Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China Hardback - 2013

Media reviews

A New York Times Notable Book
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
An Economist Best Book for Fall
 
“Empress Dowager Cixi is revisionist history at its most exuberant. As with her damning Mao exegesis, Chang hasn’t only a gut conviction about her subject. Extensive research, often into previously unexamined sources, produces hard evidence of both Cixi’s formidable gifts as a strategist, and her sincere efforts at reform. It is a wild narrative ride…. Her enthusiasm for Cixi, along with the astounding details of a half-century of outsized Chinese history, makes for a compelling, lively account, rich with drama and intrigue.” —Charles Foran, The Globe and Mail
 
“Absorbing…. [Chang’s] extensive use of new Chinese sources makes a strong case for a reappraisal…. What makes reading this new biography so provocative are the similarities between the challenges faced by the Qing court a century ago and those confronting the Chinese Communist Party today…. There is much to learn here from the experiences of Empress Dowager Cixi.” —Orville Schell, The New York Times Book Review
 
“A comprehensive biography that is three-dimensional in scope…. The portrait Chang paints of Cixi is complex….With this authoritative and epic biography, Chang harnesses Cixi’s ambition and makes a bold attempt to broadcast Cixi’s achievements against the weight of history while chronicling China at the crossroads of a new era of change.” —Jason Beerman, Toronto Star
 
“If there is one woman who mattered in the history of modern China, it is the empress dowager Cixi…. She was much maligned as a brutal despot and diehard conservative responsible for the fall of the Qing dynasty. That conventional image is queried in this detailed and beautifully narrated biography, which at long last restores the empress dowager to her rightful place…. [Chang] has a wonderful eye for the telling detail and excels at unraveling palace intrigues and corridor politics…. She is the first to devote a whole book to Cixi and place her at the very heart of modern Chinese history.” —Frank Dikotter, The Sunday Times
 
“[Empress Dowager Cixi] is…a model of the biographical form. Meticulously researched, and written in crystalline prose, the book fashions, from the indeterminate detail of Cixi’s life, and the tumultuous history though which she led her country, a narrative of remarkable cohesion and concision.” —Jonathan Chatwin, Asian Review of Books