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A review by paola_mobileread
Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China by Jung Chang
3.0
This book has a remarkable flow - it took me a while to read it for the simple reason that these days I have very little time.
The other side of the "readability coin" is that this book lacks proper probing of the issues: Chang seems too much in love with her project (offering a portrait of Cixi which is very different from conventional wisdom - at least as far as China's assessment of her goes) to remember to educate her readers on so many other aspects of that long reign that just a modest amount of curiosity makes any reader wonder about. In this sense, then, it is a lost opportunity: we get a lot of the facts, and this is remarkable given that the official Chinese position on Cixi is very different - but a lot is left unexplained. We know that there are the Manchu minority and the Han minority, but beside different dress codes, what else is there to distinguish these two cultures? How did this environment affect Cixi? How did the Manchu manage to achieve and retain power? What was the general situation of China at the time? On these themes it seems that Pearl Buck is more instructive than Jung Chan, which is a pity. Sure, this is not intended to be scholarly work, which is fine of course, but I felt shortchanged nonetheless.
All the narration points towards showing how great a ruler Cixi was - with some flaws, for which however plenty of justifications. Yet there are some sudden changes, both of Cixi's attitude and in the attitudes towards her, that are left unexplained and which are difficult to make sense of: for instance, after the Boxer troubles, first she flees Bejing to escape not just the invaders but the resentful population, then all of a sudden it seems that her people love her again: what happened to bring this change about?
Jung glosses over what are very obviously serious shortcomings in Cixi's personality: in places the facts we are presented with show a woman of many contradictions, and great passions (from allowing almost any licence to her son, to some chilling displays of callousness, e.g. Pearl's murder). But in other places she mellows down (e.g. after returning to Bejing: why?).
It is a real pity that there is no real exploration of Cixi's character - this is a good book, but it could have been much better.
EDIT: I found this review by Patricia Crossley in the London Review of Books illuminating, HT to SteveEisenberg on MobileRead.
The other side of the "readability coin" is that this book lacks proper probing of the issues: Chang seems too much in love with her project (offering a portrait of Cixi which is very different from conventional wisdom - at least as far as China's assessment of her goes) to remember to educate her readers on so many other aspects of that long reign that just a modest amount of curiosity makes any reader wonder about. In this sense, then, it is a lost opportunity: we get a lot of the facts, and this is remarkable given that the official Chinese position on Cixi is very different - but a lot is left unexplained. We know that there are the Manchu minority and the Han minority, but beside different dress codes, what else is there to distinguish these two cultures? How did this environment affect Cixi? How did the Manchu manage to achieve and retain power? What was the general situation of China at the time? On these themes it seems that Pearl Buck is more instructive than Jung Chan, which is a pity. Sure, this is not intended to be scholarly work, which is fine of course, but I felt shortchanged nonetheless.
All the narration points towards showing how great a ruler Cixi was - with some flaws, for which however plenty of justifications. Yet there are some sudden changes, both of Cixi's attitude and in the attitudes towards her, that are left unexplained and which are difficult to make sense of: for instance, after the Boxer troubles, first she flees Bejing to escape not just the invaders but the resentful population, then all of a sudden it seems that her people love her again: what happened to bring this change about?
Jung glosses over what are very obviously serious shortcomings in Cixi's personality: in places the facts we are presented with show a woman of many contradictions, and great passions (from allowing almost any licence to her son, to some chilling displays of callousness, e.g. Pearl's murder). But in other places she mellows down (e.g. after returning to Bejing: why?).
It is a real pity that there is no real exploration of Cixi's character - this is a good book, but it could have been much better.
EDIT: I found this review by Patricia Crossley in the London Review of Books illuminating, HT to SteveEisenberg on MobileRead.