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The setting is China's Forbidden City within the last days of its imperial glory, a vast complex of palaces and gardens run by a large number of eunuchs and encircled with a wall in the center of Peking. With this highly ordered place -- tradition-bound, ruled by strict etiquette, rife with political and erotic tension -- the Emperor, "the Son of Heaven," performs two duties: he must rule the court and conceive an heir. To achieve the latter, tradition offers a stupendous hierarchy of a huge selection of wives and concubines. It is as a minor concubine that the beautiful Tzu Hsi, known as Orchid as a woman, enters the Forbidden City at age seventeen.
It is not a good time to enter the town. The Ch'ing Dynasty in 1852 has lost its vitality, and the court is becoming an insular, xenophobic place. One or two short decades earlier, China lost the Opium Wars, and it has done little since to strengthen its defenses or improve diplomatic ties. Instead, the inner circle has turned further inward, naively confident that its troubles are past and the glory of China could keep the "barbarians" -- the outsiders -- away.
Within the walls of the Forbidden City the results of an misstep are deadly. As you of a huge selection of women vying for the attention of the Emperor, Orchid soon discovers that she must take matters into her own hands. After training herself in the art of pleasing a man, she bribes her way into the royal bedchamber and seduces the monarch. A grand love affair ensues; the Emperor is a troubled man, but their love is passionate and genuine. Orchid gets the great fortune to bear him a son. Elevated to the rank of Empress, she still must battle to maintain her position and the right to raise her own child. While using death of the Emperor comes a palace coup that eventually thrusts Orchid into power, although only as regent until her son's maturity. Now she must rule China as its walls tumble around her, and she alone seems capable of holding the country together.
This can be an epic story firmly in the mold of Anchee Min’s Becoming Madame Mao. Like that best-selling historical novel, the heroine of Empress Orchid comes down to us with a diabolical reputation -- a female who seized power through sexual seduction, murder, and endless intrigue. But reality tells another story. Predicated on copious research, this is a vivid portrait of an flawed yet utterly compelling woman who survived in a male world, a female whose main struggle had not been to hold to power but to her own humanity. Richly detailed and completely gripping, Empress Orchid is a novel of high drama and lyricism and the first level of a trilogy about the life span of 1 of the most crucial women in history.
