Ashes to Crown Episode 4 Review: Chu Zhao Stages a Poisoning, and Xiao Xun Sees the Trap First

By Mira Vance · Editor & Lead Reviewer

The young Emperor collapses at the ancestral rite, the court calls for the Grand Princess's head, and a fake poisoning becomes the bait in a game two people are playing at once. A quieter, sharper hour about who can read whose plan.

The hour opens on Xiao Xun at a chessboard, talking to himself. I had calculated every move, yet the one I held dearest threw it all into ruin. He reaches for composure he doesn’t quite have. I should thank her for making one thing clear — that even a masterful stratagem cannot survive a sudden turn of fortune, that the opponent does not always play by your script. He accounted for everyone, he admits, except her. Who would have thought that the little girl who once wept in public would dare to take the pieces in hand amid such chaos? The episode that follows is the two of them testing how much each has guessed about the other.

The Divine Bird descends, and the young Emperor falls at the censer

The ancestral rite runs with shamans chanting over the offering — the Divine Bird descends to the shrine as ancestral might protects the land. Chu Zhao has placed Deng Yi and Xie Yanfang in charge of every rite, the shamans’ invocations included, which worries Xiao Xun’s people until he lays out the mechanism. Once the herbs are lit, Xiao Yu, standing nearest to the censer, will inhale the poisoned smoke. She will guard against every possibility, he allows, yet once the smoke rises, her days as Grand Princess are over.

Then the boy Emperor crumples. Yu collapses mid-rite, and the shaman’s voice rises on cue: dark omens shadow the throne… it is as if the heavens seek to sever the imperial lifeline. Within seconds the cry goes up — the Grand Princess has plotted against His Majesty. Seize her at once. The poisoning Xiao Xun engineered to ruin her has landed exactly where he aimed it, and the court turns on Chu Zhao without a beat’s hesitation.

Xie Yanlai draws his blade, and the palace gates are sealed

What stops the seizure is steel. Whoever dares to touch Her Highness answers to my blade — Xie Yanlai, the Imperial Guard Commander, puts himself between Chu Zhao and the crowd, and the room recoils at a sword drawn before the throne. Deng Yi takes control instead: summon the Imperial Physician, seal the palace gates, no one leaves without express command.

The physician’s verdict is its own small mystery. His Majesty’s pulse shows no irregularity — yet he won’t wake, and the collapse looks strikingly similar to the Crown Prince’s poisoning from the coup. The toxin can’t be named because the Crown Prince’s death was never probed in time. Deng Yi, surveying a room that contains every suspect, lands on the obvious move. Everyone involved in the poisoning is right here. Why not ask them outright?

Outside Yu’s chamber, Chu Zhao and Xiao Xun first cross blades in words. She asks him plainly what poison the Emperor took. He throws it back as theatre — given it was the Third Prince’s doing, how should I know — and reaches for the shaman’s slur that branded her a jinx. She refuses it. Xiao Xun, I am the Grand Princess, not some jinx you claimed. The officials side with him, urging her to step aside and let the truth run its course. Deng Yi confines everyone to their palaces until it surfaces.

The Emperor was never poisoned, and Chu Zhao reveals the counter-plot

The reveal lands quietly, in a sickroom. Yu sits up the moment the door is shut. Zhao, how was my performance? I even fooled the Imperial Physician. The collapse was staged — pastries, a coached faint, a physician set to report a recovery on schedule. The boy treats it as a game, asking only that once it’s over she remember to build me a grand swing. A tender beat in the middle of an espionage hour: the child Emperor playing dead to catch the man who keeps trying to kill him.

When word reaches Xiao Xun that His Majesty is awake, his composure cracks. Impossible. Golden Finch Venom has no antidote. The poison, he reminds his people, is ours alone. He sends them to investigate and finds every door barred — the guards replaced by Xie Yanlai and reinforced, Deng Yi’s order forbidding visitors.

Chu Zhao later explains the logic to Xie Yanlai. She never knew the ritual poison matched the one that killed the Crown Prince; the waking-Emperor news was bait. Moving against Yu proves he killed the Crown Prince, too. That is why she needed Xie Yanlai in the shadows — to catch Xiao Xun red-handed when he came for the boy. Pressed on what happens if Xiao Xun doesn’t take it, she answers with a confidence that reads as a tell of its own: Your brother will help. Asked why she is so set on his death, she gives only the verdict. Because he deserves no less.

Xiao Xun swaps the poison and turns the trial into Chu Zhao’s

The bait works — and then it doesn’t. Xiao Xun arrives as the worried uncle, talks his way past the guards, and is left alone with the Emperor and the medicine. Chu Zhao springs it: Xiao Xun, heir to the Lord of Xiaonan, attempted to poison the Emperor. He demands proof. She calls for the Imperial Physician to test the tonic — and it comes back clean. It’s non-toxic. The court erupts, and Xiao Xun lets the trap close on her instead.

He saw it coming. Your little trap was far too rushed. He knew Golden Finch Venom has no antidote and the Crown Prince’s body was never examined, so the news of a cure had to be false — and he’d already had the physician decant a calming draft into the vial in place of any poison. Now he flips the charge: she is the prime suspect, and yet she left me alone with His Majesty, willing to risk the Emperor’s life to frame an enemy. He reaches for their history — we shared a deep bond for many years — and the officials pile on. The cry rises again: Chu Zhao’s treason demands her death. Her clever plan has handed Xiao Xun exactly the spectacle he wanted.

The real trap waits in the incense, and the impostor attendant is sprung

The episode then doubles back to what was running underneath. Yu’s nightmares, the calming soup that never works — Chu Zhao reads it correctly. It’s no nightmare. She checks the chamber’s new tributes and finds the calming incense, which should be fine as dust, completely pure, laced with grit instead. Someone is trying to poison the air — the toxins vanish with the smoke and destroy the evidence as they burn, the same way that killed the Crown Prince. Rather than flush out the mole, she plays along, ordering the Chenxiang incense changed to a blend of Fuling and Yuanzhi, and lets the enemy believe their poison is in place.

That patience pays off. Before the rite, Chu Zhao had caught the attendant preparing the herb wreath — an impostor from the Office of the Great Supplicator — and intercepted him with the trinkets still on him. When she produces the man and presses who is your master, he lunges at her with a blade, and Xie Yanlai takes the strike, the second time in one hour he’s put his body between her and a weapon. Xiao Xun seizes on the dead-man-tells-no-tales angle and accuses Xie Yanlai of overreach, of eyeing the Crown. But the boy Emperor finally speaks for himself, defending the Grand Princess as the one who has only ever sought to ease my burdens, claiming the feigned poisoning as his own idea, and ordering his uncle to rest at your estate. No court for now. Deng Yi and Xie concur. Xiao Xun walks out, removed from the court without ever being convicted.

A flashback to the desert, and a cloak in the cold

The hour closes on Xie Yanlai’s history. A memory of the frontier: a man sneaks into a tent, Xie Yanlai nearly kills him as a spy, and a general — his father — stops him. The intruder was only a father begging medicine for a sick child. In such tumultuous times, innocence is but a cloak we wear, the young Xie argues, and his father answers with the line that defines him. I wage war so that more may live. Suspicion is not proof; killing the innocent unmakes everything the fighting was meant to protect.

Back in the present, the two threads braid. Xie Yanlai tells Chu Zhao that a wolf chokes on its first kill but never lets its prey see the tremble of its own, and asks her never to pick up a blade ever again. A brief sword lesson, a lighter exchange about who taught whom, and then a quiet beat: he drapes a cloak over her against the night air. Put this on, lest you catch a cold. When she doesn’t move, he adds, with something close to hurt, Is this cloak so repulsive to you?

Tiny details worth clocking

• The chess monologue frames the whole episode — Xiao Xun naming his blind spot (I had accounted for everyone, except her) before the two of them spend the hour testing how much each has actually guessed.
• Yu’s request to build me a grand swing once it’s over is the only thing the boy Emperor asks for himself across the entire scheme.
• Xiao Xun’s tell is the antidote: Golden Finch Venom has no antidote, so the news of a cured Emperor must be false — the same certainty that lets him swap a calming draft into the vial and beat Chu Zhao’s rushed trap.
• Chenxiang incense, swapped to a Fuling-and-Yuanzhi blend — Chu Zhao’s refusal to flush the mole and her decision to let the poison “stay” is the patient counter-move under the loud one.
• Xie Yanlai takes a blade for Chu Zhao twice in one episode — first at the seizure, then from the impostor attendant — well before the cloak ever comes off his shoulders.

Verdict

After a premiere built on a single irreversible catastrophe, this is a positioning hour, and the slower pace works because the scheming stays legible on both sides. Chu Zhao stages a fake poisoning to bait a confession out of Xiao Xun; Xiao Xun reads the bait, swaps the poison, and very nearly turns her trap into her execution. The pleasure is watching two careful players each assume they’re a move ahead, with the boy Emperor’s staged collapse and the impostor attendant as the cards Chu Zhao keeps in reserve. The downside is that the win is procedural rather than decisive — Xiao Xun is sidelined to his estate, not finished, and the official chorus chanting for Chu Zhao’s death is broad enough to feel like furniture.

What lands best is the human ballast around the maneuvering: Yu playing dead and asking for a swing, Xie Yanlai stepping in front of two blades and then a cloak, the desert flashback that explains why he won’t kill on suspicion. Pieces to track: the poisoned Chenxiang incense Chu Zhao chose not to expose, the mole still unfound inside Yu’s chamber, Xiao Xun banished but uncharged and certain to return, and the slow thaw between the Grand Princess and her Commander that the cold-night cloak only just begins.

Rating: 8.0/10

More episodes from Ashes to Crown — A betrayed empress, reborn to undo her own ruin. Jump to any episode in the season:

Reviewed by Mira Vance · QuizFandom Editor & Lead Reviewer. Every rating is an honest per-watch assessment from the desk that also writes the quizzes — not a press release rehash.

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