My Beggar Husband Is the Emperor

A fortune teller told Chen Yueying's father she was fated to marry a beggar, and on a night of heavy snow Chen Yuanjiang put her out of the house for it. She collapsed in the snow and was picked up by Zhao Ziheng, the Emperor, travelling in plain clothes. They spent one night together. She was gone before morning and raised their son Hao'er alone. For six years he kept no other women and searched without finding her, while she and the boy lived on other people's charity and took whatever her superstitious father, her stepmother, and her sister, now married to a prefect, cared to hand out. When he finally traces the Chen household in Qingzhou he arrives ragged from the road and asks to marry her, and the family sees the fortune teller's beggar walking through the door. Her father makes the pair of them kneel. Zhao Ziheng can name his wife and his son and cannot prove a word of who he is, and it stays that way until the Empress Dowager's carriage arrives at the gate.