In the last year of the Qing Dynasty, the Eight-Nation Alliance invaded the city of Beijing, cixi fled west with the Guangxu Emperor and his concubines, and the Guangxu Emperor's favorite concubine, Zhenfei, was refused to take her away by Cixi on the grounds that "Zhenfei is young and beautiful, will be insulted by foreigners, and ashamed of the ancestors", and for fear that she would leave her to provoke right and wrong, simply ordered the eunuchs to push her into the well inside the Zhenshun Gate at the northern end of the Ningshou Palace of the Forbidden City, which was therefore named "Zhenfei Well".
More than a year later, Cixi and Guangxu returned to Beijing, and Cixi blamed Zhenfei's death on the self-made of the eunuch chief Cui Yugui, and ordered that Zhenfei's body be salvaged and buried in a coffin in the palace maid cemetery.
After the Zhenfei accident, the well was banned, but it is still well preserved, and now when we visit the Forbidden City, we can still see the Zhenfei Well. However, many tourists have a question in their minds: the wellhead is only 10 inches wide, not to mention adults, even children can't stuff it in, how was Zhenfei pushed down?
In fact, the last emperor Puyi had already given the answer. He heard the eunuch at that time say that the wellhead of the Zhenfei Well was originally quite large, and later for the sake of safety, a wellhead stone was added to the wellhead, and there was an iron rod lock, mainly to ensure the safety of the visitors to the Forbidden City. So what we're seeing now is not the original wellhead, but a wellhead stone with a safety barrier.