor dies pretty early on and nobody cares except inasmuch as it leads to some national policy changes, because not a single one of our main characters knew him personally!

The year is 1860; the Qing Empire is struggling with the aftermath of the Opium Wars and the ongoing Taiping Heavenly Kingdom rebellion; and our protagonist, Gu Pingyuan, a nice young man with scholarly ambitions from a family of tea farmers, has unfortunately spent his twenties in prison-exile in the frozen north after getting sabotaged by an Unknown Enemy into making criminal amounts of noise at the big civil service exams in the capitol. During his years in exile he has learned various survival skills and at the start of the show he makes his escape so he figure out who sabotaged him, as well as what happened to the long-disappeared father he went to the capitol to seek information about the first place.

Given this setup -- and the fact that the show is a high-budget historical drama that shares several cast members with Nirvana in Fire -- we were kind of expecting Gu Pingyuan to be a master schemer and puppeteer with martial skills and elaborate plans. Not so! It turns out the survival skills that Pingyuan learned in prison mostly included Wheeling, Dealing, Bullshitting, and Occasionally Falling On His Face And Begging. Very refreshing also tbh to see a clever protagonist who has no pride whatsoever. Many times Pingyuan's brilliant schemes to manipulate the market forces around him do succeed! (Often I didn't understand why, because I'm not a financial genius, but I was willing to nod sagely along and agree that they probably were brilliant.) And many other times they result in heavily armed men throwing him in prison because his bullshit immediately backfired on him and he has to wait for someone else to come and rescue him, because he did not in fact acquire any martial arts skills in prison, he leaves that to his love interest.

I should probably at this point talk about the other main characters of the drama. They are:

- his love interest, a nice young woman whose family runs a horse caravan for long-distance deliveries; as this often takes her into somewhat dangerous situations, she's picked up some martial arts skills and low-key considers herself part of the jianghu but in like a normal person way. She's lovely. So is her dad, who loves Gu Pingyuan almost as much as she does. Unfortunately Gu Pingyuan has a pre-prison-exile fiancee that he thinks he's duty-bound to be getting back to and as a result he fumbles her so many times
- his foil, the son of very wealthy merchant, Li Million, who owns a massive chain of pharmacies; as a result before we learned his name we spent several episodes calling him the Heir to CVS. The lonely CVS Junior has a deep and powerful attachment to Gu Pingyuan, and the plot keeps briefly letting them get into joyous financial cahoots and then immediately putting them into rivals situations; every mini-arc includes a scene where Li Million (a major ominously antagonistic figure, played by the Emperor from Nirvana in Fire) is like "I have told you Many times you are Forbidden to associate with that Convict" and CVS Junior stares up at him with big sad eyes and goes "but daddy ... I love him he's my only friend ...."
- his ex-fiancee, who unfortunately for Gu Pingyuan is busy having her own plot, ( which is spoilery )
- his ... hmm I don't really know how to describe Ms. Su in context of Gu Pingyuan as she doesn't actually care that much about him; she's obviously the main character of her own drama that occasionally intersects with this one in which she is a ruthless master puppeteer engaged on her own mysterious business. She appears in the plot every few episodes, often cross-dressed, often waving large amounts of money, occasionally trying to assassinate somebody, and half the time it's like "thank God she's here to help our friend out of prison, we couldn't have done it without her" and the other half the time it's like "well, five men are now dead." You never can tell with Ms. Su!

The show is somewhat interested in politics, but much more interested in how things are made, who makes them, who sells them, and how they get from place to place. At one point some East India Company white guys show up with something ominous under a cloth, and genarti was like "is it a Spinning Jenny?" and the cloth came off and INDEED IT WAS A SPINNING JENNY and we all screamed. The real villain of the story has appeared!

-- though the villain of the story, I want to be clear, is not capitalism. The show wants to be very clear on that. About every three or four episodes it's clearly been mandated by Someone that Gu Pingyuan have a conversation with somebody to reiterate his Ethical Vision for Ethical Business That Truly Serves the People. And when that doesn't happen and when businessmen act badly? That is the fault of the FAILING QING DYNASTY, or possibly the BRITISH, but it is Not the fault of Business, which is Good, and Ethical, and also Patriotic. The last scene of the drama -- this isn't a spoiler, it has nothing to do with the plot of the show in any way -- is a brief post-show epilogue set fifty years in the future where we learn that Gu Pingyuan's business wealth acquired through years of ardent dedication to the free market is of course funding the Communist Revolution.

But the flip side of this dedicated Business Propaganda is that the rest of the show is free to be nuanced, messy, and politically ambivalent. The show doesn't particularly support either the rebels or the Empire; the show just thinks that the civil war sucks for everyone who's caught up in it and makes tea production very difficult. When aristocrats and officials appear in the plot, they're small disruptive typhoons oversetting everything in their wake for the merchant- and working-class people whose lives we're following. Upward mobility is possible, but also perilous; Gu Pingyuan is constantly getting put into glass cliff situations by more powerful people who need a scapegoat, because the Empire is a powder keg and fundamentally our protagonist is just an ex-convict from a tea farming family.

( big major show spoilers )

All this is to say that I enjoyed the show very much, but I do have one -- well, two major complaints. The first is that Gu Pingyuan has a younger brother and in a show where most people broadly do get interesting characterization and growth this brother never once transcends Comedy Status. Earth-shaking revelations are destabilizing the rest of his family to their core and nobody ever bothers to tell him! What is even the POINT of a Comedy Brother if you don't get a moment of shocking and unexpected poignance! Absolute waste.

The second is that there is an arc with Wolves, all of whom seem to have been imported straight into China by way of Hammer Horror. RIP to those many, many monster movie wolves.

I've been meaning for months to write up Knight Flower, the Joseon-era kdrama about a RESPECTABLE WIDOW BY DAY, VIGILANTE BY NIGHT who spends her days dutifully kneeling by her husband's portrait and serving her mother-in-law and her nights running around town in a black mask dispensing justice by the sword.

I enjoyed this drama very much, but it's kind of an odd beast -- it's genuinely interested in the awful constraints on Joseon's women's worlds and widow's worlds in particular and wants to explore that seriously, and it also wants have our heroine be extremely cool and fight off five guys in an alley every episode and toss off a one-liner about it, and it also wants our [middle-aged! widow!] heroine to be a charming sitcom naif who gets comically overcome by the sight of a man's midriff and is shocked! shocked! to learn about some of the various injustices going on in Joseon despite the fact that she's been wandering the streets dispensing vigilante justice for ten years. (They attempt to square some of this circle by virtue of the fact that our heroine's arranged husband was killed! by bandits! on his very wedding day! and so she has spent ten years dutifully mourning a man she never actually met, let alone slept with.)

And because Lee Hanee is a talented actress, she can almost more or less pull all of that off and make RESPECTABLE WIDOW SECRET VIGILANTE JO YEO-HWA a coherent character -- helped in large part by the various interesting women around her, including:

- Yeo-hwa's hard-nosed and cynical maid, whom Yeo-hwa rescued off the streets as a teenager, and who has spent her years since then in the single-minded pursuit of enough money for An Independent Place, which she is going to move into JUST as soon as her chaotic mistress to whom she is unfortunately absolutely loyal is Out Of This Fucking House and No Longer Doing This Stupid Vigilante Shit
- Yeo-hwa's mother-in-law, who holds Yeo-hwa harshly to the extremely narrow line of conduct allowed for widows [go nowhere; speak to no one; serve your husband's family; accept that it's an embarrassment for you to be alive when your husband is dead] and sees her largely as a walking reputational vector for the family -- but hey, at least she would never pressure Yeo-hwa to commit honorable suicide, like some other mother-in-laws-of-widows of their acquaintance, so that's something! In any other drama this character would be a cruel stereotype but in this drama she's played by Kim Mi-kyung with sympathy and complexity; she's the immediate bane of Yeo-hwa's life, and nonetheless she and Yeo-hwa have spent a decade bound together as family with a kind of affection, and Yeo-hwa understands perfectly well that her mother-in-law is also trapped by the only rules she knows
- Yeo-hwa's business partner and accomplice, a merchant whom Yeo-hwa also rescued on the streets and who has also spent the time since then like You Could Just Leave This Fucking House, I will prepare a fake identity for you, it won't be hard
- the main female villain, ( who is somewhat of a spoiler though this all starts to come out pretty early on )

Obviously Jo Yeo-hwa also has a love interest. He's an honorable baby cop who wants to fight corruption and also has a backstory tied up in the ten-years-ago political plot. He's completely fine. His older brother, an upright schemer who's been helping the virtuous king lay long-term plots to take back control from his evil ministers,* has an very cute B-plot bookstore romance with the cynical maid that I frankly found much more compelling in the glimpses of it that we got. More compelling yet ( is spoilers again! )

*there's nothing kdramas love more than a virtuous king who's trying to take back control from his evil ministers