Empress Dowager Cixi

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Empress Dowager Cixi

Jung Chang
Empress Dowager Cixi Book PDF

Author : Jung Chang
Publisher : Random House Canada
Page : 448 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 2013-10-29
Category : History
ISBN : 9780307363121

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Empress Dowager Cixi by Jung Chang Pdf

From the beloved, internationally bestselling author of Wild Swans, and co-author of the bestselling Mao: The Unknown Story, the dramatic, epic biography of the unusual woman who ruled China for 50 years, from concubine to Empress, overturning centuries of traditions and formalities to bring China into the modern world. A woman, an Empress of immense wealth who was largely a prisoner within the compound walls of her palaces, a mother, a ruthless enemy, and a brilliant strategist: Chang makes a compelling case that Cixi was one of the most formidable and enlightened rulers of any nation. Cixi led an intense and singular life. Chosen at the age of 12 to be a concubine by the Emperor Xianfeng, she gave birth to his only male heir who at four was designated Emperor when his father died in 1861. In a brilliant move, the young woman enlisted the help of the Emperor's widow and the two women orchestrated a coup that ousted the regents and made Cixi sole Regent. Untrained and untaught, the two studied history and politics together, ruling the huge nation from behind a curtain. When her boy died, Cixi designated a young nephew as Emperor, continuing her reign till her death in 1908. Chang gives us a complex, riveting portrait of Cixi through a reign as long as that of her fellow Empress, Victoria, whom she longed to meet: her ruthlessness in fighting off rivals; her curiosity to learn; her reliance on Westerners who she placed in key positions; and her sensitivity and desire to preserve the distinctiveness of China's past while overturning traditions (she, as Chang reveals--not Mao, as he claimed--banned footbinding) and exposing its culture to western ideas and technology.

Empress Dowager Cixi

Jung Chang
Empress Dowager Cixi Book PDF

Author : Jung Chang
Publisher : Random House
Page : 460 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2013-09-26
Category : History
ISBN : 9781448191420

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Empress Dowager Cixi by Jung Chang Pdf

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**

Empress Dowager Cixi

X. L. Woo
Empress Dowager Cixi Book PDF

Author : X. L. Woo
Publisher : Algora Publishing
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2007
Category : History
ISBN : 9780875861661

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Empress Dowager Cixi by X. L. Woo Pdf

In all the history of China, only two women ever conquered and held the heights of power. Both enjoyed long reigns characterized by ruthless intrigue; they maintained an iron grip at the center while the vast country was torn by rebellions and caught up i.

The Last Empress

Anchee Min
The Last Empress Book PDF

Author : Anchee Min
Publisher : A&C Black
Page : 282 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2011-12-01
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781408828991

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The Last Empress by Anchee Min Pdf

'Vivid and entertaining ... this is history as it plays upon the emotions. Empires crumble, hearts are broken' THE TIMES From the bestselling author of Red Azalea comes the much-anticipated sequel to Empress Orchid At the end of the nineteenth century China is rocked by foreign attacks and local rebellions. The only constant is the power wielded by one woman, Tzu Hsi, also known as Empress Orchid, who must face the perilous condition of her empire and devastating personal losses. In this sequel to the bestselling Empress Orchid, Anchee Min brings to life one of the most important figures in Chinese history, a very human leader who sacrifices all she has to protect both those she loves and her doomed empire.

Empress Dowager Cixi

X. L. Woo
Empress Dowager Cixi Book PDF

Author : X. L. Woo
Publisher : Algora Publishing
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2002
Category : China
ISBN : 9781892941886

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Empress Dowager Cixi by X. L. Woo Pdf

In all the history of China, only two women ever conquered and held the heights of power. Both enjoyed long reigns characterized by ruthless intrigue; they maintained an iron grip at the center while the vast country was torn by rebellions and caught up in foreign wars. Through their policy decisions as well as their personal foibles, both left a deep imprint in history and in the minds of the Chinese people, fueling literature and legend. Fighting to maintain her power base, Empress Cixi struggled with the need to modernize the painfully backward empire she had inherited while honoring age-old traditions. She studied previous rulers' failures and achievements, and especially followed the example of another Chinese woman leader, Wu-Hou, who had elevated herself from concubine to empress some 1200 years earlier.

With the Empress Dowager

Katharine Augusta Carl
With the Empress Dowager Book PDF

Author : Katharine Augusta Carl
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 388 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 1905
Category : China
ISBN : UOM:39015027805558

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With the Empress Dowager by Katharine Augusta Carl Pdf

Katharine Augusta Carl was an American portrait painter and author. She made paintings of notable and royal people in the United States, Europe, and Asia. She spent nine months in China in 1903 painting a portrait of the Empress Dowager Cixi for the St. Louis Exposition. On her return to America, she published a book about her experience, titled With the Empress Dowager. Carl spent a total of nine months in China and painted four portraits of the Empress Dowager, later recording her memories as the only western foreigner to live within the precincts of the Chinese imperial court in its last days. She stayed there under the provision that she did not share information about the Forbidden City. About creation of the painting she wrote: "I was obliged to follow, in every detail, centuries-old conventions. There could be no shadows and very little perspective, and everything must be painted in such full light as to lose all relief and picturesque effect. When I saw I must represent Her Majesty in such a conventional way as to make her unusually attractive personality banal, I was no longer filled with the ardent enthusiasm for my work with which I had begun it, and I had many a heartache and much inward rebellion before I settled on the inevitable."

Wild Swans

Jung Chang
Wild Swans Book PDF

Author : Jung Chang
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 592 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2008-06-20
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781439106495

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Wild Swans by Jung Chang Pdf

The story of three generations in twentieth-century China that blends the intimacy of memoir and the panoramic sweep of eyewitness history—a bestselling classic in thirty languages with more than ten million copies sold around the world, now with a new introduction from the author. An engrossing record of Mao’s impact on China, an unusual window on the female experience in the modern world, and an inspiring tale of courage and love, Jung Chang describes the extraordinary lives and experiences of her family members: her grandmother, a warlord’s concubine; her mother’s struggles as a young idealistic Communist; and her parents’ experience as members of the Communist elite and their ordeal during the Cultural Revolution. Chang was a Red Guard briefly at the age of fourteen, then worked as a peasant, a “barefoot doctor,” a steelworker, and an electrician. As the story of each generation unfolds, Chang captures in gripping, moving—and ultimately uplifting—detail the cycles of violent drama visited on her own family and millions of others caught in the whirlwind of history.

Dragon Lady

Sterling Seagrave,Peggy Seagrave
Dragon Lady Book PDF

Author : Sterling Seagrave,Peggy Seagrave
Publisher : Alfred A. Knopf
Page : 648 pages
File Size : 54,6 Mb
Release : 1992
Category : China
ISBN : UOM:39015025152383

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Dragon Lady by Sterling Seagrave,Peggy Seagrave Pdf

"The last empress of China--Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi (1835-1908)--is remembered as one of history's monsters, an iron-willed concubine who, after usurping power in 1861, ruled from the Dragon Throne for half a century. Her reign, in the aftermath of the Opium Wars and through the Boxer Rebellion until the collapse of the 2,000-year-old empire, has traditionally been seen as one of murder, poison, and intrigue. But the wicked image is false." "In 1974, to the dismay of scholars, Sir Edmund Backhouse--the biographer most responsible for the widespread vision of Tzu Hsi as monster--was revealed to be a con man. And now the author of the celebrated best-seller The Soong Dynasty has undertaken the first complete reappraisal of the empress--exposing Backhouse's writings about her as a major hoax and forgery, and establishing that the most important Western correspondent in Peking during her reign--Dr. George Morrison of the London Times--kept a secret diary contradicting his own dispatches about Tzu Hsi." "Drawing on many unpublished or long-overlooked contemporary sources, Sterling Seagrave shows us Tzu Hsi as a complex woman whose desperate--though often misguided--efforts to hold her country together take on a different coloration in the context of unrelenting foreign attempts to colonize and tear it apart. Far from being all-powerful, she was actually a hostage of vengeful Manchu princes who were using her in a power struggle against both Chinese reformers and foreign interference." "Here at last is an authentic portrait of this fascinating historical figure, as well as insight into the Western craving to believe in a sinister, dragon-haunted Orient. Dragon Lady is at once a compelling biography and the equally compelling story of how a myth was contrived, how it endured, and how, ultimately, the truth has emerged."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The Empress and Mrs. Conger

Grant Hayter-Menzies
The Empress and Mrs Conger Book PDF

Author : Grant Hayter-Menzies
Publisher : Hong Kong University Press
Page : 363 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2011-01-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9789888083008

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The Empress and Mrs. Conger by Grant Hayter-Menzies Pdf

This is the story of two women from worlds that could not seem farther apart--imperial China and the American Midwest--who found common ground before and after one of the greatest clashes between East and West, the fifty-five day siege of the Beijing foreign legations known as the Boxer Uprising. Using diaries, letters and other sources,The Empress and Mrs. Congertraces the parallel lives of Empress Dowager Cixi and American ambassador's wife Sarah Pike Conger, which converged to alter their perspectives of each other and each other's worlds. Grant Hayter-Menziesis the author ofImperial Masquerade: The Legend of Princess Der Lingand the biographer of stage and screen stars Charlotte Greenwood and Billie Burke. "Sarah Conger's story is worth telling for many reasons. She occupied a point in time that makes her interesting, but the author demonstrates that she is interesting in her own right-a flawed and fascinating individual whose story we want to read not for what we learn about Chinese history, but for what we learn about a woman profoundly typical of her era and class leading a life of determination in the belief that the right combination of positive attitudes and common sense must win out over adversity." - Timothy Brook, University of British Columbia

Imperial Masquerade

Grant Hayter-Menzies
Imperial Masquerade Book PDF

Author : Grant Hayter-Menzies
Publisher : Hong Kong University Press
Page : 454 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2008-02-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9622098819

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Imperial Masquerade by Grant Hayter-Menzies Pdf

"Imperial Masquerade: The Legend of Princess Der Ling, the first biography of one of the twentieth century's most intriguing cross-cultural personalities, traces not only the life of Princess Der Ling, in all its various transformations, but offers a fresh look at the woman she lionized and, ultimately, betrayed - the Empress Dowager Cixi, to whom, like Der Ling, many legends have been affixed over the past century. The book also depicts the changing worlds of Paris, Tokyo and the other international stages of Der Ling's development as woman and as mystery, and deals with the many teachers who made her who she was." --Book Jacket.

Two Years in the Forbidden City

Princess Der Ling
Two Years in the Forbidden City Book PDF

Author : Princess Der Ling
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 314 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2019-10-26
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 1702630234

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Two Years in the Forbidden City by Princess Der Ling Pdf

Two Years In The Forbidden City This book is about the small or hidden parts of Empress Dowager Cixi who was known to effectively controlled the chinese goverment in the late Ching Dynasty for 47 years. Empress Dowager Cixi was a concubine for Xianfeng Emperor and later became the empress dowager as soon as her son become the Tongzhi Emperor after the death of Xianfeng. She later appointed her nephew to become the next emperor on the death of her son.The Empress Dowager although known to refused to adopt the western model of goverment, she however supported the technological and military reform to strengthen the goverment. Princess Derling wrote this memoirs during her involvement with the empress. Her father was one of the goverment member and had sent her for western schools for education. She was then well versed with English and French.Apart from doing the court ladies work, she did all the interpretation as and when Empress Dowager Cixi attended to foreign visitors. Empress Dowager Cixi The Last Empress Of China This book, Two Years In the Forbidden City is about the hidden story or small details from the perspective of the court lady whom the empress had favoured. In her view, Empress Dowager Cixi is not the monster of depravity depicted in the popular press and in the second and third hand accounts left by foreigners who had lived in Beijing. The Last Empress Of China was actually to her an aging woman who loved beautiful things, had many regrets about the past and the way she had dealt with the many crises of her long reign, and apparently trusted Der Ling enough to share many memories and opinions with her. Read the whole 20 Chapters about Empress Dowager Cixi in this interesting book Two Years In The Forbidden City and get your copy from us today.

Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period

Rebecca E. Karl,Peter Gue Zarrow
Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period Book PDF

Author : Rebecca E. Karl,Peter Gue Zarrow
Publisher : Harvard Univ Asia Center
Page : 308 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 2002
Category : China
ISBN : 0674008545

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Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period by Rebecca E. Karl,Peter Gue Zarrow Pdf

The nine essays in this volume reexamine the "hundred days" in 1898 and focus particularly on the aftermath of this reform movement. Their collective goal is to rethink the reforms not as a failed attempt at modernizing China but as a period in which many of the institutions that have since structured China began. Among the subjects covered are the reform movement, the reformers, newspapers, education, the urban environment, female literacy, the "new" woman, citizenship, and literature. All the contributors urge the view that modernity must be seen as a conceptual framework that shaped the Chinese experience of a global process, an experience through which new problems were raised and old problems rethought in creative, inventive, and contradictory ways.

Empresses of China's Forbidden City

Daisy Yiyou Wang,Jan Stuart
Empresses of China s Forbidden City Book PDF

Author : Daisy Yiyou Wang,Jan Stuart
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 2018
Category : ART
ISBN : 0300237081

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Empresses of China's Forbidden City by Daisy Yiyou Wang,Jan Stuart Pdf

"Empresses of China's Forbidden City: 1644-1912 accompanies the exhibition of the same title organized by the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, the Freer]Sackler, Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, DC, and the Palace Museum, Beijing, China."

Manchus and Han

Edward J. M. Rhoads
Manchus and Han Book PDF

Author : Edward J. M. Rhoads
Publisher : University of Washington Press
Page : 413 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2017-05-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9780295997483

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Manchus and Han by Edward J. M. Rhoads Pdf

China�s 1911�12 Revolution, which overthrew a 2000-year succession of dynasties, is thought of primarily as a change in governmental style, from imperial to republican, traditional to modern. But given that the dynasty that was overthrown�the Qing�was that of a minority ethnic group that had ruled China�s Han majority for nearly three centuries, and that the revolutionaries were overwhelmingly Han, to what extent was the revolution not only anti-monarchical, but also anti-Manchu? Edward Rhoads explores this provocative and complicated question in Manchus and Han, analyzing the evolution of the Manchus from a hereditary military caste (the �banner people�) to a distinct ethnic group and then detailing the interplay and dialogue between the Manchu court and Han reformers that culminated in the dramatic changes of the early 20th century. Until now, many scholars have assumed that the Manchus had been assimilated into Han culture long before the 1911 Revolution and were no longer separate and distinguishable. But Rhoads demonstrates that in many ways Manchus remained an alien, privileged, and distinct group. Manchus and Han is a pathbreaking study that will forever change the way historians of China view the events leading to the fall of the Qing dynasty. Likewise, it will clarify for ethnologists the unique origin of the Manchus as an occupational caste and their shifting relationship with the Han, from border people to rulers to ruled. Winner of the Joseph Levenson Book Prize for Modern China, sponsored by The China and Inner Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies

Artful Subversion

Ying-Chen Peng
Artful Subversion Book PDF

Author : Ying-Chen Peng
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 208 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2023-01-24
Category : History
ISBN : 9780300263435

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Artful Subversion by Ying-Chen Peng Pdf

This revelatory book shows how the influential and controversial Empress Dowager Cixi used art and architecture to establish her authority Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908), who ruled China from 1861 until her death in 1908, is a subject of fascination and controversy, at turns vilified for her political maneuvering and admired for modernizing China. In addition to being an astute politician, she was an earnest art patron, and this beautifully illustrated book explores a wide range of objects, revealing how the empress dowager used art and architecture to solidify her rule. Cixi's art commissions were innovative in the way that they unified two distant conceptions of gender in China at the time, demonstrating her strength and wisdom as a monarch while highlighting her identity as a woman and mother. Artful Subversion examines commissioned works, including portrait paintings and photographs, ceramics, fashion, architecture, and garden design, as well as work Cixi created, such as painting and calligraphy. The book is a compelling study of how a powerful matriarch at once subverted and upheld the Qing imperial patriarchy.