They say that when I was born, all the wild geese flew down from the sky, and the fish sank beneath the waves, having forgotten how to swim. Even the lotus flowers in our gardens quivered and turned their heads away, so ashamed they were of their own diminished allure in my presence. I have always found such stories to be laughably exaggerated, but they prove the same thing: that my beauty was something unnatural, transcending nature itself. And that beauty is not so different from destruction.

so these stories are all taken from the idioms 沉鱼落雁，闭月羞花 / to make the fish sink to the riverbed and the geese fall from the skies, to blot out the moon and put the flowers to shame, which are used to describe the 四大美女 / four great beauties of ancient china. each binome/story is related specifically to one of these beauties; xishi in particular was said to make the fish sink, because she was often seen washing clothes in a river, hence gaining the name 浣纱女 / the girl who washes light fabrics. (side note: 纱 is so finicky to translate)

anyway, the reason beauty is linked to destruction is because all four of these women were famed for bringing down entire kingdoms through their beauty. they're so renowned for it, in fact, that there are entire poems written about it, like this one by 李延年 li yannian:

北方有佳人， / In the north, there is a beautiful person, 絕世而獨立。 / Who is peerless and stands alone. 一顧傾人城， / One look topples human cities, 再顧傾人國。 / Another look topples human kingdoms. 寧不知傾城與傾國， / How could one not know of the toppling of cities and the toppling of kingdoms, 佳人難再得！ / Such a beautiful person will be hard to find again!

(translation my own)

according to historical records, the emperor he sang this poem for lamented the fact that such great beauty no longer existed, upon which his older sister recommended li yannian's younger sister, for whom he apparently wrote this poem. for some reason that is beyond me, the emperor then took her as a concubine despite her being quite explicitly compared to women who ruined entire dynasties through their beauty. men. anyway, civil unrest later broke out between the li family and the empress's family, and also their older brother defected to the xiongnu. the dynasty/kingdom itself didn't fall, but her family sure did, though i'm not sure how much she had to do with it.

this where jennifer and lucy merge all the books that are dupes/short stories? based on the reviews it seems to be a bunch of randomness 😭💀