In this biography, Jung Chang vividly describes how Empress Dowager Cixi -the most important woman in Chinese history- brought a medieval empire into the modern age. Under her rule, the ancient country attained virtually all the attributes of a modern state and it was she who abolished punishments like “death by a thousand cuts” and put an end to foot-binding.
Chang overturns the conventional view of Cixi as a diehard conservative and cruel despot, and takes the reader into the depths of the splendid Summer Palace and the harem of Beijing’s Forbidden City, where she lived surrounded by eunuchs. The book is a panoramic depiction of the birth of modern China and a portrait of a woman: as a concubine to a monarch, as the absolute ruler of a third of the worlds population, and as a unique stateswoman.
A.D. (Ireland, 2015)