5/19/2023 0 Comments Empress orchidThe Ch'ing Dynasty in 1852 has lost its vitality, and the court has become an insular, xenophobic place. It is as a minor concubine that the beautiful Tzu Hsi, known as Orchid as a girl, enters the Forbidden City at the age of seventeen. To achieve the latter, tradition provides a stupendous hierarchy of hundreds of wives and concubines. In 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. The setting is China's Forbidden City in the last days of its imperial glory, a vast complex of palaces and gardens run by thousands of eunuchs and encircled by a wall in the center of Peking. “A man who does not like power will suffer from its cruelty.”Īnchee Min, a Chinese author, has penned an enlightening tale about the last empress of China in her book called, Empress Orchid that revolves around a young concubine of the last emperor of the forbidden city where the young lady is caught in the race against an heir to the king in order to rise above her mistress status, but once she becomes the empress, she gets tangled up in the war of jealously, rage, ugly politics, scandals against the kingdom which she wants to desperately save it from the English invaders but the problem is the kingdom doesn't want to be saved, thereby becoming the sole reason for the downfall of the forbidden city.
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