ThoughtGallery.org > Author Jung Chang on ‘Empress Dowager Cixi’

Author Jung Chang on ‘Empress Dowager Cixi’

Jung Chang, in conversation about her latest book, Empress Dowager Cixi, with Orville Schell, Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society.

jung-changFrom author and historian Jung Chang, coauthor of the best-selling Mao: The Unknown Story, comes a compelling new look at Cixi, the last Dowager Empress of China. This was a woman who entered the court as a concubine and then ruled China for 50 years, overcoming centuries of traditions and formalities — and found ways to modernize China, exposing its culture to Western political ideas and technology.

In this groundbreaking biography, Jung Chang vividly describes how Cixi fought against monumental obstacles to change China. Under her the ancient country attained virtually all the attributes of a modern state: industries, railways, electricity, the telegraph, an army and navy with up-to-date weaponry. She developed foreign trade and diplomacy and established an entirely new education system. Newspapers were published for the first time. It was she who abolished gruesome punishments like “death by a thousand cuts” and put an end to foot-binding. Chang comprehensively overturns the conventional common view of Cixi as a diehard conservative and cruel despot.

Cixi reigned over extraordinary times and had to deal with a host of major national crises: the Taiping and Boxer rebellions, wars with France and Japan — and an invasion by eight allied powers including Britain, Germany, Russia and the United States. Chang not only records the Empress Dowager’s conduct of domestic and foreign affairs, but also takes the reader into the depths of her splendid Summer Palace and Beijing’s Forbidden City, where she lived surrounded by eunuchs. The world Chang describes here, in fascinating detail, seems almost unbelievable in its extraordinary mixture of the very old and the very new.

Based on newly available, mostly Chinese, historical documents, this biography will revolutionize historical thinking about a crucial period in China’s — and the world’s — history. 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 world’s population, and as a unique stateswoman.

This talk is followed by a book sale and signing.











When: Tue., Nov. 12, 2013 at 6:30 pm
Where: Asia Society and Museum
725 Park Ave.
212-288-6400
Price: $15; $12 seniors and students; $10 members
Buy tickets/get more info now
See other events in these categories:

Jung Chang, in conversation about her latest book, Empress Dowager Cixi, with Orville Schell, Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society.

jung-changFrom author and historian Jung Chang, coauthor of the best-selling Mao: The Unknown Story, comes a compelling new look at Cixi, the last Dowager Empress of China. This was a woman who entered the court as a concubine and then ruled China for 50 years, overcoming centuries of traditions and formalities — and found ways to modernize China, exposing its culture to Western political ideas and technology.

In this groundbreaking biography, Jung Chang vividly describes how Cixi fought against monumental obstacles to change China. Under her the ancient country attained virtually all the attributes of a modern state: industries, railways, electricity, the telegraph, an army and navy with up-to-date weaponry. She developed foreign trade and diplomacy and established an entirely new education system. Newspapers were published for the first time. It was she who abolished gruesome punishments like “death by a thousand cuts” and put an end to foot-binding. Chang comprehensively overturns the conventional common view of Cixi as a diehard conservative and cruel despot.

Cixi reigned over extraordinary times and had to deal with a host of major national crises: the Taiping and Boxer rebellions, wars with France and Japan — and an invasion by eight allied powers including Britain, Germany, Russia and the United States. Chang not only records the Empress Dowager’s conduct of domestic and foreign affairs, but also takes the reader into the depths of her splendid Summer Palace and Beijing’s Forbidden City, where she lived surrounded by eunuchs. The world Chang describes here, in fascinating detail, seems almost unbelievable in its extraordinary mixture of the very old and the very new.

Based on newly available, mostly Chinese, historical documents, this biography will revolutionize historical thinking about a crucial period in China’s — and the world’s — history. 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 world’s population, and as a unique stateswoman.

This talk is followed by a book sale and signing.

Buy tickets/get more info now