The Pearl Concubine's Well
A plain palace well inside the Zhen Shun Gate of the Forbidden City, where the Guangxu Emperor's favourite concubine was thrown and drowned on imperial orders in 1900 — its mouth now choked with a holed stone so no one can follow her.
Case File No. 104
FILE 01 The Legend
The Pearl Concubine (1876–1900) was the young favourite of the Guangxu Emperor — spirited, pro-reform, and hated by Empress Dowager Cixi, who had her confined after the failed reforms of 1898. On 20 July 1900, as the Eight-Nation Alliance reached Beijing and the court fled to Xi'an, Cixi ordered the eunuch Cui Yugui to throw her down the well, officially 'to spare her defilement by foreigners'. Her body was recovered the next year; she was posthumously elevated and the well has carried her name ever since.
FILE 02 The Sightings Log
Night-shift guards in the Palace of Tranquil Longevity have long spoken of a weeping woman in old-style dress near the Zhen Shun Gate; visitors report a sudden chill at the well mouth in high summer. Online forums add photographs said to show a pale reflection in water that is no longer there.
FILE 03 The Skeptic’s File
The murder is documented history — the Palace Museum itself states the 1900 drowning. The ghost is not: no sighting has a named witness, and the narrow well-stone with its two iron-bar holes was a standard anti-suicide and safety cover, not a seal against anything supernatural. In daylight it is a quiet, grimly educational stop on the tourist circuit.