Empress Dowager Cixi: China's Most Misunderstood Ruler
Empress Dowager Cixi ruled China for almost fifty years from behind a literal curtain, without ever officially being allowed to rule anything. She staged a coup in her twenties, ordered the drowning of a rival's favourite consort, and was branded a monster in the West by a book built substantially on a forged diary. When her reputation collapsed after the Boxer Rebellion, she hired a Manchu photographer trained in Paris and an American portrait painter and built one of the most sophisticated personal image campaigns of the nineteenth century to fight back. This episode covers her rise from a…
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