Chang is a meticulous researcher, as displayed in her Mao biography, which was heralded as a “magisterial” work of serious scholarship (and which aired some of the Chairman's dirtiest secrets and worst atrocities). Still, despite a handful of attempts to sort through the myths surrounding her life and legacy, Cixi’s name has remained synonymous with feminine wickedness and imperial perfidy.Įnter Jung Chang, the London-based author of the best-selling Wild Swansand Mao: The Unknown Story, both of which remain banned in her homeland. Yet one iron-willed leader is conspicuously absent from the Princes’ Hall of Fame, at least in the West: that of China’s original ‘Dragon Lady’, the Empress Dowager Cixi.Īdored and feared during her Methuselian lifetime, demonized by later Republicans and Communists as a tyrant who sold China out to the Europeans, Cixi has been an object of fascination and scorn ever since she seized the reins of the Manchu dynasty in 1861 in a carefully calculated palace coup. “It is necessary,” wrote Niccolò Machiavelli in his famous treatise on the craft of ruling, “to be a fox to discover the snares and a lion to terrify the wolves.” Shrewd statesmen from antiquity through the Florentine’s day and beyond have embodied this alchemical mix of the vulpine and the leonine in their quest to consolidate power, and their names gild our history books: Cesare Borgia.
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