From the bestselling author ofWild SwansandMao: The Unknown Story

In this groundbreaking biography, Jung Chang vividly describes how Empress Dowager Cixi the most important woman in Chinese history brought a medieval empire into the modern age. Under her, the ancient country attained virtually all the attributes of a modern state and it was she who abolished gruesome punishments like death by a thousand cuts and put an end to foot-binding. Jung Chang comprehensively overturns the conventional view of Cixi as a diehard conservative and cruel despot andalso takes the reader into the depths of her splendid Summer Palace and the harem of Beijings Forbidden City, where she lived surrounded by eunuchs with one of whom she fell in love, with tragic consequences.

Packed with drama, fast-paced and gripping, it is both a panoramic depiction of the birth of modern China and an intimate portrait of a woman: as the concubine to a monarch, as the absolute ruler of a third of the worlds population, and as a unique stateswoman.

Powerful Simon Sebag Montefiore

Truly authoritativeNew York Times

WonderfulSunday Times

Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Biography Prize

Jung Chang is the best-selling author ofWild Swans(1991, which theAsian Wall Street Journalcalled the most read book about China),andMao: The Unknown Story(2005, with Jon Halliday), which was described byTimeMagazine as an atom bomb of a book. Her books have been translated into more than 40 languages and sold more than 15 million copies outside mainland China where they are both banned.. She was born in China in 1952, and came to Britain in 1978. She lives in London.