Böcker av Edmund Backhouse

One of the most popular and controversial Chinese history books ever written, China under the Empress Dowager is also one of the best. Authors Bland and Backhouse take you inside the Forbidden City during the reign of Empress Dowager Cixi (1861-1908), a world of power-thirsty eunuchs, concubines and Mandarins, intrigue, bitter antagonism and ruthless reprisals. The book was unique for its time in its use of sometime controversial Chinese source materials. As entertaining as it is enlightening, the book that presaged the fall of the Qing dynasty is as readable today as it ever was.

In 1898 a young Englishman walked into a homosexual brothel in Peking and began a journey that, as he claims, took him all the way to the bedchamber of imperial China's last great ruler, the Empress Dowager Tz'u Hsi.