Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China by Jung Chang (PDF)

Description

Discover the extraordinary story of the woman who brought China into the modern age, from the bestselling author of Wild Swans 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 **Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Biography Prize**

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐This is a absorbing, detailed account of the reign of Cixi and her domination of the last several emperors of China. He covers the tensions between those who wanted to reform and modernize the government and those who wanted to retain the fossilized past. This is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the background of China as it is today.

⭐Author Jung Chang was very successful with her semi private history of 20th century China, the Wild Swans. She upset some readers with her next book, a very critical and very readable bio of Mao.Now she comes out with a new surprise, a rehabilitation of the much reviled Empress Dowager Cixi.Cixi, in this book, is not the xenophobic shrew with the perverse lusts. That portrait, says JC, was based on her opponents’ sensationalist calumny and ideological dishonesty.JC’s correction of myths begins pre Cixi, with emperor Qianlong’s famous letter to King George. Qianlong did not reject the British trade and embassy offers out of ignorance, but as a defensive measure. The Qing world was already beginning to crumble. The emperor wanted to keep the foreign devils away. As we know, that failed.When Cixi started her career as an emperor’s consort, the empire was in very deep trouble. The Taiping rebellion, which was probably the bloodiest civil war in world history, was still going strong, and foreigners had also waged war against China, over a trade dispute. They were winning, which enraged the Qing emperors in their downward slide in history. Cixi maneuvered herself into a dominating position behind the weak men on the throne.Some parts of the narration are not really so interesting. For example, we learn in much detail what the lady’s hobbies were during her phases of retirement. Even the story how Cixi managed to become a person with power, by a veritable coup d’état, is a bit of a bore.On the other hand, the consequence was beneficial to China. A relatively long period of peace and prosperity was started, which helped China solve the Taiping crisis, and brought some modernization and progress. The first quarter century after her coup is considered a success. Then she handed over to her nephew, and things went out of shape.One standard accusation against CX is that she wasted money for the restauration of the Summer Palace, which English and French soldiers had destroyed, and that therefore the navy wasn’t able to modernize due to lack of funds, and therefore China lost an important war to Japan, which had serious long term consequences. JC defends CX against this, and puts the blame fully with the new emperor and his advisers, who stopped modernizing the navy due to a lack of strategic insight.Japan started an expansionist move and beat China badly in the war. A ruinous peace was enforced, which was the beginning of the end for the Qing dynasty. The treaty of 1895 had extortionist conditions for indemnities, and took Taiwan away from China. JC holds that CX has been unjustly blamed for the defeat and the financial disaster. The defeat also made other foreign powers greedy, as it showed the extent of China’s weakness. Their impertinence enraged CX, which made her sympathize with the Boxers. After the Boxers were beaten, and CX still in place, a decade of unprecedented opening happened, which, however, didn’t help Qing dynastic survival. They were foreign rulers, after all.JC tends to ascribe all kinds of good intentions and enlightened views to Cixi. I am not sure about the solidity of her proof, so we are never quite sure if she offers solid facts, or maybe she just puts her own picture into it.JC will also write things like this: Prince Gong’s instinctive reaction was this…, but he did that… While this is all quite possibly what happened, we would like to know how the author knows.This is an interesting book, but hardly a definitive biography of Cixi.

⭐In response to the many criticisms of this biography by Jung Chang being predisposed to admiration of Cixi rather than impartial, let us all imagine the empire of China as it was. Thoroughly despotic, enshrined traditions that refused updating, Emperors isolated and encumbered by court rituals and the courtiers who clung almost irrationally to them, China had imposed self isolation upon itself further encouraging fatal stagnation. For all its intense inventiveness and the one grand voyage of exploration, China faced no real unity, entrenched in Confucian ideology, a corrupt bureaurcracy, and numerous peasant revolts. With no incentive to change, there was no standing professional national army, only regional armies whose governance lay under the governors of those states, no navy, China was in actuality very weak. Foreign nations found her ready for despoliation, and in the classic imperialistic trend of the 19th century, China suffered humiliation after humiliation at their unjust invasions, and found her people enslaved to the opium trade. She was raped and pillaged; her national treasures looted and burned, then made to pay reparations to those who savaged her!Imagine how Europeans and Americans would respond to enforced religious proselytism, alien take overs of ports, and having alien armed services to quell any revolt against them and to punish any person who harmed one of the occupiers’ people! Imagine being treated as a second class citizen in one’s own country! Imagine the legitimate governments having to bow to their demands, to helplessly watch their populaces succumb to drug addiction with drugs provided by those “civilized Christian” nations!Chang’s biography of this amazing woman who overcame the stigma of her sex, her lack of formal education, and whose survival skills allowed her to become a formidable force, reveals Cixi to be thoroughly human, a complex woman with many more virtues than flaws. She had no points of reference from which she could derive deduced plans of action; she had to learn by doing, so of course she made mistakes, of course she authorized actions that came from her gut reaction to the almost impossible horrific situations created by the so-called civilized countries. In the end she regretted her missteps bespeaking her conscience.She never had recognition as the legitimate leader of her country; she could not interact with foreigners because of court protocol. She was constantly balancing her rule with managing her obstreperous Court Advisors, all while learning how to interact with aggressive, pugnacious, greedy, avaricious foreign powers. She was almost literally blindfolded with her hands tied behind her back! Remember, China had no previous foreign missions, no previous diplomatic contact, and no one who could or would school her. China had closed her doors; China now found herself totally unprepared for the whirlwind landing on her shores.Cixi overcame her inexperience by being precociously able to evolve; she overcame her prejudices by becoming open to change. Placed into her shoes with only her knowledge of her environment, who among us could rise (let alone survive) from concubine to empress, then from a virtually powerless ceremonial position to being the invisible ultimate power of the largest nation in the world even while constrained by obsolescent but nearly insurmountable court protocol!Chang did an amazing scholarly work relying on newly uncovered primary resources that bely previous held beliefs about Cixi. This is an amazingly well written biography that is also easily read. Considering it is not welcome in China may speak to its veracity.For future editions, a pronunciation guide would be welcomed by most. Also numbered footnotes would be lovely.

⭐This book was eye-opening to me as I had only read of Cici from Pearl Buck’s writing. That such a woman was the person to bring China into the modern world with practical wisdom and Machiavellian bravado is truly a remarkable story. Jung Chang has provided a feast of political personal and human interest in this remarkable work.

⭐Lots of information here, as usual for Chang. She digs deeper than anyone in Chinese sources and is very meticulous in her writing. One learns not only about Cixi but also about much of the troubled history that surrounded her long reign. Often the reader is led by the hand through the lives of the many characters depicted, and one has the impression of living in the Forbidden City or the Summer Palace. A real light on the life of late imperial China.The major problem of the book is that the author is in love with her protagonist. This produces a hagiography rather than a biography. Cixi is praised for much, too much, and hardly ever criticized. When she is criticized, then immediately follows an excuse for her mistakes (of which there were many) or her shortsightedness.Cixi did a lot of good, but also a lot of evil, and only the former is described in this book. Perhaps this is because Chang seems to be in love with female figures of Chinese history. Her Wild Swans remains my favorite and I am looking forward to reading her new book on the Soong sisters, hoping that it will be more impartial than this one.

⭐This is a well researched biography by the author better known for Wild Swans. Cixi was the most powerful woman in Chinese history effectively exercising executive power over the largest state in the world for most of the period between 1861, when her young son became Emperor Tongzhi, and 1908 when she died. The role of the concubine in the Chinese imperial hierarchy could be very powerful if she was the mother of the emperor, and she exercised power in the early years of this period with her husband’s Empress, Zhen, a much weaker figure personally and politically, though apparently they got on well. Tongzhi assumed power for himself for just a couple of years before he died, possibly of syphilis, in 1875. The next Emperor was Cixi’s adopted son (actually nephew) Guangxu, another boy over whom she could exert influence and rule herself (though there no real other candidates for the imperial role). She struggled to bring China into the modern age through bringing in trains, telegraphs and industry through more positive relations with foreign countries. There were several foreign invasions with nearly all the Western powers, plus Japan, invading and obtaining chunks of Chinese territory in the name of trade and economic expansion. So the difficult balance for Cixi was to learn from the west to bring China into the modern age, while patriotically fighting their imperial pretensions against Chinese territory. This contradiction was most clearly demonstrated in the nationalist Boxer uprising in 1900. After nearly being dethroned, she managed to draw on deep wells of support and come back to power, instituting what by Chinese standards, a fairly radical programme of reform, including abolishing footbinding and torture, a wider curriculum for mandarins beyond the Confucian classics and including travel abroad, promoting education for women, legal reform and even an outline for a form of parliamentary democracy, albeit still with imperial executive power ultimately still intact. Historians differ over the interpretation of these events, with the author challenging the traditional view that Guangxu was behind these reforms and Cixi conservatively opposing them. Jung Chang’s interpretation seems more likely given the thrust of her life and policies over the decades of her rule and Chang considers that “Few of her achievements have been recognised and, when they are, the credit is invariably given to the men serving her. This is largely due to a basic handicap: that she was a woman and could only rule in the name of her sons – so her precise role has been little known.” Cixi seems a fascinating and contradictory figure, a mixture of the Medieval and modern, a cautious reformer but with a capacity for ruthlessness that shocks on occasion.

⭐Like many, I was partly attracted to this book by the fact that the author, Jung Chang, previously wrote Wild Swans, which I still consider one of the finest and most powerful historical books ever written. Since the Empress Dowager Cixi died more than 100 years ago and the author has no family history to draw on, the narrative is somewhat more conventional than I remember from her earlier triumph, but still effective.The fact that Jung Chang is not a careerist writer, having completed only three books, is important in that she clearly holds the subject of the book in very high regard and presents an account of her life that is imbued with the author’s personal feelings. This becomes increasingly evident in the later chapters, in which the narrative blossoms into a compelling account of a most extraordinary woman. It is made clear though that this slightly rose-tinted assessment is at odds with many other accounts: I am in no position to judge but you do end up trusting Chang’s views and wanting them to be accurate.What Empress Dowager Cixi achieved in her life, given the enormous handicap of being a women in 19th century China, is phenomenal. She had luck, immense fortitude, ruthless determination, generally faultless intuition and yet was capable of compassion and intense feeling. But the book is not just about her life, it also provides much insight into the functioning of the Qing dynasty and the geopolitics of competing and acquisitive sovereign states. A really worthwhile read.

⭐The Empress Dowager Cixi lived at the end of nineteenth century and the turn of the twentieth. She was the concubine of one emperor and the mother of the next after seizing power. With two interruptions she ruled China for the rest of her life but always in the name of male emperor at the time and often from behind a screen so that she never saw the officials who enacted her decisions. She was an absolute ruler who recognised that China’s isolation had made it very backward but who then had to struggle to modernise against the weight of inflexible tradition.I knew very little about China at this time (or at any time) and I felt that the author aimed this book very successfully at the general and rather ignorant Western reader. She is very clear in her explanations and repeats information when necessary. She concentrated on the personalities rather than the strategy and the details so that it made for an interesting and understandable read. To understand the period in detail and the implications of what the empress did and didn’t do you would need to do some additional reading around the events but for a general understanding this book is excellent.Although I thought that the writing style made the content very accessible I do have to say that I found that the author had an obvious affection for this woman who was, despite everything good that she does, a bit of a monster. The book is clear about the murders she ordered and the beatings and torture that were very much a part of court life. It is true that these things were expected and that they were necessary for her to keep power but the woman was a tyrant who overthrew the rightful emperor and used any method possible to maintain her position – this is evident from the content of this book but the author never makes it explicit.I really enjoyed this history/biography and found that I was devouring it like a novel – some of this was because I genuinely didn’t know what would happen next, unlike most European histories that I read. It is great to have such an easy way to learn about a new culture and its history. I recommend this book to all who enjoy history whether or not they know anything about China.

⭐Jung Chang gives a great account of an oriental Enlightened Despot – a monarch bent on reforming and modernising her country to ensure that it survives the modern world. {European Enlightened despots 125 or so earlier included Frederick the Great of Prussia, Catherine the Great, Maria Theresa of Austria).The tragedy was when she died her reform programme was not continued and that pro-Japanese factions weakened the country leading up to Japanese expansion and eventual invasion of China.Being a woman she has been given a really bad press and her achievements ignored by historians. In China today she has yet to be rehabilitated. It will surely happen … one day.

Keywords

Free Download Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China in PDF format
Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China PDF Free Download
Download Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China 2013 PDF Free
Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China 2013 PDF Free Download
Download Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China PDF
Free Download Ebook Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China