Cixi ‘brought medieval China into the modern age’. ‘Empress Dowager Cixi’s legacy was manifold and towering,’ she writes. Jung Chang does not merely repeat what are now truisms in the representation of Cixi – that she has been obscured by misogyny and orientalist stereotyping, as well as the anti-Manchu sentiment running through Chinese nationalist narratives – but also claims to have discovered something new. Since Sterling Seagrave’s Dragon Lady of 1992, Cixi has been the subject of or a major figure in a dozen books, as well as films and television series. And now she appears in the vanguard of stubborn Chinese opposition to foreign arrogance and encroachment. In the 1960s and 1970s, she was one of a small collection of ‘powerful’ women newly discovered in Chinese history. In the first decade of the 20th century, she was either the vivacious tea hostess who had protected foreigners from Boxer mobs, or the murderous xenophobe who had set the rioters on them in the first place. E mpress Dowager Cixi of the Qing dynasty is one of those historical figures who are renovated from time to time as the moment demands.
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