ABSTRACT In La Fille du Ciel (1911), a play co-authored by Pierre Loti and Judith Gautier, allusions to ethnic equality between the Manchu and the Han celebrate the political thinking of Kang Youwei (1858–1927), a Chinese reformer who figures in the play as Puits-des-bois, the emperor's minister. In this article, I use the picturesque and the political to show how the play combines Orientalist fantasy and late-Qing politics. Conceived as a French melodrama, the play makes the rift between imaginary narrative and political debate narrower than one might expect, but the picturesque tendency of its performance eventually submerges the political subtext.