Empress 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 and sexual partners. 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,
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. Jung 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 the 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 - with one of
whom she fell in love, with tragic consequences. The world Jung
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 Based on newly available, mostly Chinese, historical
documents such as court records, official and private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 eye-witness accounts, this biography
will revolutionise 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.
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