Can I read Dragon lady : the life and legend of the last empress of China on EtoBox?

Dragon lady : the life and legend of the last empress of China by Seagrave, Sterling; Seagrave, Peggy is a history book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Dragon lady : the life and legend of the last empress of China about?

The last empress of China--Dowager Empress Cixi (Tzu Hsi, 1835-1908)--is remembered as one of history's monsters, an iron-willed concubine who, after usurping power in 1861, ruled from the Dragon Throne for half a century. Her reign, in the aftermath of the Opium Wars and through the Boxer Rebellion until the collapse of the 2,000-year-old empire, has traditionally been seen as one of murder, poison, and intrigue. But the wicked image is false. In 1974, to the dismay of scholars, Sir Edmund Backhouse--the biographer most responsible for the widespread vision of Cixi as monster--was revealed to be a con man and a hoaxster. Now best-selling biographer Sterling Seagrave has undertaken the first complete reappraisal of the empress. Drawing on many unpublished or long-overlooked contemporary sources, Seagrave shows us Cixi as a complex woman whose desperate--though often misguided--efforts to hold her country together take on a different coloration in the context of unrelenting foreign attempts to colonize and tear it apart. Far from being all-powerful, she was actually a hostage of vengeful Manchu princes in a power struggle against both Chinese reformers and foreign interference. Here

Who reads Dragon lady : the life and legend of the last empress of China?

Author

Seagrave, Sterling; Seagrave, Peggy

Publisher

Alfred A. Knopf Books for Young Readers

Published

1992

Language

EN

ISBN

9780679402305

Category

history

Subjects

Memoir, Fiction, Historical Fiction

Rating

3.82 / 5 (10 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14