The Empress

The Empress Cixi by Jung Chang
I will admit I devour books, but this book took time to read, weeks, not hours or indeed days. My only knowledge of the Empress was the movie 55 Days at Peking,  a truly bad movie extolling the brave Europeans, defending their presence in China against the Boxers, with the evil Empress pulling the strings. 
The daughter of a minor Manchu family she became a concubine, a very lowly concubine, but this intelligent child, as she was, was soon number 2 wife/concubine , with the sudden death of the Emperor, joint Dowager Empress with her lifelong friend the number one wife. This was possible because she, Cixi was very smart and more importantly the mother of the Emperor's only son. 
 She ruled discreetly at first, but then with more confidence, acutely aware of the gathering forces of European countries all demanding a piece of China disguised as access for trade opportunities and the ever present Japanese, waiting to take what ever it could.
Cixi sent out envoys all over the world to bring back knowledge to modernise the Army, Navy, transport and industry. One of the frustrating things about this book is that is how the whole modernisation of China is described, no detail. The envoys went out, returned. and somehow it was done, very annoying I wanted details.
Such an enormous task and China achieved it in a remarkable time period.
Though there is a lack of details, there is an abundance of gossip, actually gossip was the life blood of the Forbidden Palace. The Empress is an interesting woman in fact I admired her, you have to accept the unpleasantness of her reign, I'm talking about the murders, she ordered the murder of her adopted son, the Emperor, had his favourite concubine thrown down a well, mass executions, torture, and general violence. She was remarkable, that is obvious, but she is still a distant figure, the reader never really gets any real sense of her, everything is gossip, innuendo, and based on biased foreign reporting.
Perhaps I'm being harsh, it is a good book, made difficult by the sheer complexity of China, The Empress herself and the times she lived in, the difficulty in getting information from China, the author's books are banned in China.  Perhaps it could have been two books, The Empress the reformer, and The Empress the woman. the book doesn't address either of these satisfactorily.
So I rate this book 5/10.