I disliked this song when I first listened to it because I felt that it was just another mass-produced Cantonese pop song, but I eventually loved it after listening to it several more times. This song isn't very tearjerking if compared to other songs but its lyrics filled my eyes up with tears. Background info: This song, Love in the Forbidden City, is the theme song for the Cantonese dubbed version of Chinese drama The Story of Zhen Huan.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ElL_8byxHY[/youtube]
Rough translation: "She startled a hundred flowers as she gently brushed rouge onto her cheeks. She dressed herself in bright and beautiful colors to compete against the flowers around her. Her frowns and smiles were significant enough to determine her nation's fate, but she never found out that her palace had been frozen in ice since dawn. Brilliant fireworks disappeared as night disappeared into day. She was one of her nation's most heavenly beauties, waiting for someone to claim her as his own. She broke the silence around her by playing the zither, but the snow, the moon, the wind and the flowers around her were too preoccupied to listen to her. Her love story ended the moment she was sent into this palace in the Forbidden City, she stared at the sky alone with tears in her eyes. While she was competing for glory so as to avoid humiliation, she fell in love with someone that she had never intended to love. She resembled a rock; ignorant of pain. She realized that snow had suddenly engulfed her world, she embraced the cold wind every night, had anyone else tried empathizing with her? The tree had shriveled and died, leaving a mess of crisscrossed tree rings behind--her life had ended in bloodshed and tragedy. She could not disguise her tear-filled eyes with cosmetics, she lost her moral compass in a struggle for whom? The lamp that she lit every night illuminated her fate--she whose beauty shamed the moon into hiding and shamed flowers into wilting was destined to be recorded in history, but no one could verify what History said about her. Her love story ended the moment she was sent into this palace in the Forbidden City, she stared at the sky alone with tears in her eyes. While she was competing for glory so as to avoid humiliation, she fell in love with someone that she had never intended to love. She resembled a rock; ignorant of pain. She realized that snow had suddenly engulfed her world, she embraced the cold wind every night, had anyone else tried empathizing with her? The tree had shriveled and died, leaving a mess of crisscrossed tree rings behind--her life had ended in bloodshed and tragedy. Time celebrated her departure. Even after her beauty had faded and her hair had turned white, she remained in this palace in the Forbidden City, sacrificing her youth for a dream of hers. Engulfed by love; engulfed by hatred; she had already become a rock ignorant of pain, she no longer expected anyone to empathize with her aching heart. As dimming sunlight entered her palace in the Forbidden City, her tears celebrated her departure from this world. Her life was just a fragile life within the Forbidden City's sturdy walls. She, a beauty who eventually ruined her nation, realized in the end that all her love stories were products of manipulation. Her love story in the Forbidden City was transmitted through the ages secretly."