The last empress of China--Dowager Empress Cixi (Tzu Hsi, 1835-1908)--is remembered as one of history's monsters, an iron-willed concubine who, after usurping power in 1861, ruled from the Dragon Throne for half a century. Her reign, in the aftermath of the Opium Wars and through the Boxer Rebellion until the collapse of the 2,000-year-old empire, has traditionally been seen as one of murder, poison, and intrigue. But the wicked image is false. In 1974, to the dismay of scholars, Sir Edmund Backhouse--the biographer most responsible for the widespread vision of Cixi as monster--was revealed to be a con man and a hoaxster. Now best-selling biographer Sterling Seagrave has undertaken the first complete reappraisal of the empress. Drawing on many unpublished or long-overlooked contemporary sources, Seagrave shows us Cixi as a complex woman whose desperate--though often misguided--efforts to hold her country together take on a different coloration in the context of unrelenting foreign attempts to colonize and tear it apart. Far from being all-powerful, she was actually a hostage of vengeful Manchu princes in a power struggle against both Chinese reformers and foreign interference. Here at last is an authentic portrait of this fascinating historical figure, as well as insight into the Western craving to believe in a sinister, dragon-haunted Orient.