Ambition and Power in Of Jade and Dragons: How the Pursuit of Power Corrupts
The Thematic Claim: Power's Corrosive Price in Of Jade and Dragons
In Of Jade and Dragons, Amber Chen builds a world where ambition is both the engine of progress and the instrument of destruction. The novel's central claim is that the pursuit of power—whether institutional, political, or personal—systematically corrodes the values it claims to serve. The Engineers Guild, founded to advance knowledge, becomes a fortress of exclusion and political maneuvering. The High Command, sworn to protect the nine isles, sacrifices friendship and integrity for control. And individual characters, from the High Commander to Ye-yang to Ying herself, discover that the cost of ambition is measured in moral compromise. The novel does not condemn ambition outright; rather, it shows how ambition, when untethered from ethical restraint, transforms both institutions and individuals into instruments of harm.
The Guild: Ambition Institutionalized
The Engineers Guild is the novel's most vivid portrait of institutional ambition. When Ying first arrives, the compound is described as resembling a military fortress more than an institution of research and learning—a telling inversion of what a guild of engineers should be. The guild's stated mission is the pursuit of knowledge, but its actual behavior reveals a different priority: self-preservation and political alignment.
Master Gerel embodies this corruption. His treatment of Ying is not merely pedagogical harshness; it is personal vendetta. He mocks her father's memory, calling Shan-jin cocky and arrogant and sneering that the Annals are still here while Aihui Shan-jin is not. Gerel's jealousy is the corrosive acid of institutional ambition—he resents Shan-jin's brilliance because it threatened his own standing. The guild's response to Ying's unconventional thinking—dismissing her questions, mocking her insights, nearly expelling her—shows an institution more invested in protecting its reputation than in advancing knowledge.
The guild's motto, These seas can never trap those who are meant to fly, is itself a study in irony. It is the phrase Ying's father lived by, yet the same motto seals a threatening letter warning the Aihui clan not to investigate his death. The institution that claims to celebrate flight uses its own creed to ground and silence those who might challenge it. Even the guild's apprenticeship trial becomes a battleground for the beiles' political ambitions, with candidates treated as proxies in a succession war. Ye-kan, the fourteenth prince, disguises himself with a painful allergic reaction to enter the trial on his own merits rather than through privilege—a rare example of ambition seeking legitimacy through effort, yet even his presence is entangled in the same political web.
The High Commander: Power's Price
Aogiya Lianzhe, the High Commander, represents the most direct case of ambition corrupting an individual. His hunger for power led him to order the murder of his own friend, Aihui Shan-jin. The motive was not personal animosity but strategic gain: Shan-jin and Lianshu were developing cannon improvements that could shift the military balance against the Qirin Empire. Rather than collaborate with Shan-jin, the High Commander chose to steal from him—and when that failed, to kill him.
The novel reveals this through Lianshu's confession. She admits that her selfish thirst for knowledge and her brother's hunger for power destroyed Shan-jin's life. The High Commander's ambition is not abstract; it has a body count. And when Ying confronts him, he admits responsibility but frames it as an accident—a euphemism that reveals how power rewrites moral language.
The High Commander's death is fittingly ironic. He is killed not by an enemy of the state but by the son he underestimated. Ye-yang orchestrates the confrontation so that Ying will deliver the fatal blow, and the High Commander dies from a wound inflicted by the daughter of the man he murdered. His ambition to control the succession, to choose his heir, is undone by the very machinations he set in motion.
Ye-yang: The Architect of Ambition
Ye-yang is the novel's most complex portrait of ambition. On the surface, he is the fourth beile, the youngest and least powerful of the High Commander's potential heirs. But his ambition is the most calculated. He nominates Ying for the guild trial not out of kindness but because he sees her as a weapon—Ye-yang's sword, as the other beiles perceive her.
Ye-yang's manipulation is total. He brings Ying to Fei, secures her entry into the guild, and positions her for the final confrontation with his father. He knows that Ying's quest for justice will lead her to the High Commander, and he arranges events so that she will be the instrument of his father's death. When the moment comes, Ye-yang kills Lady Odval and takes control of the palace, completing his coup.
Yet Ye-yang's ambition is not purely selfish. He frames his goal as securing the Empire and peace. He offers Ying an official acceptance letter to the guild under her real name—a genuine gesture of recognition. But Ying sees through the offer. She drops the letter off the cliff, choosing to leave Fei rather than accept a place bought with blood. Ye-yang's ambition, however noble its stated aims, is inseparable from the moral compromises that made it possible.
Ying's Ambition: The Exception or the Rule?
Ying's own ambition is the novel's most nuanced treatment of the theme. She enters the guild under false pretenses, disguised as a boy, driven by a desire for justice and a need to prove herself. Her father's dying wish was for her to burn the journal and stay out of danger; she defies him, choosing investigation over obedience. This is ambition, but it is also love—a desire to honor her father's legacy by uncovering the truth of his death.
The novel complicates Ying's ambition through her own reflections. She admits that her engineering projects were petty vanity projects that served no purpose but to curb her own boredom. Her father had taught her that we shouldn't build for ourselves—build for the people. Ying's journey is partly about learning to redirect her ambition from self-gratification to purpose.
But the novel does not let Ying off easily. Her ambition makes her complicit in Ye-yang's scheme. She kills the High Commander, even if she did not intend to. She is used, and she allows herself to be used, because her desire for justice aligns with Ye-yang's desire for power. The difference is that Ying recognizes the cost. When Ye-yang offers her the acceptance letter and the octagonal lantern, she refuses both. Her final act is to ride away without looking back—an assertion that some ambitions are not worth their price.
Complexity and Contradiction
The novel resists a simple moral equation. Ambition is not uniformly condemned; it is the engine that drives Ying's investigation, that pushes her to excel, that allows her to survive in a hostile institution. The guild's ambition to produce the best engineers in the nine isles is not inherently corrupt—it is the institutional culture that twists it. Similarly, Ye-yang's ambition to secure peace is not inherently evil; it is the means he chooses that corrupt him.
The most striking contradiction is the guild motto itself. These seas can never trap those who are meant to fly is aspirational and beautiful. It is also used to threaten and silence. The novel suggests that the same ambition that lifts people up can be weaponized to hold them down. The question is not whether to be ambitious, but what one is willing to sacrifice in the pursuit of power.
The symbols reinforce this tension. The jade pendant, bearing the dragon emblem of the Qirin Empire, connects Ying to her father's legacy and the truth of his death—it is the key that unlocks the High Commander's confession. The octagonal lantern, Ye-yang's gift, represents his attempt to bind Ying to his vision of power; her refusal of it is a rejection of that vision. The cobra symbol of the Cobra's Order and the dragon symbol of the Qirin Empire both evoke the military and imperial ambitions that drive the novel's conflicts.
Study Questions and Answers
1. How does the Engineers Guild's institutional culture reflect the novel's critique of ambition?
The guild is described as resembling a military fortress more than an institution of research and learning, revealing that its priorities have shifted from knowledge to power. Master Gerel's jealousy of Shan-jin and his mistreatment of Ying show how institutional ambition breeds personal vendettas. The guild's motto, used both as inspiration and as a threat, demonstrates how the same ideals can be twisted to serve power.
2. What role does the High Commander's ambition play in Shan-jin's death?
The High Commander ordered Shan-jin's murder to steal his cannon research, which could shift the military balance against the Qirin Empire. Lianshu's confession reveals that her brother's hunger for power and her own selfish thirst for knowledge destroyed Shan-jin's life. The High Commander later calls the death an accident, showing how power rewrites moral language.
3. How does Ye-yang's manipulation of Ying complicate the theme of ambition?
Ye-yang uses Ying as a weapon, positioning her to kill his father. His ambition is framed as noble—securing peace for the Empire—but his methods are morally corrupt. Ying's refusal of his offer at the end shows that she recognizes the cost of his ambition, even as she was complicit in it.
4. What does Ying's final choice—refusing the acceptance letter and the lantern—reveal about her character?
Ying chooses to leave Fei rather than accept a place in the guild bought with blood. Her refusal of the octagonal lantern, Ye-yang's gift, symbolizes her rejection of his vision of power. She asserts that some ambitions are not worth their price, choosing integrity over advancement.
5. How do the symbols of the jade pendant and the octagonal lantern function in the novel's treatment of ambition?
The jade pendant, bearing the dragon emblem of the Qirin Empire, connects Ying to her father's legacy and the truth of his death. It is the key that unlocks the High Commander's confession. The octagonal lantern, Ye-yang's gift, represents his attempt to bind Ying to his ambition. Her refusal of the lantern—and her decision to drop the acceptance letter—shows her rejecting the corrupting influence of power.