A Song to Drown Rivers

The Four Great Beauties of Ancient China are four legendary women (Xi Shi, Wang Zhaojun, Diaochan, and Yang Guifei), living in disparate times and places, whose beauty is said to have been so great that it changed the course of history. All except Diaochan (a fictional character from the Ming-era novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms) are thought to be based on real people, though their lives and characters have been heavily embellished by legend over the centuries. Xi Shi is chronologically the first of the Four Great Beauties, having lived between the 7th and 6th centuries BCE, in what is known as the Spring and Autumn period of ancient Chinese history—a time when the centralized power of the Zhou dynasty was eroding as local lords asserted their own independent power.

Xi Shi was a peasant girl from the state of Yue, which had been conquered by the neighboring state of Wu. With the help of his advisor Fan Li, the Yue king, Goujian, formulated a plan to train beautiful women as spies and give them to the Wu king, Fuchai, as concubines. The two women chosen for this mission, Xi Shi and Zheng Dan, trained for three years before traveling to the Wu kingdom to begin their mission.