When Orchid’s father dies, her family have to take his coffin hundreds of miles to Peking for burial. By the time they arrive they are tired, ill and broke. On arrival in Peking, Orchid, her mother, brother and sister, stay at her uncle’s house but things get worse for Orchid when her uncle threatens to throw them out unless she marries her retarded, opium-addicted cousin Bottle. Orchid gets a job working for a woman who once was a maid for an Empress. She tells her all about the Forbidden City; the details, architecture, history and traditions and so when Orchid hears that that the Emperor, Hsien Feng, is looking for wives she competes with hundreds of others to enter the Forbidden City. She sees this as her only chance to provide for her family and to avoid the marriage to her cousin. Somehow she manages to meet all the impossibly high standards set for an Emperor and is eventually chosen amongst several others to enter as a low-ranking concubine.

Once inside the Forbidden City, Orchid quickly has learn how to survive in a world of scheming, deception and bribery as all the girls attempt to be the one to carry the Emperor’s first born son. She has to figure out who she can trust and who she can’t, and who really holds all the influence in the courts. As Orchid finds herself falling in love with the Emperor she realises that she has to go to great lengths in order to get him to notice her and as she seduces him and spends more time with him her enemies increase and will go to great lengths to stop her consuming all his time. Not content with just being essentially a pretty face, Orchid learns about the Chinese government and its problems in an attempt to help the Emperor save the collapsing country, but her determination to be involved could ultimately be her undoing.