The Dragon Empress

Oct 30, 2024 3:31 AM

Author:Marina Warner

The Dragon Empress

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.

Reviews

This is probably the best book that has ever been written in the Renaissance and probably the most readable... Mr Cronin's fluent pen and his delight in the subject turn the whole account into something of a love story.

—— The Times Educational Supplement

One of the first books to recommend to someone who wishes to discover the Florentine Renaissance.

—— The Times Literary Supplement

A fascinating story, eloquently told and packed with recondite material... a model history for the general reader.

—— Spectator

With the selective skill of a great master painter who makes the most minute detail play its part in the whole composition, Vincent Cronin has, in this distinguished book, sifted for us the living spectacle of the quattrocento in the hub of Tuscany.

—— Scotsman

A real-life Hunt For Red October

—— New York Times

From page one, it reads like a novel. How they uncovered all this stuff is remarkable

—— Don Imus

The most comprehensive look at the work of these intrepid sailors . . . A celebration of their ingenuity and valor

—— Baltimore Sun

Reads like an adventure novel, but it's all to real

—— Seyour M. Hersh, author of The Dark Side of Camelot

The veterans of the 'Silent Service' are silent no more

—— John Lehman, former Secretary of the Navy , Wall Street Journal

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