From 1861 to 1908 a woman, the Empress Dowager Tz''u-hsi, born the daughter of a minor mandarin, held the supreme power in China.

Opportunistic, ruthless, malicious, she ruled over four hundred million people. Marina Warner''s biography lays bare her complex personality: her extreme conventionalism; her hatred of "foreigners"; her passion for power and intrigue; her vanity and her delight in ritual; her extravagance and corruption and her love of gardens, painting and the theatre.

THE DRAGON EMPRESS

also portrays a China in rapid decline as poverty, civil war and foreign exploitation and invasion brought about the fall of the Ch''ing dynasty.