The Dragon Empress : " Life And Times Of Tz'u-hsi, 1835-1908, Empress Dowager Of China " :

by Marina Warner (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1974

  $5.85

• Used

  Paperback
  1993

  $3.28

  From 1861 to 1908 a woman, the Empress Dowager Tz'u-hsi, born the daughter of a minor mandarin, held the supreme power in China. Opportunistic, ruthless, malicious, she ruled over four hundred million people. Marina Warner's biography lays bare her complex personality: her extreme conventionalism; her hatred of foreigners ; her passion for power and intrigue; her vanity and her delight in ritual; her extravagance and corruption and her love of gardens, painting and the theatre. THE DRAGON EMPRESS also portrays a China in rapid decline as poverty, civil war and foreign exploitation and invasion brought about the fall of the Ch'ing dynasty.