Bibliograph

Dragon lady, the life and legend of the last empress of China, by Sterling Seagrave with the collaboration of Peggy Seagrave

Type

Label

Dragon lady, the life and legend of the last empress of China, by Sterling Seagrave with the collaboration of Peggy Seagrave

Language

eng

Bibliography note

Includes bibliographical references (pages 563-576) and index

resource.biographical

individual biography

Illustrations

illustrationsmaps

Index

index present

Literary Form

non fiction

Main title

Dragon lady

Nature of contents

bibliography

Oclc number

23652354

Responsibility statement

by Sterling Seagrave with the collaboration of Peggy Seagrave

Sub title

the life and legend of the last empress of China

Summary

The last empress of China--Dowager Empress Cixi (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 Cixi as monster--was revealed to be a con man and a hoaxster. Now best-selling biographer Sterling Seagrave has undertaken the first complete reappraisal of the empress. Drawing on many unpublished or long-overlooked contemporary sources, Seagrave shows us Cixi as a complex woman whose desperate--though often misguided--efforts to hold her country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 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

Table Of Contents

Flowers in the back garden -- Lady Yehenara -- Foreign devils -- Palace coup -- Behind a gauze curtain -- Two men on a horse -- Life in a yellow mist -- Suicide of a phoenix -- "Our hart" -- Hostage to etiquette -- New ironhats -- Wild fox -- Puppet show -- Betrayal -- Fugitive -- Poisoned pen -- Sly pornographer -- Weed people -- Something wicked this way comes -- Mad, rotten scheme -- Siege of Peking -- Chinese takeaway -- Forked tongue -- Dragons flee -- "That odious woman" -- Hunting snipe -- Hatching the dragon lady -- Dynasty's end

Classification