Where The Mask Ends - Netflix Series

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Tian Xiwei plays two parts here. In one role she plays a spoiled, evil princess. In the other she plays the peasant who pushes a cart around town collecting night soil (shit) from the houses. Just so happens the peasant happens to look just like the princess. The princess has been engaged to a lord since forever but now he has gone off to fight a war and has been seriously wounded. All the eggheads predict that he will not survive. His mother (or maybe it's his grandmother) wants the the princess and the lord to be married as soon as possible on the hope that the wedding will somehow help him recover. Hopes and prayers and all that. However, if they are married and he dies, the princess will be a widow and will be wearing clothing made of burlap for several years, if she doesn't kill herself as a dutiful noble widow should. Her grandmother doesn't like the odds, and when she see's the peasant girl being carted off to be executed she comes up with a plan. She sends one of her minions to get the peasant released which he manages to do for the price of a few coins, few being very vague since these people have got all the gold in China. Now they have to clean her up and teach her how to behave amongst the nobility and they only have five days until the wedding. Behaving mostly means standing still, being quiet and kneeling when everybody else kneels. Also our girl is sharp and this a fantasy so she has no problem. They don't say anything about her lower class accent, but this is Chinese TV so they all speak the same lingo.

You might wonder how she came to be condemned to death and that is because her father (the bum) pimped her out to pay a debt. Our girl took excepting to being raped (she didn't agree to the deal) and kills her attacker. Cuts off his head and throws it at her father.

Wait a minute, haven't we seen this actress before? Yes, we did. In Pursuit of Jade where she plays a pig butcher, so she knows her way around cutting up bodies. Are there any other similarities? Why, yes, now that you mention it, she rescues a lord wounded in battle. While we may have seen this actress before, I did not immediately recognize her. All these young, beautiful Chinese women look alike to me. My wife however picked up on it immediately.

This show and most of these Chinese historical fantasies mostly just cruise along with people going about their business, but every now and then a little discrepency, AKA a clue, will appear. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to piece these clues together and see if you can figure out what's really going on.

The wounded lord recovers and wakes up. He knows the real princess for being a first class bitch and he had no intention of marrying her, but now he is married to a girl who looks just like the princess and he assumes, like everyone else, she is the real deal, which causes him severe anguish. How is he going to get shut of her?

Meanwhile the real princess is scheming how to get rid of the imposter and assume her rightful place as the wife of the lord. Also, the lord and the imposter are obviously not happy together, so we have other swinging dicks trying to horn in on our girl which means there is no end of intrigue, enough to fill 30 episodes.

As a bonus, we have a scene where an assassin's teapot is used. I've heard of it, thanks to Steve Mould, but I've never seen it in a show, never mind real life. The assassin's teapot appears in the scene that begins at 13:30 in Episode 16.

The nasty princess on the left, Bitao, our girl's servant in the middle and our girl on the right

Covering the left hole of the teapot

Covering the left hole of the teapot

Teapot

Who lives and who dies all depends on where Bitao's loyalty lies. I think nasty girl miscalculated.

Then there's this little bit I found on Acacuss by Emma Bowler:

The assassin's teapot is a small, unassuming pot with a long spout and a curved handle that has a fascinating and mysterious history. It is believed to have originated in China and to date back to the Ming Dynasty. According to legend, the teapot is cursed and those who have owned it have all met with mysterious and untimely deaths.

The teapot became famous in the early days of the British Empire when it was used by the government to prevent assassinations by poisoning the tea of potential targets. The teapot was designed with a hidden compartment that could only be opened by a special key, which was given to a trusted member of the government.

The plan worked for several years, but eventually, the secret of the teapot was leaked and it became famous as the "assassin's teapot." Today, the teapot is on display in the British Museum, where it serves as a reminder of the lengths that governments will go to in order to protect their interests.

This sounds plausible because the Brits back then were some really nasty scoundrels.

The Assassin's Teapot Is Weird
Steve Mould

Qing dynasty teapot circa 1700

Didn't find any teapots that might plausibly be from the same era as the show, but I did find this one and I kind of like it.

P. S. Notes about the images captured from Netflix. I used Windows screen capture to start, but since Windows image viewer program no longer works reliably (I don't know what happened, but more often than not, when I try to edit an image all I get is a black screen), so I open the image in Chrome (Open with) and use Google Lens to select the portion I want and just paste it into Blogger.

When Bitao first starts to pour the tea, two holes are visible at the top of the handle, but it's only visible for a split second and try as I might I could not capture the image, so you'll just have to take my word for it that there are two holes right next to each other.