Synopses & Reviews
A New York Times Notable BookEmpress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908) is the most important woman in Chinese history. She ruled China for decades and brought a medieval empire into the modern age.
At the age of sixteen, in a nationwide selection for royal consorts, Cixi was chosen as one of the emperor’s numerous concubines. When he died in 1861, their five-year-old son succeeded to the throne. Cixi at once launched a palace coup against the regents appointed by her husband and made herself the real ruler of China—behind the throne, literally, with a silk screen separating her from her officials who were all male.
In this groundbreaking biography, Jung Chang vividly describes how Cixi fought against monumental obstacles to change China. Under her the ancient country attained virtually all the attributes of a modern state: industries, railways, electricity, the telegraph and an army and navy with up-to-date weaponry. It was she who abolished gruesome punishments like “death by a thousand cuts” and put an end to foot-binding. She inaugurated women’s liberation and embarked on the path to introduce parliamentary elections to China. Chang comprehensively overturns the conventional view of Cixi as a diehard conservative and cruel despot.
Cixi reigned during extraordinary times and had to deal with a host of major national crises: the Taiping and Boxer rebellions, wars with France and Japan—and an invasion by eight allied powers including Britain, Germany, Russia and the United States. Jung Chang not only records the Empress Dowager’s conduct of domestic and foreign affairs, but also takes the reader into the depths of her splendid Summer Palace and the harem of Beijing’s Forbidden City, where she lived surrounded by eunuchs—one of whom she fell in love, with tragic consequences. The world Chang describes here, in fascinating detail, seems almost unbelievable in its extraordinary mixture of the very old and the very new.
Based on newly available, mostly Chinese, historical documents such as court records, official and private correspondence, diaries and eyewitness accounts, this biography will revolutionize historical thinking about a crucial period in China’s—and the world’s—history. Packed with drama, fast paced and gripping, it is both a panoramic depiction of the birth of modern China and an intimate portrait of a woman: as the concubine to a monarch, as the absolute ruler of a third of the world’s population, and as a unique stateswoman.
Synopsis
From a coauthor of the best-selling Mao: The Unknown Story, the dramatic, epic biography of the woman who ruled China for fifty years, overcoming centuries of traditions and formalities--and found ways to modernize China, exposing its culture to western political ideas and technology.Empress Dowager Cixi led an intense and singular life. Chosen at the age of twelve to be a concubine by the Emperor Xianfeng, she gives birth to his only male heir, who at four years old is designated emperor when his father dies in 1861. Enlisting the help of Xianfeng's widow, Cixi orchestrates a coup that ousts the appointed regents and makes herself the regent on behalf of her son. Her son ends up dying in his mid-twenties and Cixi is able to designate a young nephew as the emperor--continuing her reign, which stretches to her death in 1908. In this remarkable chronicle, Chang gives us a portrait of Cixi that is complex and riveting: her ruthlessness in fighting off rivals; her startling curiosity to learn all she can, not only about China (she is not allowed to leave the court compound); her reliance on her advisers and officials, often Westerners who she has placed in key positions of responsibility; and her sensitivity and desire to preserve the distinctiveness of China's past. Chang makes a compelling case that Cixi was one of the most formidable--and enlightened--rulers of a nation.
Synopsis
Jung Chang is the best-selling author of Wild Swans, which The Asian Wall Street Journal called the most widely read book about China, and Mao: The Unknown Story (with Jon Halliday), which was described by Time as “an atom bomb of a book.” Her books have been translated into more than forty languages and sold more than fifteen million copies outside mainland China, where they are both banned. She was born in China in 1952 and moved to Britain in 1978. She lives in London.
About the Author
JUNG CHANG was born in Sichuan Province, China, in 1952. She was a Red Guard briefly at the age of fourteen and then worked as a peasant, a "barefoot doctor," a steelworker, and an electrician before becoming an English-language student and, later, an assistant lecturer at Sichuan University. She left China for Britain in 1978 and was subsequently awarded a scholarship by York University, where she obtained a Ph.D. in linguistics in 1982, the first person from the People's Republic of China to receive a doctorate from a British university.