Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China Audiobook

Quotes

• “Cixi’s extraordinary story has all the elements of a good fairy tale: bizarre, sinister, triumphant, and terrible.”

  — Economist

• “The author of Wild Swans sets out to rehabilitate the reputation of a woman who, she argues, helped modernize China….While Chang acknowledges Cixi’s missteps—such as allowing the Boxers to fight against a Western invasion, which led to widespread slaughter—she sees her as a woman whose energy, farsightedness, and ruthless pragmatism transformed a country.”

  — New Yorker

• “In [Chang’s] absorbing new book…her extensive use of new Chinese sources makes a strong case for reappraisal. Since none have made use of a full range of sources in both languages, there has been no truly authoritative account of Cixi’s rule. Her story is both important and evocative…There is much to learn here from the experiences of Empress Dowager Cixi.”

  — New York Times

• “Chang portrays Cixi as a proto-feminist and reformer in this authoritative account.”

  — New York Times Book Review

• “Jung Chang’s book dives into a genuinely fascinating figure: a fierce imperial consort who rules behind the thrones of two successive Chinese emperors and helped ease china into the twentieth century….a fantastic Machiavellian tale by the author of the definitive Mao biography.”

  — New York magazine

• “This new biography by June Chang reveals the Empress Dowager as a surprisingly enlightened leader who, against formidable odds, moved China towards the twentieth century.”

  — Barnes&Noble.com, editorial review

• “‘Although I have heard much about Queen Victoria,” her Chinese contemporary, the Empress Cixi once remarked, ‘I do not think her life is half as interesting and eventful as mine.’ It is a judgment that is hard to dispute…The tumultuous story of her reign remains astonishing.”

  — Telegraph (London)

• “The times that Cixi dominated were critical to the shaping of modern China, a country that resembles the Qing autocracy in many ways, though without the empire’s relatively free press and anticipated suffrage. The top echelons of Chinese politics remain as male-dominated and vicious as ever, and Cixi remains as gripping a subject.”

  — Guardian (London)

• “It was a biography by Jung Chang and her husband Jon Halliday that finally toppled Mao Zedong from his creaking pedestal. Now she has demolished another myth. The Empress Dowager of China…was not the scheming, vicious, reactionary she-monster of fond imagination but the force behind what she calls ‘the real revolution of Modern China’…What a colorful tale it is…This is history at its most readable by an author with a point of view.”

  — Evening Standard (London)

• “[Chang has] trained her sleuthing skills and piercing pen on the common concubine who rose to rule china, and what she’s uncovered is nothing short of imposing….as painstaking in detail as it is sweeping in scope….Chang’s new tome is certain to become the standard by which all future biographies of the Dowager Empress are measured.”

  — Daily Beast

• “[An] authoritative and epic biography.”

  — Toronto Star

• “A largely new—and to me, mostly convincing—interpretation. Chang makes a unique claim for Cixi, summed up in her subtitle: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China…Jung Chang has written a path-breaking and generally persuasive book.”

  — New York Review of Books

• “Well-researched and provocative…Cixi deserves to be remembered and this book is to be welcomed for giving an important figure in Chinese history the prominence she deserves…[A] spirited biography.”

  — New Statesman (London)

• “A fascinating and instructive biography for anyone interested in how today’s China began.”

  — Library Journal (starred review)

• “Her original first name was considered too inconsequential to enter in the court registry, yet she became the most powerful woman in nineteenth-century China…Chang melds her deep knowledge of Chinese history with deft storytelling to unravel the empress dowager’s behind-the-throne efforts to ‘Make China Strong’ by developing international trade, building railroads and utilities, expanding education, and constructing a modern military.”

  — Publishers Weekly

• “When an author as thorough, gifted, and immersed in Chinese culture as Chang writes, both scholars and general readers take notice.”

  — Booklist

• “Corrects a longstanding misconception about a woman whose impact on China can’t be overstated. It’s a fascinating look at power, politics, and the gender divide.”

  — BookPage

• “An impassioned defense of the daughter of a government employee who finagled her way to becoming the long-reigning empress dowager, feminist and reformer. Chang strongly argues for a fresh look at this much-maligned monarch…In an entertaining biography, the empress finally has her day.”

  — Kirkus Reviews

• “Jolene Kim brings just the right tone to this book about nineteenth-century Chinese history. She pronounces Chinese names and phrases with a Mandarin accent that adds to the atmosphere…Listeners will come away with a better understanding of China as it prepared to enter the twentieth century.”

  — AudioFile