Empress Orchid (BBC Audio) [Audio CD]

Product Details

• Audio CD
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1846071682
• ISBN-13: 978-1846071683
• Product Dimensions: 5.6 x 5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (96 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,490,541 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Anchee Min was born in Shanghai in 1957. At seventeen she was sent to a labor collective, where a talent scout for Madame Mao's Shanghai Film Studio recruited her to work as a movie actress. She came to the United States in 1984 with the help of actress Joan Chen. Her memoir, Red Azalea, was named one of the New York Times Notable Books of 1994 and was an international bestseller, with rights sold in twenty countries. Her novels Becoming Madame Mao and Empress Orchid were published to critical acclaim and were national bestsellers. Her two other novels, Katherine and Wild Ginger, were published to wonderful reviews and impressive foreign sales.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

79 of 81 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
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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.

57 of 61 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
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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.

30 of 35 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
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This review is from: Empress Orchid (Paperback)

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.