Lily in China uses up just about everything I know about Imperial China, and that doesn’t amount to much, unfortunately. A lot of the first part of the story, the caravan trek across country from the Xinjiang region of north-western China to Bejing, the Forbidden City, was loosely based on the missing Doctor Who episode, Marco Polo. The attacks on the Caravan were, again, loosely based on the outlaw raid seen in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Those two sources amount to all I know about China.

But it doesn’t really matter in a two thousand word story which is mostly about Lily and Li’s continued love story. The important fact is that the two were married under Imperial Chinese law and tradition, and lived as man and wife for many happy years before returning to Liverpool only a day after they left. Lily, of course, decides to live on Gallifrey as a widowed aristocrat, keeping her marriage to Li secret.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Beijing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaolin_Monastery
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Song