Marina Warner 
The Dragon Empress 
Life and Times of Tz’u-hsi 1835-1908 Empress Dowager of China

From 1861 to 1908 a woman, the Empress Dowager Tz”u-hsi, born the daughter of a minor mandarin, held the supreme power in China. Opportunistic, ruthless, malicious, she ruled over four hundred million people. Marina Warner”s biography lays bare her complex personality: her extreme conventionalism; her hatred of ‘foreigners’; her passion for power and intrigue; her vanity and her delight in ritual; her extravagance and corruption and her love of gardens, painting and the theatre. THE DRAGON EMPRESS also portrays a China in rapid decline as poverty, civil war and foreign exploitation and invasion brought about the fall of the Ch”ing dynasty.