The Glamorous Imperial Concubine

Half a year ago I was watching The sword and the brocade as my second chinese costium drama. After the trauma from Oh My Emperor! I didn't expect to go into the chinese period piece once again, but here I am! The Glamorous Imperial Concubine is my next take and I was happy to watch it. Drama was definately more complicated than the previuos one 😅 and sometimes I was even getting lost who is whom in which kingdom but managed to watch it till the end.

What is The Glamorous Imperial Concubine about?

The story is in 10th century Imperial China where Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdom fight over power. The main protagonist is Ma Fuya of Chu which is a kind and beautiful princess. In one night, her kingdom is destroyed by her own uncle Ma Yi Fang who kills her whole family. Forced to flee her kingdom, after losing everything she loved, she takes the path of revaging her family and restoring the kingdom of Chu. To make that happen she luckly meets mysterious Meng Qiyou, the unfavored prince of Shu. Although he has personal motives and uses Fuya as a political tool inside of his kingdom, they fall in love and help each other to acheive set goals. 

While Ma Fuya is hiding in Shu under new name, the crown prince of Northern Han who is crazy in love with her, desperately searches her across the land. The beauty, inteligence and kindness is many times a burden to princess as many princes and emperors wants her to be their wife or concubine. On top of that there is a love battle between of Shu and Han and inside wars between high ranked officials. 

Otherwise to korean dramas, I noticed that the Chinese ones are usually quite long. The Glamorous Concubine takes 42 episodes each -/+ 1h what gives a looooot of time for story development 😅 but....

It started out quite typical but interesting - good royal family, happy princess that hates rules who finds a man that also hates is. He wants to marry her but she doesn't. Then the tragedy where Liu Lian Cheng searches for Ma Fuya but didn't succeded. 

Tragedy makes princess to enter real-life and story becomes more serious and tense. She meets Meng Qiyou who needs someone to help him in his kingdom but that requires Ma Fuya to become seductive 💋 and brutal. The preparations and first days in the Shu kingdom are interesting and you think that it will stay like it till the end... Not really.... 😩Somewhere around episode 30 we have sudden drop. No fun, no drama, no excitement anymore. Its just death after tragedy after death. Story was lost.

Unfortunately The Glamorous Concubine is an example of overly streched drama with too many side characters. It's a pity because the story was interesting and they could have make an amazing drama out of it. Acting was really good, the raw plot had a lot of potential, they had outstanding outfits, superb locations but it all went to s*** with too many side characters and stories and too few logical connections. They had so much to make this drama epic but didn't use much of it. I'm looking forward to see Ruby Lin (Ma Fuya), Yan Yikuan (Meng Qiyou), Wallace Huo (Liu Lian Cheng) and Jennifer Hung (Ma Xiangyun) in other shows as I find them as good actors 👍

As a whole drama is not bad but I cannot rate otherwise as 5,5/10 as its far too complicated with billion background stories. It is even hard to say what I liked .... There was too much happening and I have one big chaos in my head. 

DRAMA NEWS: no matter what happened at the ending, these two became husband and wife in reality and have a beautiful daughter 💚💙