Making of an iron lady

Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China
by Jung Chang
Jonathan Cape
4 stars

The Empress Dowager Cixi has been called many things - cruel, ruthless, treacherous, even sex-crazed. She has been blamed for a host of atrocities, as well as for the fall of the Qing dynasty.

Jung Chang is out to set the record straight.

In the eight years since the publication of Mao: The Unknown Story - the biography she wrote with her husband, Jon Halliday - Chang has been researching the life and times of the most significant woman in China's history: for almost half a century, Cixi ruled over one third of the world's population.

Chang's publisher tells us that it's in light of newly available historical documents - court records, diaries, official and private correspondence, most of it in Chinese - that she was able to produce this comprehensive and sensitive biography, but there's no doubt it's also in large part thanks to a biographer who was willing and often even eager to re-examine Cixi in a less critical light.

Cixi is far from being the first female ruler to come in for bad press, but the slanderous vitriol against her was especially harsh - and the name-calling continued for almost 100 years. Only in recent years have historians been prepared to view events in a more sympathetic light. While Chang isn't the first biographer to trumpet Cixi's achievements, her book will certainly make the greatest impact.

Chang paints the empress dowager as a complex character: stern-faced in politics and yet giggly, even girlish, among her court ladies and eunuchs; forward thinking and eager to embrace the modern world yet superstitious; capable of impulsive acts of cruelty and also ones of great kindness. Expertly, Chang builds up the layers of detail until we have that lofty sense of seeing the world through Cixi's eyes. We feel her drive and ambition, sense her fear and want her to succeed.

Readers who found Chang's Mao Zedong biography slow going, a little too dry and heavy on the historical detail need not worry about that here. Vast sections of Empress Dowager Cixi are as engaging as good fiction - the characters are carefully drawn, the plot compelling. It's page-turner stuff.