Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

Japan and China both responded to the modern world in different ways. Japan rushed head first into the modern world, and industrialization. The goal was to become a great nation quickly. China though took another route they tried to close themselves off to the world, thinking they were already a great and mighty nation and had nothing to prove. Over the 1800s they would learn that there were other nation states willing to strike against China and show them they were no longer great. This book tells the story of Cixi and how she ushered in Chinese modernization at great costs.

While she might not be well known today, Cixi was a powerful figure in modern China, one of the great rulers who foresaw that China had to changed, and she implemented change that could be controlled by the state. The book is fairly well written though at times it gets lost in the names of titles of Imperial China, a common downfall of many books on China. But Jung Chang does a fairly decent job bringing to life China during this time of crossroads, a time when everything was changing for an empire not used to change.