Best-selling author Jung Chang's latest book sheds light on a controversial concubine who became China's unofficial ruler. Shane Gilchrist reports.
Jung Chang concedes her efforts in translating into Mandarin the many words in her new book, Empress Dowager Cixi, might be largely in vain.
Both her 1991 bestseller, Wild Swans, and 2005 effort, Mao: The Unknown Story, have been banned in mainland China, so she's not certain her illuminating depiction of a much-maligned concubine who rose to rule China will actually find its way on to bookshop shelves in her homeland.
''When I started researching this book in 2008, China was at its most relaxed, partly because of the Olympics, which meant Cixi was not a sensitive subject. Now, I don't know.
''In any case, I don't think the regime would want to raise my profile,'' Chang explains from Thailand last week before embarking on a tour of Australia and New Zealand that includes a speaking engagement at the University of Otago's College of Education auditorium tomorrow.
''After the publication of my Mao biography, I lost the freedom to come and go from China.
''But I am allowed to go back to China once a year for a few days because of my mother, who is in her mid-80s and frail. She can't travel and depends on her children to go and see her,'' says Chang, who left China in 1978 and now lives in London with her husband, Jon Halliday.
''When I'm in China, I am not allowed to be involved in any public protest or give interviews - or even see friends who might be slightly involved in politics.
''At the moment I am translating the book into Chinese. It is a lot of work,'' the 61-year-old says.
''I have just given the draft to the Chinese publisher in Taiwan.''
Regardless of its fate in her homeland, Empress Dowager Cixi: the concubine who launched modern China could do rather well elsewhere, given Chang's books have been translated into more than 40 languages and sold more than 15 million copies.
Chang says her new book is an attempt to fully explore the life and motivations of Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908), who ruled China for decades and brought a medieval empire into the modern age.
''She had this terrible image in the public eye. She was regarded as a despot, hopelessly rotten and useless.
''When I started researching Wild Swans, I realised that foot-binding - a practice that had gone on for a thousand years - was banned by the Empress Dowager. I had always thought it had been banned by the communists ... so that made me more than a little interested in her.
''I finished Wild Swans, and it was when I was researching Mao that I realised how many freedoms there were in Mao's youth that were a result of the Empress Dowager. I realised all these modern things, such as newspapers, the telegraph then telephone, lighting, foreign trade ... all of this started from the 1860s, which was when she took power,'' Chang explains.
At the age of 16, in a nationwide selection for royal consorts, Cixi was chosen as one of Emperor Xianfeng's numerous concubines and sexual partners. When he died in 1861, their five-year-old son, Tongzhi, took the throne. Cixi and Empress Zhen then launched a palace coup against the regents appointed by her husband and they became the real rulers of China, albeit from behind the throne.
''They were not even allowed to see officials face to face and had to sit behind a silk screen,'' Chang explains.
''Officials would prostrate in front of the throne, where her son was seated. How do you rule such a large empire? It is an amazing feat. She was never a monarch in her own right, but she was a ruler. In her time, she opened the doors to China.
''Her life was full of real drama. She suppressed peasant uprisings, including the biggest one, the Taiping Rebellion, which devastated much of southern China. These uprisings started before she took power [but] her methods were ruthless.
''Of course, she was a deeply flawed person,'' Chang says.
''She grew out of the medieval soil, a time when there was death by a thousand cuts. She emerged as a real person, nuanced, not a caricature.
''To start with, I wanted to find out what she was really like. As I got into the court documents, eyewitness accounts and diary entries, the more I found out about her, the more I felt she was unjustly treated.''
Chang's work might meticulously record the Empress Dowager's conduct of domestic and foreign affairs, but it also explores the splendour of her Summer Palace as well as the harem of Beijing's Forbidden City, where Cixi lived surrounded by eunuchs, including one, Little An, with whom she fell in love.
However, the affair had a tragic ending in 1869. In an unprecedented move, Cixi allowed Little An and a party including other eunuchs to leave the Forbidden City, the tour aimed at helping preparations for the forthcoming marriage of her son as well as providing something of a reward for her lover. Outraged officials ordered the execution of Little An and others.
''That was such a tragedy,'' Chang says.
''Most people in China have this deep-rooted disgust of eunuchs, when they should have pity for them. Even today, people mention the word eunuch in a derogatory way.
''Cixi suffered a nervous breakdown when the man was executed. She was no shrinking violet but this breakdown lasted many months; her heart was closed. In my research I never found any trace of her having another relationship.''
Regardless of any differences in culture, ''Shakespearean'' springs to mind when presented with this broad picture of Cixi's life. And it's one that resonates with Chang, too.
Cixi, after all, did murder her stepson, Emperor Guangxu, in 1908, three days before she died.
''Let's not forget her adopted son had been involved in an attempt to murder her in 1888,'' Chang notes.
''But, from her point of view, if she had died and he had remained alive, China would've fallen into the hands of the Japanese. The Emperor was a hopeless person, not very smart ... in the last hours of her life, she was thinking of what would have happened when she died.''
Empress Dowager Cixi: the concubine who launched modern China, by Jung Chang, is published by Jonathan Cape.
See her, hear her
''An Afternoon with Jung Chang'', University of Otago College of Education Auditorium, 145 Union St East, Dunedin, Sunday, March 9, 2pm-3.30pm. Tickets $10, available from University Book Shop.
