Then we have the gall to complain we don’t like the way it turned out. The European powers with the help of the United States transformed China into a monster. How we destroyed thousands of years of art and treasures so each country from the west - who had no right to any of China - treated the Chinese people as if they were the barbarians because they did not want to become just like us. You can also read Imperial Woman as a much larger story, how the western nations took the oldest culture on earth and destroyed it so we could plunder it for opium. Her bad decisions based on the logic of a world already gone where the rules no longer applied. Certainly it’s the story of Tzu Hsi, her life, her deeply flawed, complex personality. It’s a brilliant, detailed picture of a vanished civilization … beautiful and to modern minds, bizarre. There are a number of ways to read this book. The old China collapsed but from its ashes, the new China has gained more power than the old ever had. In a way, she was more right than she knew.

The unstoppable force meets the immoveable object and the result is – as might be expected – tragic. Despite all evidence, she cannot believe China can lose to these invaders and she never loses her unyielding belief in the superiority of Chinese culture … the ultimate irony given the unyielding belief of the Western powers of their superiority. Even the rare victory is no more than a holding action. Once the rape of China begins, she is powerless to stop it. As the representative of the last Dynasty, she tries to find her way while the China she has known is assaulted by wave after wave of western imperialist pirates under the guise of missionaries, traders, and ambassadors. Her fight against white imperialism is hopeless. She is forced to preside over the destruction of Chinese culture.

His early death leaves her regent to her son. Intelligent, highly (self) educated Tzu Hsi makes herself essential to her debauched, physically weakened, opium-addicted husband. Still in love with her childhood sweetheart, a single night of love produces a son, the next emperor. First chosen as one of many concubines to the young emperor – no more than a child himself – she manipulates herself into position as his favorite, cultivates his favor until he depends on her completely. The empire collapsed only three years after her death, in 1911. Her death heralded the end of the old China. This is the story of Tzu Hsi, a woman who rose from obscurity to rule first as regent to her son, the boy emperor, then ultimately as the last Empress of China from 1861 to 1908. The Last Empress and the Destruction of China

Imperial woman buck