- Title:
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Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China
- Written by:
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Jung Chang
- Read by:
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Pik-Sen Lim
- Format:
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Unabridged CD Audio Book
- Number of CDs:
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16
- Duration:
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19 hours 3 minutes
- Published:
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August 01 2014
- Available Date:
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August 01 2014
- Age Category:
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Adult
- ISBN:
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9781486220182
- Genres:
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Non-fiction; Asian; Biography; Historical
- Publisher:
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Bolinda audio
Qty
Format
Price
Bolinda price
New York Times bestselling author
'A fascinating and instructive biography for anyone interested in how today’s China began.'
Library Journal
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. 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, the 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. Chang comprehensively overturns the conventional view of Cixi as a diehard conservative and cruel despot.
Based on newly available, mostly Chinese, historical documents such as court records, official and private correspondence, diaries and eyewitness accounts, this biography will revolutionize historical thinking about a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.
'The author of “Wild Swans” sets out to rehabilitate the reputation of a woman who, she argues, helped modernise 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
'Cixi’s extraordinary story has all the elements of a good fairy tale: bizarre, sinister, triumphant and terrible.'
The Economist
'When an author as thorough, gifted, and immersed in Chinese culture as Chang writes, both scholars and general readers take notice.'
Booklist