To rescue her family from poverty and avoid marrying her slope-shouldered cousin, seventeen-year-old Orchid competes to be one of the Emperor’s wives. When she is chosen as a lower-ranking concubine she enters the erotically charged and ritualised Forbidden City. But beneath its immaculate faзade lie whispers of murders and ghosts, and the thousands of concubines will go to any lengths to bear the Emperor’s son.