Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China - Tapa blanda

"Cixi's extraordinary story has all the elements of a good fairy tale: bizarre, sinister, triumphant and terrible." --The Economist

"A truly authoritative account of Cixi's rule. Her story is both important and evocative." --Orville Schell, The New York Times Book Review

"A fantastic Machiavellian tale. . . . Dives into a genuinely fascinating figure: a fierce imperial consort who ruled behind the thrones of two successive Chinese emperors and helped ease China into the twentieth century." --New York magazine

"Certain to become the standard by which all future biographies of the Dowager Empress are measured." --The Daily Beast

"Jung Chang has written a pathbreaking and generally persuasive book." --The New York Review of Books

"If there is one woman who mattered in the history of modern China, it is the empress dowager Cixi. . . . [Her] conventional image is queried in this detailed and beautifully narrated biography, which at long last restores the empress dowager to her rightful place." --The Sunday Times (London)

"Sets out to rehabilitate the reputation of a woman who, [Chang] argues, helped modernize China. . . . While Chang acknowledges Cixi's missteps--such as allowing the Boxers to fight against a Western invasion, which led to widespread slaughter--she sees her as a woman whose energy, farsightedness, and ruthless pragmatism transformed a country." --The New Yorker

"[An] authoritative and epic biography." --The Toronto Star

"Well-researched and provocative. . . . Cixi deserves to be remembered and this book is to be welcomed for giving an important figure in Chinese history the prominence she deserves. . . . This spirited biography reminds us that a greater female presence might be a trigger for much-needed political change." --New Statesman

"Fascinating. . . . Wonderfully illuminating. . . . Jung Chang's new book gives the infamous concubine Cixi her due." --The Spectator

"This is a rich, dramatic story of rebellions, battles, plotting, rivalry, foreign invasion, punishment and forbidden love. . . . [Chang] uses new evidence and meticulous research to cast a spotlight on the amazing woman she regards as the mother of modern China." --Daily Mail

"Corrects a longstanding misconception about a woman whose impact on China can't be overstated. It's a fascinating look at power, politics and the gender divide." --BookPage

"A rich and fascinating book that never relaxes its hold on the reader despite the marshalling of a mass of complex historical details seen through the prism of Cixi." --The New York Journal of Books

This is from the bestselling author of Wild Swans and Mao: The Unknown Story. In this groundbreaking 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, the ancient country attained virtually all the attributes of a modern state and it was she who abolished gruesome punishments like 'death by a thousand cuts' and put an end to foot-binding. Jung Chang comprehensively overturns the conventional view of Cixi as a diehard conservative and cruel despot and 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. 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. "Powerful". (Simon Sebag Montefiore). "Truly authoritative". (New York Times). "Wonderful". (Sunday Times). It is shortlisted for the James Tait Black Biography Prize.