Get full access to The Daily Beast for $1 Trending Now Jung Chang's new book tackles the legend and legacy of Empress Dowager Cixi, the concubine who modernized China. “It is necessary,” wrote Niccolò ...

Empress Dowager Cixi strikes a pose Photo courtesy of the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Empress Dowager Cixi is known historically as one of the most powerful women in the world.

Queen Victoria was dressed in black mourning clothes to remember her late husband in the same year that a young woman in a ...

Get full access to The Daily Beast for $1 The legend and legacy of Empress Dowager Cixi, the concubine who modernized China. Xunling “It is necessary,” writes Niccolò Machiavelli in his famous ...

The Suzhou embroiderer wowed the world in the 1900s with pioneering portraits of Jesus to European royalty, and helped empower women at home Suzhou embroidery is one of China's most celebrated ...

Intrigue! Riches! Sex! Some violence! Not the latest movie plot, but a story that lurks in the background of some 100-year-old photographs of The Empress Dowager — once the most powerful woman in Asia ...

Empress Dowager Cixi (second from left) ruled China for much of the second half of the 19th century. (Wikimedia Commons) For much of the second half of the 19th century, as China’s Qing Dynasty fell ...

HOUSTON, November 17, 2013 — The Empress Dowager Cixi has been traduced, author Jung Chang says. Reviled as a devious reactionary, the formidable Cixi, whose dour visage, in the minds of many, ...

Few women have had as long and uninterrupted sway over Chinese politics and society as Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908). Her story is more fraught and high-octane than the finest Peking Opera, of ...

Consider Supporting HoH: During the closing decade of the 19th century, elements of old and new existed side by side in China. The years after the Sino-Japanese war saw a reform movement that ...