For bestselling author Chang Jung (張戎), translating her latest English-language book into Chinese meant editing it for a more skeptical crowd.
Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China, published in English last year by Knopf Doubleday, was released this month in traditional Chinese by Taipei’s Rye Field Publications. It’s the same book — mostly.
Portions of text have been updated with information received after the English release, mainly “technicalities,” Chang said.
Photo courtesy of Rye Field Publications
The Chinese translation also includes more proof for its claims and less exposition.
“In English[-speaking] audiences, very few people know who Cixi (慈禧) was, so to tell the story was straightforward,” she said.
“In the Chinese[-speaking] world, because people have already got deep-rooted prejudices against her, I needed more original quotes to convince them … I also did leave out the explanations needed for foreign readers who don’t know anything about China’s background,” she said.
Chang is author of Wild Swans (1991), a family history and memoir that has sold 13 million copies worldwide.
She was born in Sichuan province, China in 1952, as the daughter of high-ranking Communist party cadres who were disgraced for their criticism of Great Leap Forward policies. In 1978, Chang left China for the UK, where she now lives.
Her latest book focuses on Cixi, who controlled the Qing dynasty’s throne from 1861 to 1908.
During Cixi’s unofficial reign, China faced a series of invasions by foreign powers, losing all the wars it fought. After China’s surprise defeat to Japan in 1894, opinions overseas began turning against China and Cixi herself. In contemporary records, she was treated as a symbol of Oriental decadence, though today she is mostly forgotten in the West by all but historians.
In the East, however, her reputation as the vicious and deeply conservative ruler who “caused the fall of China” still lingers.
“Her reputation has been blackened for over a hundred years,” Chang said.
“I think perhaps the main thing is that three years after Cixi died, China became a republic and the political forces had no incentive to give her credit. They’d rather say Cixi made a mess of the country and it fell on them to rescue China from the terrible mess she had left behind,” she said.
“Also, there was another factor. Because Cixi was a woman, she rarely issued edicts in her own name. She often issued edicts in the name of the boy emperors. So it’s not quite straightforward, which were her ideas and which were the boy emperor’s ideas. Without some research, it is not very obvious.”
REHABILITATING THE EMPRESS
Chang’s biography is the first to draw on the full range of English and Chinese court records, diaries and other documents, to mount a stalwart defense of Cixi.
In both the original text and translation, Chang identifies Cixi as a reformer who abolished foot-binding, built railways and other modern infrastructure and sent students overseas so that China could “learn from the West.”
In her later years, Cixi made an effort to reinvent the Manchu dynasty as a constitutional monarchy, in a time when anti-imperial sentiment was rising, Chang said.
“The anti-Manchu sentiment started with modern education, with people going abroad and learning all these new ideas and learning about this majority rule and so on, and many people suggested to Cixi she should stop sending people abroad, but Cixi rejected [the idea],” she said.
“And she didn’t want to use slaughter to keep people at bay. She wanted to create a situation where she could both keep the Manchu monarchy and give people their say.”
But Cixi probably was as extravagant as her reputation suggests, Chang said. She “certainly loved beautiful things,” and at the heart of her policies was “making China rich.”
The empress dowager was also probably as brutal as her detractors claim. The empress dowager backed ruthless crackdowns on a pro-independence Muslim uprising, and Chang concludes that Cixi poisoned the young Guangxu Emperor (光緒帝), as is widely believed.
Chang makes an unorthodox claim for the emperor’s murder: that it was part of a plan to keep Japan from seizing control of the throne.
The book is also unusual for advancing a claim that on the deathbed, Cixi knew her constitutional monarchy would not succeed and had deliberately made arrangements to ensure China’s transition to a republic.
“The fact that China became a republic is to Cixi’s credit. In my view, she planned it,” Chang said.
“Many intelligent Chinese scholars know that Cixi is not what her reputation makes her out to be. But because this is not a party line, many people are hesitant to be as blunt and as straightforward as I am,” she said.
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