Empress Orchid (Paperback)

~ (Author) "MY IMPERIAL LIFE began with a smell..." (more)
Key Phrases: head eunuch, grand councilor, other concubines, Tung Chih, Emperor Hsien Feng, Prince Kung (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Talk about story arc: poor girl from rural China auditions for a job as royal concubine, winds up as emperor's wife number four, gives birth to the "last Emperor," rules China as regent for 46 years. The fascinating, implausible life of Tsu Hsi, or "Orchid," was reviled by the revolutionary Chinese, but here it receives a sympathetic treatment from Min (Red Azalea; Becoming Madame Mao), who once again brilliantly lifts the public mask of a celebrated woman to reveal a contradictory character. Sexually assertive, intellectually ambitious, socially striving, Min's Orchid is also "isolated, tense, and in some vague but very real way, dissatisfied." Even after giving birth to the emperor's only son, Orchid feels trapped by the stultifying imperial rituals and persecuted by the other residents of the Forbidden City: six other royal wives, 3,000 invisible concubines and 2,000 scheming eunuchs. In addition to these powerful distractions, she has to discipline her overindulged son, outmaneuver the ruthless politician Su Shun (who wants her buried alive when the emperor dies) and advise the ailing emperor how to fend off both the Boxers and the Western "barbarians." Min, herself a survivor of China's Cultural Revolution, has done a prodigious amount of on-site research to capture the glorious, hopeless last days of the Ching dynasty. At times her writing is textbook-flat, and she sometimes loses track of her teeming cast of characters (for example, Orchid's dangerous mother-in-law and mentally ill sister). But readers will be enthralled by the gorgeously woven cultural tapestry and the psychologically astute portrait of the empress-a talented girl from the provinces who married (way) up.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Bookmarks Magazine

Min, author of the acclaimed Becoming Madame Mao, which fictionalized the life of a woman demonized in history books, again melds exhaustive historical and political research with expertly articulated characters in Empress Orchid. Critics praised the novel's linguistic dexterity (once in the U.S., Min had to learn English in six months or face deportation) and revelatory insights into the lives of women possessing few rights. Too many characters and events muddle the plot, and the style wavers from glittering to dull. Yet ultimately, the novel provides a valuable glimpse into the daily habits of fascinating historical characters and charts the last, decadent days of an empire.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books; First Edition. first pb edition (April 11, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618562036
• ISBN-13: 978-0618562039
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (91 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #203,759 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

62 of 64 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Life in the Forbidden City, January 29, 2004

By	Steve Koss (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Empress Orchid: A Novel (Hardcover)

Anchee Min's latest book demonstrates once again her comfort level with historical novels and shows, as well, her increasing command of English as an acquired language. Ms. Min's writing shows more complexity in her sentence structures, more subtlety in her imagery, richer characterization, and more power of expression than her previous novel, Wild Ginger. As a result, Empress Orchid is a highly engaging and satisfying read, rich in plot and characterization. Her novelization of the Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi may or may not be historically accurate, but I personally do not think precision is required here. The subject matter gives the author a wide field in which to display her story-telling skills while weaving in fascinating elements of Chinese history and culture. Having visited the Forbidden City and the Summer Palace three times myself, and the Summer Resort in Chengde once, I felt that Ms. Min captured their essence perfectly. As I read her descriptions, I felt transported back to those places as I had seen them, but 100 years ealier. Read this book for its atmosphere, its depiction of life in Imperial China, and its fascinating "insider" snippets of Chinese culture. If I had one criticism to offer, it is that I wish more of the "secondary" characters were more fully and thoroughly drawn and more of their interior thoughts, motivations, and reactions were revealed. The author creates fascinating characters in the eunuch An-te-hai, Prince Kung, and Yung Lu -- I would love to know more about them. That said, I will wait anxiously for the next installment in Anchee Min's story of Tzu Hsi. I firmly believe Ms. Min will replace Pearl Buck (and everyone else) as THE English language novelist of Chinese history. I recommend this book highly to anyone who wants to learn more about Chinese history and culture and life as it must have been lived in the Forbidden City in the late 19th Century.

42 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Flawed---but an ambitious and exciting novel anyway, March 8, 2004

By	Joanna Daneman (Middletown, DE USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

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This review is from: Empress Orchid: A Novel (Hardcover)

Anchee Min takes the story of Yehonala, the concubine of Manchu Emperor Hsien Feng and gives it an erotic, feminine twist, creating a memoir-like portrait of this legendary woman. This novel is not perfect, yet it is exciting and takes a great deal of risks in style and substance.

If you aren't familiar with much Chinese history of the Ching Dynasty (ending with "The Last Emperor" Pu Yi) it helps to know a few things beforehand. Orchid, or Yehonala (her family name) became "Tzu Hsi" --Empress of the Western Palace, and was known as The Dowager Empress to the Europeans. She ruled as regent for her infant son Tung Chih after the death of Hsien Feng. She survived a coup attempt, the Opium Wars, the Tai Ping rebellion in Nanking, and the Boxer Rebellion and she died in 1908, on the same day as her nephew, the emperor successor to Tung Chih, who died of smallpox not long after coming of age.

A biography of the Empress by an English adventurer named Backhouse was considered gospel truth by the British, who despised this stubborn woman who kept China from modernizing and prevented the Europeans from establishing as much of a colonial beachhead in China as they had done in India and Indonesia. Backhouse's work was only discredited in 1974, which I find amazing, as I read his book in 1971 and thought it was pure bunkum with stories that surely were colonial propaganda and sensationalism (his tales of sexual escapades and sado-masochism were pure Victorian English erotic fantasy.)

Anchee Min plays some interesting turns on well-known history events (the selection of concubines after the death of the first Empress, the flight of the Imperial Household to Jehol during one European invasion, the death of Hsien Feng amid the struggle of his Viceroy Su Shun to become Regent, and Yehonala's rise to power.) The real story is vastly different -- actual events are sketched in altered form or as they were reported to happen, depending on Min's novelistic requirements.

What author Min is apparently attempting is an internal history, the development of the China's most powerful rulers rising from poverty-stricken and uneducated girl. It echoes the rise of Madam Mao during the Cultural Revolution, a subject of another of Min's novels ("Becoming Madam Mao.") As a work, the novel is flawed; characters are developed importantly, then dropped except for trifling reappearances (Yehonala's siblings, the Dowager foster-mother of Hsien Feng.) There is a lot of improbability and derivative plot device (the education in a whorehouse to learn erotic technique and the poisonous plotting of the other wives of Hsien Feng seems to owe more than a little something to novels such as Barbara Chase-Riboud's "Valide", the story of a concubine who rises to power in Ottoman Turkey.)

But despite the literary vagaries, this is an exciting read, not quite as good as I'd hoped, and not nearly as good as Pearl Buck's version "Imperial Woman" which is just as inaccurate historically. Anchee Min takes risks, and though this may not be her finest work, I think she will continue to delight and amaze her readers with her style.

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A Huge Disappointment to anyone who knows anything about Chinese history, November 21, 2006

By	NoBooksNoLife (Tokyo, Japan and Nevada USA) - See all my reviews

I really wanted to love this book. I loved the author's autobiography (RED AZELEA) and her novel (KATHERINE)about a foreign English teacher in China, so I expected EMPRESS ORCHID to bring together her amazing talent for prose narrative in English, enhanced with her first-hand research of Chinese sources, to bring to life the mis-judged history of Empress Dowager Tz'u Hsi.

I anticipated some embellishments, but the total re-creation of Tzu Hsi as "Orchid", into a kind of modern woman-warrior, was too much for me. To ask the reader to believe that an uneducated female was able to "pick up" enough formal literary Chinese to be able to read court documents is stretching history way too far. Wouldn't it have made a more fascinating story to construe how Orchid was able to hold onto power so long in spite of being illiterate?

The first third of the book is a masterful depiction of the sights, smells, sounds, social structure, of late 19th Century China, and would have gained 5 stars, but the rest devolved into conjecture after conjecture which mix like sour notes in an otherwise brilliant composition. It's a novel, but it's not a historical novel. Moreover, I $en$ed that the whole $tory was being pitched to the $maller mind$ of Hollywood in hope of a movie deal. I felt like the author let down her loyal fans while trying to ride her own popularity to chase the $$.

The best part of Empress Orchid is the list of 5 tone-setting quotations from other sources in the facing page prior to the map (unnumbered pages). One of these quotes is from Sterling Seagrave from his book DRAGON LADY: THE LIFE AND LEGEND OF THE LAST EMPRESS OF CHINA, which refers to the fact that in 1974 most of the previously trusted scholarship on Tzu Hsi had been revealed as counterfeit. This led me to buy Seagrave's book, which explores the falsehoods of these earlier works, and turns into a fluid and fascinating narrative that is truly Biographical History.

In short, you can choose to spend your precious time on 336 pages of a fictional romance novel (Empress Orchid), or 463 pages of intelligent, delicious historical biography (followed by 135 pages of fascinating notes and complete index). As a student of Chinese language, literature, and history, I recommend reading Seagrave's book first.