Empress Dowager Cixi

1835–1908

Empress Dowager Cixi was a consort of the Xianfeng Emperor who became the dominant political figure of late Qing China after 1861. Acting through successive child emperors, she supported selective reforms, suppressed rivals and confronted foreign intervention, the Boxer crisis and mounting pressure for constitutional change.

In Pearl S. Buck’s Imperial Woman, as Empress Dowager Cixi, she survives rebellions, foreign invasion and repeated crises of succession while extending her authority across nearly half a century. In George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman and the Dragon, captured by Qing forces, he enters the orbit of the Xianfeng Emperor and the concubine who will become Empress Dowager Cixi before witnessing the allied occupation and destruction of the Old Summer Palace. Other novels featuring Empress Dowager Cixi include Christopher Nicole’s The Crimson Pagoda.

Series

Series featuring Empress Dowager Cixi (2 series)

The Flashman Papers in Order

by George MacDonald Fraser 12 books 4.2

The Flashman Papers present the supposed memoirs of Sir Harry Paget Flashman, the bully expelled from Rugby School in Tom Brown’s School Days who becomes a decorated Victorian soldier despite being a coward, liar, opportunist and sexual predator. George MacDonald Fraser places this fictional witness inside documented nineteenth-century…

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Flashman

4.1

Royal Flash

4.2

Flash for Freedom!

4.3

Flashman at the Charge

4.4

Flashman in the Great Game

4.4

Flashman’s Lady

4.2

Flashman and the Redskins

4.3

Flashman and the Dragon

4.3

Flashman and the Mountain of Light

4.3

Flashman and the Angel of the Lord

4.2

Flashman and the Tiger

4.1

Flashman on the March

4.2

China Series in Order

by Christopher Nicole 3 books 4.2

The China Series follows connected women through the collapse of the Qing dynasty and the violent decades that follow. Constance Baird enters missionary and court society before the Boxer crisis; Adela Wynne returns as a Manchu heiress during the revolution of 1911; and Joan Carter arrives in 1926…

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