Raise the Red Lantern, and the Rules That Made the Women Rivals

Toward evening in the Chen house, the women learn whether they count tonight. Red lanterns are lit at one courtyard’s gate, and only one. Behind that gate a foot massage begins, given by an elderly servant, and the sound of it carries; one critic describes its beat echoing through the house every evening. Tomorrow the woman behind the lit gate will choose what is cooked, and the servants will be a little more careful with her. The other wives hear the tapping from their own dark courtyards. The man whose choice it was hardly appears. The film never lets us see his face clearly.

Songlian is the newest of them. She is nineteen, an educated girl whose father has died bankrupt, and her stepmother has made her marry the rich Master Chen as his fourth wife. The first time the film shows her, in the Australian critic Adrian Martin’s account of the shot, she is in sudden close-up, holding herself rigid while she argues with her stepmother off screen about having to leave home and become a concubine. When she gives in, the tears come. It is worth keeping that grammar in mind, because the film keeps it to the end. The one who decides is outside the frame. The one decided about fills it.

Raise the Red Lantern is usually described as a story of wives competing for their husband’s favour, and so it is. This essay wants to look at the competition from one step further back. What the film shows with great exactness is how one man’s choice, made in public every evening and paid out in small privileges, turns every woman within its reach into every other woman’s rival, and how completely the rivalry, once it is running, does his work for him. He need not raise his voice. He need hardly appear. What looks like jealousy is the rule working through the women.

The rules also hide things. On this reading they hide three: the man behind them, the violence they rest on, and the possibility that the women were never each other’s enemies at all. This essay follows both: the rivalry the rules make, and what they keep out of sight. It also counts what the women did to one another, because the film counts it, and because a reading that blamed everything on the rules would take from these women the last thing the Chen house had left them, which was their choices.

This essay discusses the whole film, including how it ends. The ending includes a death after a punishment and a killing; neither is described in detail. A later section says where the ending begins, and anyone who would rather see the film first can stop there and come back.

Raise the Red Lantern was directed by Zhang Yimou from a screenplay by Ni Zhen, after Su Tong’s novella Wives and Concubines. Gong Li plays Songlian; He Saifei plays Meishan, the Third Mistress; Cao Cuifen plays Zhuoyun, the Second; Kong Lin plays Yan’er, Songlian’s maid; and Ma Jingwu plays Master Chen. It was photographed by Zhao Fei and runs 125 minutes, and it was shot in Shanxi province, in the Qiao family compound, a great house built under the Qing. The money came from a Taiwanese distributor through a Hong Kong subsidiary, as an American review pointed out in 1992, and Hou Hsiao-hsien was one of its executive producers.

It had its premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September 1991 and won a Silver Lion there, and it was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, entered under Hong Kong’s name. In China it was banned, as Zhang’s previous film, Ju Dou, had been. A review published in Austin, Texas, in June 1992 noted that it could not be screened in its own country, and later accounts describe a ban that lasted several years and, after it, a release that was at most a limited one.

The film was not screened for this essay. What it says happens comes from the film’s published record and from criticism written about it since 1992. Lines are paraphrased, never quoted as exact.

One more thing before the story. This is a film about one household in the 1920s, as a novelist and a director imagined it. It is not a record of how anyone lived, and nothing here is a claim about China or about Chinese women, then or now. The film’s most famous detail makes the point for itself. The lanterns are the film’s invention. Radha O’Meara, writing in the film journal Senses of Cinema in 2018, says that the rituals at the centre of Zhang’s early films were made for the films rather than drawn closely from history. The lanterns, in other words, are the film’s invention, and an exact one.

Here is the institution as the film builds it. Each day the master decides which of his wives he will spend the night with. That wife’s courtyard has its lanterns lit. She is given the foot massage. She chooses what will be cooked the next day. And while the favour lasts, the servants show her a respect the others do not get.

Nothing on that list is large. A massage is a massage, and a menu is a menu. Together, though, they are the whole economy of these women’s lives, and the film’s invention is to make every item of it public. The master’s choice is not a private matter between a man and one wife. It is announced to the compound with light, it is heard after dark in the tapping of the massage, and it comes to the table the next day. Every evening the Chen house publishes a ranking, and every woman in it reads her place.

That is why this essay treats the master’s choice as an institution. What it watches is what the choice does to everyone outside the gate: whose dishes are cooked, whose maid looks up, whose courtyard stays dark. Songlian is nineteen when she arrives. The first thing the house teaches her is rank.

Su Tong’s novella is named, in Chinese, for the women: a site that tracks Chinese literature in translation glosses its title as wives and concubines in droves. The film is named for the signal. Its Chinese title is a line about big red lanterns hung high, and in English even the novella has since been published under the film’s title, so that a ritual the film invented now gives the book its name. The change of title is the film’s method in small. It moves the eye from the women to the device that arranges them.

The usual word for what follows is jealousy. Reference books sum the film up as a competition among four wives for their elderly husband’s favour, and Adrian Martin, reviewing it in 1993, described “the vicious games of deceit and one-upmanship played among the women in their desperate attempt to gain some meagre privilege.”

The last two words are the ones to keep. Meagre privilege. Jealousy, in the ordinary sense, is a feeling about love: the fear that someone you love prefers another. What the women of the Chen house feel for their husband, the film’s record does not say. What they are fighting over is plain. It is a ration. There are four courtyards and one set of lit lanterns, and on any evening one woman’s gain is exactly the others’ loss. As the film builds it, the Chen house gives them no other account to draw on. Songlian has no family money to fall back on. The house is the only place her standing can come from, and its only currency is one man’s choice.

On those terms rivalry is not a lapse of character. It is arithmetic. A wife who refused to compete would not be noble; she would simply be dark every night. That does not make the cruelties that follow anyone’s duty, and this essay will come back to them. But it changes where to look first. Before asking why these women behave as they do, it is worth asking what else the rules left them to do.

The rules have one more property, and it is the one that lets the household run by itself. They turn knowledge into a weapon. Forbidden lanterns hidden in a servant’s room, a pregnancy that is not real, an affair with the family doctor: each secret in this film is worth a punishment, if it reaches the right person. The rules supply the punishment. The women supply the information. Between them, they spare the master any trouble at all.

Each woman in the household meets the rule from the place it has left her.

The First Mistress is old and rigid, and on this reading she seems to have stepped out of the contest; whatever standing she has is no longer counted in lanterns. Zhuoyun, the Second, welcomes Songlian with compliments and a gift of silk, and warns her about the Third. Outwardly she is the kindest of the wives. It is Zhuoyun, Songlian later learns, who wrote Songlian’s name on the curse hidden in her maid’s room. For Zhuoyun, kindness is a way of standing close enough to see.

Meishan, the Third, was an opera singer before she was a wife, and she is no longer the youngest or the favourite. She is cold to Songlian at first. Then she hears that Songlian, cutting Zhuoyun’s hair, has cut her ear, and she tells Songlian two things: that Zhuoyun once tried to poison her when both of them were pregnant, and that only a son will keep Songlian’s place.

That second sentence is the household’s constitution, and it is spoken by a rival who could have kept it to herself. A son is the only standing the lanterns cannot take away. This Library’s essay “Lady Chatterley's Lover, and a Marriage That Asked Her Only for Care and an Heir” followed a marriage that asked a wife for care and for a child and never once for what she wanted. The Chen house asks even less. It does not ask for care. It asks for a son, and until one comes it rations a wife’s standing night by night, with the whole compound watching.

Yan’er, Songlian’s maid, had hoped to be made a mistress herself, and she resents the woman she has been given to serve. She keeps forbidden lanterns hidden in her room. It is easy to read her as the film’s spiteful servant. It is more accurate to see that the rule has reached her too. On this reading, the only way up the household has ever shown her is the same lanterns, and so she keeps some of her own, hidden, where nobody can see them.

And Songlian, the newest, learns faster than any of them. She is educated, and the Chen house rewards a quick study. She finds the curse, learns whose hand wrote her name, and answers, while cutting Zhuoyun’s hair, by cutting her ear. She is learning the household’s language, in which a wound can be given in the middle of a kindness.

Through all of this the master is almost invisible. His face is never clearly shown; the review in Austin in 1992 called him virtually unseen by the camera. Jonathan Rosenbaum, reviewing the film for the Chicago Reader the same year, noted that the action is filmed mainly in frontal long shots.

Martin found the film’s method in repetition. Zhang, he wrote, “conveys everything through ritualistic repetitions: the beating of a gong, the lighting of a lantern, the way someone enters or leaves a room,” and, he went on, “it is through such small, inexorable gestures that the master maintains his immaculate system of tyranny.”

The film does not show his face because the system does not need it. That is not a stylistic flourish; it is the argument. A tyranny that must keep appearing in person is a weak one. The Chen house runs on things that happen without him: a lantern lit, a massage begun, a gong struck, a meal ordered. When he does step in, on this reading, it is to confirm what the rules have already decided. His face would only draw the eye away from where the power actually lives, which is in the way the women look at one another.

So the faces the film gives us are the women’s. We watch them watch each other. It is a cruel arrangement for a viewer too. For two hours we look where the Chen house wants its women to look: sideways, at one another.

From here, this essay describes the rest of the film, including how it ends.

Songlian pretends to be pregnant. Inside the rules it is the most rational move she has. She has been told that only a son will keep her place, and so she claims the one thing the rules reward. Zhuoyun and Yan’er expose her. When Yan’er brings Zhuoyun proof that the pregnancy is a sham, Zhuoyun, feigning concern, asks the master to send for the doctor, who exposes it. The master has Songlian’s lanterns covered with black cloth.

The black cloth is a demotion made as public as the favour was. On this reading the lanterns are not taken down; they are shrouded. The household does not remove the sign of her standing. It leaves the sign in place, darkened, so that everyone can read her loss.

Then Songlian takes revenge, and she takes it on the person below her. She reveals Yan’er’s hidden lanterns. The maid is made to kneel in the snow all night. She falls ill, and she dies.

Look at how that happened. Songlian told. The rules did everything else. Lanterns were forbidden in a servant’s room; the punishment was the household’s, not Songlian’s; the snow belonged to no one. No one in the chain had to be the master, and he did not have to be there. This is the cruel part of the film, and it deserves anger, aimed where it belongs: at a rule that took a servant’s hope of rising, the only hope the household had ever shown her, and turned it into a crime to be punished in the open.

It would be dishonest to stop there. Songlian chose to tell, and Yan’er died. The rules made the weapon and left it within Songlian’s reach. Songlian picked it up. Both sentences are true, and this essay will not let either one cancel the other. Nothing in its sympathy for Songlian unsays the second. Nothing in the second is a verdict on who she is.

One more thing about Yan’er, because the film is easy to leave without her. She was punished for wanting exactly what the Chen house had taught every woman in it to want.

On her twentieth birthday, drunk, Songlian lets slip that Meishan is having an affair with the family doctor. Meishan had warned her to keep quiet. She had kept quiet, until the drink.

Zhuoyun catches Meishan with the doctor at a hotel. Songlian sees the servants drag Meishan to the locked room on the roof, where two women were once put to death for adultery, and Meishan is killed there. As Meishan is dragged away, Zhuoyun thanks Songlian for telling her.

Songlian screams that they are murderers. The master tells her she saw nothing.

That sentence is the rules entire. Until now the rules distributed favour. Here they decide what happened. The room on the roof is the household’s archive of what it denies: two women before Meishan, and now Meishan. The economy of lanterns, massages and menus rests on a threat, and the threat is kept on the roof. And the man who decides what may be seen speaks the rule aloud himself.

Notice, too, Zhuoyun’s thanks. Gratitude in the Chen house is one more currency. In effect, she thanks Songlian the way one trader thanks another for a tip, and the thanks seals Songlian into what has happened: she is now someone who told. The nearest thing to an alliance this essay can find between two of the wives, Meishan’s plain speaking to Songlian and Songlian’s silence for Meishan, has been turned into its opposite by one drunken sentence and a word of thanks.

What Songlian does next is the strangest and bravest thing in the film. She lights the lanterns in Meishan’s empty courtyard and plays a recording of her singing. The servants say the place is haunted.

Read it as testimony. Told that she saw nothing, Songlian answers in the only language the household has ever accepted, which is its own. Lanterns mean that a woman is present and counted. She lights them for the woman the household has erased, and she puts the woman’s voice back into her rooms. It is a public statement, made in the household’s own signal: Meishan was here. The household hears it as a ghost.

That is what a household’s rules do with a witness. They can absorb rivalry, punishment and even a killing, because each of those runs through the rules. What they cannot absorb is a woman who saw and will not agree that she did not. So the witness’s statement becomes a haunting, and then the witness becomes a story.

The following summer the master takes a fifth wife. Songlian, gone mad, wanders the courtyards in her old student clothes.

The film shows what has become of her, and this essay will not name it or explain it. It can notice two things. The first is the clothes. She has put back on the person she was before the rules began: the student who came through the gate. The second is the massage. The tapping has started again, behind another gate, for another woman, who is already learning the household from its sounds. What the ending shows is not only Songlian’s suffering. It is that the system goes on, and that it needed no one in particular to go on: not Yan’er, not Meishan, not Songlian. It needed the rules, and a fifth wife.

Set the film’s turns side by side and the rules turn out to have hidden three things.

The first is the man. The rules turn every woman’s eyes sideways, towards the other women, and away from the one person who decides. The camera, by keeping his face from us, makes us do the same. By the end we know the wives’ faces far better than his, which is how the Chen house is built: the women are vivid to one another, and he is a weather they all live under.

The second is the violence. The lanterns and the menus look like privileges, and in a sense they are. But they are privileges in a house with a locked room on its roof, and the rules that hand out the lanterns are the rules that decide who is taken up there. The beauty of the courtyards is real. So is what it rests on.

The third, and the one the rules most need to hide, is that the women are all in the same position. Each holds a standing rationed out by one man. Each can be replaced; the fifth wife proves it. The rivalry keeps them from seeing this, or from acting on it if they do. Meishan told Songlian the truth about the household when a rival could have kept it to herself. Songlian kept Meishan’s secret when she could have traded it. For a few scenes two wives stood on the same side. The Chen house had to break that, and it did, using one of them to do it.

This Library’s essay “Made in Heaven, and Everything She Had to Bargain For” kept three words apart: what a woman is owed, what she can trade for, and what can only be given. In the Chen house the first word has no meaning. Nothing is owed; even a wife’s lanterns can be shrouded overnight. Nearly everything is traded: a secret for a punishment, a pregnancy for a place. Meishan’s plain speaking may have been strategy, or something given; this essay cannot tell which. But Songlian’s silence about the doctor was, on this reading, the one thing in the household not for sale, and Zhuoyun’s thanks turned it, after the fact, into a sale.

Women quarrelling is one of the oldest things a story can show, and one of the easiest to misread, because the quarrel is visible and the rule is not.

Japanese has a blunt phrase for the conclusion a viewer may be tempted to draw: onna no teki wa onna, a woman’s enemy is a woman. The Chen house is the strongest argument against that phrase this essay knows. Not because its women are kind to one another; they are not. Because it shows, step by step, where their enmity comes from. The terms of that enmity have an author, and the author is none of the women. The phrase has the wrong subject.

This Library’s essay “Asura, and a Place to Say It Without Losing” followed a Tokyo family in 1979 in which the last word on women’s quarrels goes to a husband. Women are asura, he says: gods who hold up every virtue on the outside and love nothing better than speaking ill of people. That essay noticed that the title belongs to a man and that the series gives its last look to the women, and it accepted an uncomfortable point: that an arrangement like the one it described is substantially maintained by women, handed down with love. Raise the Red Lantern shows the machinery behind a line like that husband’s. From where he stands, the wives of the Chen house would look like asura. From inside the rules, each of them is doing what the rules reward.

Martin’s vicious games are real, and the film does not soften them. But a game has rules, and someone wrote them.

Raise the Red Lantern opened in Japan on 11 April 1992, less than two weeks after the Academy Awards ceremony at which it had been a nominee, under a Japanese title of its own, Kōmu, a red dream. From 27 December 2024 it was back in Japanese cinemas, restored in high definition, in a programme of three early films that Zhang Yimou made with Gong Li.

The three titles point three ways. The novella’s names the women, the film’s Chinese title names the signal, and the Japanese title names a dream. This essay does not know who chose the Japanese title or why, and makes no claim about it. Read beside the other two, though, it is suggestive. A red dream is what the lanterns sell: the dream of being chosen, renewed every evening, that keeps the wives listening in the dark for the tapping that announces the evening’s choice. The title moves the eye from the machine to the dream it runs on.

A viewer in Japan is unlikely to find concubines in her own life, and should not be told that she will. What she may find is the mechanism, which needs no walled house. Wherever one person’s approval is the only currency on offer and several people are waiting for it, the waiting will look like a matter of personality long before it looks like a rule: an office where women are brought forward one at a time, a family in which a parent’s favour moves between siblings, a circle of friends arranged around one person’s attention. The film suggests a discipline that works in any of them. Before deciding what sort of women are quarrelling, find the lanterns, and find who lights them.

None of this makes the film a portrait of China, or of Japan, and this essay does not set either country above the other.

There are at least four ways this reading could be wrong, and a fifth that belongs to the person making it.

First, the allegory. Several of the film’s first critics read it as politics. In 1992 Rosenbaum wrote that it “explicitly critiques Chinese feudalism and indirectly critiques contemporary China”, and the Austin review saw “a couched allegory about obsolete old men and the harmful traditions governing China”; Martin called it “a brilliant political fable”. Writing in Senses of Cinema in 2004, David Neo argued that the women “represent the Chinese people who are oppressed by an authoritarian government that allows no freedom of expression”, and that the film “makes obvious but coded reference to the Tiananmen Square Massacre” of 1989. In 2018 O’Meara suggested that the rituals “may symbolise the dominant practices of social power in PRC in the 1990s.” If they are right, this essay has mistaken the vehicle of an allegory for its subject.

The answer here is narrow. An allegory only works if its literal story holds on its own terms, and this one does: it is a story about women inside a marriage, and it does not stop being one because it can also be read as a story about a state. But there is something worth noticing in the allegorical reading too. When the women are read as standing for a people, they become a figure for something else, and their particular harms, a maid in the snow, a wife on the roof, become signs. This essay has tried to keep them as women. It cannot say which reading the film intends, and it makes no claim about what its makers meant.

Second, the invented ritual and the outside eye. The lanterns are the film’s invention, and in O’Meara’s account the Chinese journalist Dai Qing “attacked the rituals in Raise the Red Lantern, arguing that the lack of realism in the film’s cultural and historical detail amounts to cultural misrepresentation.” Set that beside the film’s history: money from Taiwan by way of Hong Kong, a premiere at a European festival, a nomination for an American prize, a ban at home. A critic could fairly say that the film sold the world a beautiful, invented old China of red lights and cruel custom, and that an essay written from Japan has bought it. The answer attempted here is that the invention is the very reason this essay reads the film as a mechanism and not as a record. But the objection reaches the reader as well as the writer. A viewer in Japan is part of the audience that found the film beautiful.

Third, complicity. The Austin review found in the film a tale “about people’s ideological complicity in their own oppression”, and Rosenbaum saw wives and female servants who “virtually devote their lives to scheming against one another”, with a heroine he called “a less sympathetic figure than her predecessors”, the women Gong Li had played for Zhang before. This essay has leaned the other way, on the rules. The risk is real. A reading that blames only the rules takes away the women’s choices, and with them their standing as people who act. Zhuoyun’s thanks were her own. Songlian’s telling was her own. The essay has tried to say so plainly, and a reader who thinks it is still too gentle is not wrong.

Fourth, beauty. The film is famous for how it looks, and a prison that is lovely to look at may teach a viewer to admire it. Rosenbaum found the world it presents cold, remote and stifling, with little emotional release. A film held at that distance may let its audience watch women destroy one another as a pattern, and take pleasure in the pattern. This essay has argued that the distance is the point. It may also be the problem.

Fifth, the writer’s distance. This essay reads a Chinese film through what has been written about it in English and Japanese. Where it goes beyond those accounts, it is interpretation, and should be read as that.

Three things, kept apart.

A rivalry can be built. When one person’s choice is the only source of standing, and it is handed out in public and can be withdrawn overnight, the people waiting for it will be set against one another whatever they are like, and their quarrels will look like character. Before judging the women in such a quarrel, find the rule, and find whom it serves. Very often that person is not in the room.

A household’s rules hide what they are for. Here they hid a man, a locked room and an alliance, and the last is the one worth looking for. The rules of the Chen house could survive any amount of rivalry. What they could not survive was two of its women on the same side, or a woman who saw what was done and would not say she had not.

Rivalry does not erase choice. The rules left the weapon within reach; the women decided whether to use it. Understanding why a woman does a cruel thing is not permission for the thing, and on this reading the film never confuses the two.

If you have caught yourself measuring yourself against another woman for something a third person hands out, a place, a word of approval, a little standing, and have been ashamed of what you felt, some of that shame may belong to the arrangement. The feeling is real, and so is whatever you do with it. But it may help to ask who set the terms, and whether the woman you are watching is watching you for the same reason. The two of you may be in the same position. The Chen house needed its women never to notice that.

This is a reading of a film. It diagnoses no one, the characters included, and nothing in it is advice about any reader’s marriage or household.

It rests on the film’s published record and on criticism and reference works read where they were published: reviews by Jonathan Rosenbaum and Marjorie Baumgarten in 1992 and by Adrian Martin in 1993; essays by David Neo in 2004 and Radha O’Meara in 2018 in Senses of Cinema; and the Venice festival’s and the Academy’s own records of the Silver Lion and the nomination. What a critic describes is given as that critic’s account, and lines of dialogue are paraphrased.

It makes no claim about China or about Chinese women, then or now, about the history of concubinage anywhere, or about what Zhang Yimou or Su Tong intended. The film’s rituals are treated as the film’s inventions.

No director, performer, critic or festival named here has any connection with this publication, and none has endorsed it.

For readers in Japan: if a spouse or partner is hurting you, calling #8008 connects you to the nearest spousal violence counselling and support centre. Consultations are limited to each centre’s hours, and the call costs the same as a call to an ordinary landline.

Whose choice decides your standing, and has that person ever had to appear?

Have you ever been angry with a woman for something a rule did?

What would you have to stop competing for, to stand on the same side as the person you compete with?

Has anyone ever told you that you did not see what you saw? What did you do with it?