Imperial Woman is a historical novel about the last Empress of China under the Manchu Dynasty. She was known by many different names: Tzu Hsi, Cixi, The Empress Dowager, and “Old Buddha”. This is a story of her rise to power…from concubine to empress. She was only twenty-five years old when the emperor died and left her to run the entire country of China, which she did with shrewd deliberation and fierce pride. This was no easy task because trouble was brewing everywhere. Muslims in the south threatened to cut off a separate territory to call their own, rebellion raged, and the country was divided. Westerners, through force, demanded rights to trade, preach, and travel freely within Chinese borders. And she was under the constant threat of being dethroned by male members of the royal family.
As rule by dynasty was coming to an end in China, the empress watched with horror, powerless to stop the unwanted western influence, incapable of understanding why so many foreign nations were intent on destroying China’s centuries old lifestyle. She preferred isolation for China, steeped in tradition and Chinese cultural values which strongly clashed with the western ideas of Christianity, individualism, and materialism.
During her fifty years of rule Tzu Hsi experienced drastic change in China: floods, famines, the Opium wars and the Boxer Rebellion. Her life included love, drama, intrigue, and murder. She ruled with an iron fist and appeared to be a cold-hearted tyrant. She would go to any lengths to maintain her exalted title of Empress……but she loved her country faithfully and “her people loved her….the peasants and small-town people revered her.” Pearl Buck seems to have made an effort to present Tzu Hsi in the most favorable light, failing to pass judgement on her obsession with material things and her stubborn insistence on maintaining the outdated status quo of the government and cultural conditions. Tzu Hsi made some really bad decisions that cost China dearly in foreign affairs and loss of territories. Only an author personally familiar with life in China in the early twentieth century could possibly have written this story with such ethnic flair and heartfelt emotion, understanding the perspective of all characters: the concubines, eunuchs, the Empress’s friends and enemies, and the general population of China. Pearl Buck did a beautiful job of bringing to life the fairy-tale “rags to riches” story of Tzu Hsi, showing her human side: loneliness, jealousy, fear, anger, love, desire, and her weakness of extravagant adoration of beautiful things. The years covered during the Empress’s reign in Imperial Woman are just a small link in the chain of events of Chinese history, but an important period of time as these tumultuous years represent the calm before the storm of the coming revolution.
Rated 5 Stars. I use a rating scale of 1 to 5. Books rated 1, I seldom finish; books rated 2, I usually finish but would never recommend to anyone. 5 is the highest rating.