My life in books

Anchee Min:
Empress Orchid
The Last Empress

OK, I was pretty much a pre-sold audience for these books, because I have long been fascinated by the woman known as Dowager Empress Tsu Hsi (Cixi in pinyan), who fought as hard as she could to hold together the disintegrating Manchu dynasty, and China itself, against the superior firepower and technology of European imperialism.

She has been demonised, reviled, exoticised, eroticised, but rarely depicted (at least until recently – see Sterling Seagrave’s recent biography Dragon Lady), either in fiction or biography, as a woman trying to use her position as wife and later mother of successive incompetent Emperors in order to preserve her country and way of life from unending assaults both military and economic from the imperialist West, hampered by the rigid bonds of tradition and ingrained sexism within her own court.

At least, that’s how I’ve long envisioned her.

Anchee Min has written a two-volume fictionalised account of Cixi’s life, her rise from the daughter of a minor official to the most powerful woman in China – which, thanks to the intensely ritualised protocols and traditions of the court and Imperial family, still leaves her without much direct power, forced to work through various powerful men of the court in social conditions that make it difficult for her to forge a working relationship with her rival, the other Dowager Empress Tsu An (Ci'an in pinyan).

I enjoyed Min’s portrayal of Tsu Hsi, although I did have one significant issue with the book – its first person POV and the tone resulting from it. I found myself wondering at a number of points in the books who Cixi is telling her story to. My best guess, based on terminology and occasional explanations or justifications, is that she is talking to a Western audience. Having spent so much of her life trying to encourage reform in China based on some of the higher principles of Western theories of government, while watching western nations annex vast swaths of China’s territory and cripple its economy with vindictively huge demands for reparations, I couldn’t figure out why Min represented her as being so anxious to explain herself to the West. A less specific tone, or a sense that her audience is her own people, would have read better, in my opinion.

Also, I'd like to apply a rather large clue-by-four to an appropriate portion of the publishers' anatomy, who did everything they could in presenting and promoting the novels to re-exoticise and re-eroticise the story of a powerful Asian woman.