China’s Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908) had a life filled with intrigue and reversals of fortune to match any dreamt up by Dickens or Dumas. Born into an elite family that fell on hard times during the economic crises triggered by the opium war, she was chosen to join the ranks of palace concubines in 1851. New tribulations followed when foreign troops drove the court from Beijing in 1860, and soon after that the emperor died. But Cixi bounced back, proving so adept at court politics that she secured a place as co-regent of the new ruler, her young son, and then, in 1875, was named sole regent to his successor, the Guangxu Emperor.
The final years of her life, as Jung Chang recounts fluently in Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China, were equally eventful. In 1898, factions linked to the emperor and to Cixi locked horns in a fierce power struggle. The Empress Dowager’s side won, reasserting her position as the Qing ruling family’s dominant member, and the emperor was placed under house arrest. When he died in 1908, just before Cixi, new rumours that she’d poisoned him joined old ones alleging lurid liaisons with various powerful men.
Even a brief sketch such as this brings to mind three famous queens whose stories have been catnip for generations of fans of royal biography. Cixi’s long period of rule evokes Victoria; her notoriety, Cleopatra; her political manoeuvring, Elizabeth I.