Empress Orchid & The Last Empress KINDLE MOBI by Anchee Min [complete 2 book series) H.A.

Empress Orchid Series by Anchee Min:
EMPRESS ORCHID (2005):
Talk about story arc: poor girl from rural China auditions for a job as royal concubine, winds up as emperor's wife number four, gives birth to the "last Emperor," rules China as regent for 46 years. The fascinating, implausible life of Tsu Hsi, or "Orchid," was reviled by the revolutionary Chinese, but here it receives a sympathetic treatment from Min (Red Azalea ; Becoming Madame Mao ), who once again brilliantly lifts the public mask of a celebrated woman to reveal a contradictory character.
Min, herself a survivor of China's Cultural Revolution, has done a prodigious amount of on-site research to capture the glorious, hopeless last days of the Ching dynasty. Ochid is revealed to be sexually assertive, intellectually ambitious, socially striving; yet Min's Orchid is also "isolated, tense, and in some vague but very real way, dissatisfied." Even after giving birth to the emperor's only son, Orchid feels trapped by the stultifying imperial rituals and persecuted by the other residents of the Forbidden City: six other royal wives, 3,000 invisible concubines and 2,000 scheming eunuchs, Orchid's dangerous mother-in-law and mentally ill sister. In addition to these powerful distractions, she has to discipline her overindulged son, outmaneuver the ruthless politician Su Shun (who wants her buried alive when the emperor dies) and advise the ailing emperor how to fend off both the Boxers and the Western "barbarians.". The massive amount of research Min has done ensures this novel to be not only an extremely accurate portrayal of "the woman who would be Empress" but also that readers will be enthralled by the gorgeously woven cultural tapestry and the psychologically astute portrait of the how a woman from the lower classes became an empress. Orchid is ultimately the story of how a talented girl from the provinces who married (way) up.
THE LAST EMPRESS (2007)
Set in the twilight days of Imperial China, The Last Empress continues the tale begun in Empress Orchid: the life of Tzu Hsi, best known to Western histories as a manipulating, murderous “Dragon Lady of theManchu Yehenara clan who lived for 72 years, and who effectively controlled the Chinese government for 47 years, from 1861 to her death in 1908 when she appointed her infant nephew Pu Yi, as the very last Emperor of China, a title he held only until royal rule was abandoned in 1912.
But the real Tzu Hsi was a passionate and intelligent woman trapped in a system that allowed no one – man or woman – freedom. Telling her own story, Tzu Hsi reveals herself as a brilliant politician, balancing warring factions and attempting to hold strong against the foreign powers seeking China as a prize.
Historians both in China and abroad have generally portrayed her as a despot responsible for the fall of the dynasty, while others have suggested that her opponents among the reformers succeeded in making her a scapegoat for problems beyond her control, that she stepped in to prevent disorder, that she was no more ruthless than other rulers, and that she was even an effective if reluctant reformer in the last years of her life. The Last Empress tells of the poignant life of a woman swept up in the massive changes of the late 1800s; a dedicated ruler who nevertheless knows herself doomed to fail in her increasingly desperate attempts to keep a dying way of life alive. A fascinating book, granting us a window into a past we can barely imagine, and making a tumultuous time period come to vivid life.