Who Is Prince Changxin in Pursuit of Jade? The Rebel Prince, Who Kills Him — and Why He Isn't the Real Villain

Quick answer: Prince Changxin (长信王) is the rebel prince who serves as Pursuit of Jade's public-facing military antagonist in the drama's back half. He is played by Guan Yunpeng. He raises an army against the throne and promises to share power with his collaborators — and he is killed by Fan Changyu (樊长玉) in episode 30, a kill that earns her the rank of Flower-Crowned General (簪花将军). But here's the thing most viewers get wrong: Changxin is not the architect of the crime the whole drama is about. He's the third layer of a three-layer villain structure, and the actual first mover has been dead since before episode 1.

General Wei Qilin (魏麒麟) is the other name people search for, and he's the opposite kind of character: not a villain at all, but the commander scapegoated and executed for the Jinzhou disaster — and, in the drama's biggest reveal, Fan Changyu's grandfather.

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Who is Prince Changxin?

Prince Changxin is a senior imperial prince and the drama's overt military threat once the story moves from courtly maneuvering into open war.

His pitch to his collaborators is the classic rebel bargain: back me, and we split the throne's power between us. He is the man whose refusal to send reinforcements helped seal the Jinzhou garrison's fate — the atrocity that destroyed both the Xie family and General Wei Qilin sixteen years before the drama opens.

His exact blood relationship to Qi Sheng is described inconsistently across sources — brother, half-brother, and close cousin all appear. What is not in dispute is his function: senior conspirator, public antagonist, and the man both leads have concrete reason to want dead.

Who plays Prince Changxin? Guan Yunpeng.

Who kills Prince Changxin?

Fan Changyu kills him, in episode 30 — not in the finale, which is a common mix-up given how much of the story is still running afterward. Ten more episodes follow his death, because his death doesn't solve the mystery. It only clears the battlefield.

She does it with her father's butcher knife, and the drama treats that as the whole point: the weapon of a commoner trade, used on a prince, by a woman the court would not have let into the room. The kill earns her the Flower-Crowned General (簪花将军) title, a fourth-rank generalship. We covered that arc in full in Does Fan Changyu Become a General?.

Why he isn't the real villain

Pursuit of Jade deliberately stacks three faces of villainy, and the reason so many viewers finish confused about "who the bad guy actually is" is that the drama keeps moving the answer backwards in time.

Layer 1 — the public antagonist: Prince Changxin. The rebel with the army. Dies in episode 30. Satisfying, and insufficient.

Layer 2 — the apparent architect: Wei Yan (魏严). Played by Yan Yikuan. For 25-plus episodes he reads as the man who built the whole thing. He handed General Wei Qilin a falsified tiger tally (虎符, the military authorization token). He blocked reinforcements through Prince Changxin. He benefited politically when both the Xie and Wei Qilin families fell. He covered up the truth for sixteen years. He is a genuine villain — just not the first one.

Layer 3 — the hidden first mover: Emperor Qi Yi (齐屹). The late Emperor, and the drama's true mastermind. Paranoid about his own military and about his own popular son, Qi Yi engineered the abandonment of the Jinzhou garrison specifically to kill Crown Prince Chengde, who was visiting the front. The Xie family and General Wei Qilin were collateral damage in a regicidal purge dressed up as a battlefield failure.

Read the three layers together and the drama's argument comes into focus: everyone the heroes can actually punch is downstream of one dead emperor's fear of his own son. You cannot avenge yourself on a corpse. That's why the ending is what it is.

Who is General Wei Qilin?

Wei Qilin (魏麒麟) is the commander who was scapegoated and executed for the Jinzhou disaster — handed a falsified tiger tally by Wei Yan, denied reinforcements, and then branded a traitor for the defeat that resulted.

The reveal that reorganizes the whole drama: Fan Dagui (樊大贵), Fan Changyu's butcher father, is Wei Qilin's son. Which makes Fan Changyu the executed general's granddaughter.

After his father was branded a traitor, Fan Dagui took a butcher's identity and disappeared into a provincial town specifically to hide his daughters from political reprisal. Fan Changyu is born into that hiding and grows up not knowing what she is.

This is what makes her eventual fourth-rank generalship coherent rather than a fairy tale. Inside the drama's own logic she is technically a general's granddaughter — the military lineage was always there, buried under a butcher's apron. And it means the Jinzhou Case is not only Xie Zheng's wound. It is hers too, secretly, by inheritance, long before she learns of it.

There's a grim symmetry the drama never states out loud: the man Fan Changyu kills in episode 30 is one of the men who helped destroy her own grandfather. She doesn't know that when she does it.

Frequently asked

Who is Prince Changxin in Pursuit of Jade? A rebel imperial prince, the drama's public military antagonist in the back half, played by Guan Yunpeng.

Who kills Prince Changxin? Fan Changyu, in episode 30, with her father's butcher knife.

Is Prince Changxin the main villain? No. He's the visible one. Wei Yan appears to be the architect, but the actual first mover is the late Emperor Qi Yi, who engineered the Jinzhou massacre to kill his own son.

Is Wei Qilin a villain? No — the opposite. He was framed and executed for a disaster deliberately engineered by the throne.

How is Wei Qilin related to Fan Changyu? He's her grandfather. Her father Fan Dagui is Wei Qilin's son, living under a butcher's identity to hide the family.

What is a tiger tally (虎符)? A tally in two halves used to authorize troop movements in imperial China — a commander could only act when his half matched the half held by the court. Handing someone a falsified one is how you engineer a military disaster and blame the general for it.

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More on Pursuit of Jade:

• Family Tree & Character Relationships: How Three Families Orbit One Buried Crime
• Ending Explained: Is It a Happy or Sad Ending?
• The Politics Explained: The Jinzhou Case
• Does Fan Changyu Become a General?
• Zhang Linghe Career Guide: Xie Zheng and Beyond