Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

Selected when she was fifteen as one of Emperor Xianfeng’s 3,000 concubines, she rose rapidly through their ranks, cementing her position by producing an heir, Tongzhi. When Xianfeng died in 1861, Tongzhi was only five. Cixi at once launched a palace coup, ousted the regents appointed by her husband and made herself sole regent for her son.

In this ground-breaking biography, Jung Chang shows that under Cixi’s rule China acquired virtually all the attributes of a modern state: industries, railways, cars, electricity, telephones, Western medicine, an army and navy with modern weaponry. She developed foreign trade and diplomacy, and revolutionised the education system; newspapers were published for the first time, students were sent abroad to study. She abolished foot-binding and gruesome medieval punishments like ‘death by a thousand cuts’. Jung Chang comprehensively overturns the conventional view of Cixi as a deeply conservative and cruel despot.

Cixi reigned over extraordinary times and had to deal with a host of major national crises: the Taiping and Boxer Rebellions, wars with Britain, France and Japan. Jung Chang looks in detail at her conduct of domestic and foreign affairs, but also takes us into Cixi’s splendid Summer Palace, where she lived surrounded by eunuchs. The world Jung Chang describes here, in fascinating detail, seems almost incredible, a unique mixture of the very old and the very new.

Fast-paced, gripping, based on thorough research in newly opened Chinese and Western archives, this biography will revolutionise historical thinking about a crucial period in China’s – and the world’s – history.

Jung Chang is the author of Wild Swans (1991), which has been translated into thirty languages and sold 10 million copies, and (with her husband Jon Halliday) Mao: The Unknown Story (2005), which was described by Time Magazine as ‘an atom bomb of a book’. She was born in China in 1952, and came to Britain in 1978. She lives in London.

Description Empress Dowager Cixi is the most important woman in Chinese history. She ruled China for forty-seven years, and transformed China from a medieval state into a modern society.