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A review by siria
Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China by Jung Chang
3.0
Jung Chang's biography of the Empress Cixi is a fascinating look at a period of history about which I know very little. As I'm not familiar with the existing historiography, I don't know to what extent exactly this is a revisionist biography—certainly, if Chang's characterisation of previous historical works on Cixi is true, then this is a swing of the pendulum in the other direction. Chang presents a picture of a woman who was not without her faults, who could be ruthless if necessary, and who was firmly rooted in a traditionalist and monarchist worldview, but who was also a reformer and a moderniser. Chang bases this, she claims, in large part on Chinese-language sources which have been largely disregarded by Chinese scholars and inaccessible to Anglophone ones.
I think there's much to consider here, and Chang is good at unpicking the ways in which gender shaped both how Cixi had to present herself and the ways in which both her contemporaries and later scholars have viewed her. However even I could see that there was special pleading in operation here. Telling me that Cixi rarely used torture or execution as a political tool when diplomacy and tact would do instead is one thing—but you cannot then gloss over in a couple of lines the fact that Cixi ordered that her adoptive son be poisoned when she was on her own deathbed, or his favourite concubine thrown down a well because there wasn't enough room for her in their entourage when fleeing Beijing!
Empress Dowager Cixi really reads like the first salvo in a broader reassessment of Cixi's life—Chang has probably been too laudatory here, but I think this biography should lead to further study and reassessment.
(To nitpick as a historian, I really disliked the citation style—why do publishers seem to think that a popular audience will faint away if footnotes are used? I also really, really wish that people would stop using the word 'medieval' as a synonym for 'barbaric.')
I think there's much to consider here, and Chang is good at unpicking the ways in which gender shaped both how Cixi had to present herself and the ways in which both her contemporaries and later scholars have viewed her. However even I could see that there was special pleading in operation here. Telling me that Cixi rarely used torture or execution as a political tool when diplomacy and tact would do instead is one thing—but you cannot then gloss over in a couple of lines the fact that Cixi ordered that her adoptive son be poisoned when she was on her own deathbed, or his favourite concubine thrown down a well because there wasn't enough room for her in their entourage when fleeing Beijing!
Empress Dowager Cixi really reads like the first salvo in a broader reassessment of Cixi's life—Chang has probably been too laudatory here, but I think this biography should lead to further study and reassessment.
(To nitpick as a historian, I really disliked the citation style—why do publishers seem to think that a popular audience will faint away if footnotes are used? I also really, really wish that people would stop using the word 'medieval' as a synonym for 'barbaric.')