Empress Dowager Long — The Story of Cixi

Author: (American) Segrave / Qin Chuan'an
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-04-01
Features: A fallen concubine who has an illegitimate son named Qin Ming. She originally intended to help him ascend the throne... How could our nation of etiquette accept such a lustful, hypocritical, cruel, and vicious person, a usurping thief who seized the throne as a cripple? In 1980, with the death of Empress Dowager Cixi, Sir Edmund Backhouse suddenly announced his special discovery, claiming that many court archives and other manuscripts had long fallen into his hands long after the Boxer Rebellion. These discoveries confirmed the image of the evil and decadent Empress Dowager Cixi described by Kang Youwei, and also exposed the bizarre details of her past life: how she used poisoned cake to eliminate her rivals, and how she kept eunuchs in the palace for her sexual entertainment. In people's memories, Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908) had always been a historical monster, a willful concubine of the Qing court. After seizing power in 1861, she controlled the dragon throne for half a century. Her reign spanned from the late Opium War to the Boxer Movement, to the disintegration of the feudal empire. In legend, she was seen as the embodiment of poisoning, murder, and conspiracy. In 1974, to the astonishment and frustration of scholars: Sir Edmund Backhouse (the biographer of Empress Dowager Cixi) was exposed as a fraud. Today, the author (author of the globally popular The Soong Dynasty) has for the first time conducted a comprehensive reassessment of Empress Dowager Cixi—exposing the fraud and open forgery in Backhouse's writings, confirming that Western journalists stationed in Beijing at the time, such as George Morrison of The Times of London, preserved secret diaries whose contents clearly contradicted the telegrams he wrote about the Empress. The author uses many unpublished or long-neglected primary sources from this period to show us another side of Empress Dowager Cixi as a complex woman. This book is a persuasive biography and equally compelling story. From it, we can see how myths are created, how they are continuously accepted, and finally, how the truth is revealed.