Quotes from Jung Chang

Indeed Empress Dowager Cixi had forseen that her reforms, drastically changing China, could in the end bury her own dynasty.

Only surrender could save her people-as well as spare the country civil war.

Republicanism was not what Empress Dowager Cixi had hoped for, but it was what she would accept, as it shared the same goal as her wished-for parliamentary monarchy that the future of China belong to the Chinese people.

Empress Dowager Cixi's legacy was manifold and towering.

Yaban KuÄŸular? - Çin'de Üç K?zkardeÅŸ

Above all, her transformation of China was carried out without her engaging in violence and with relatively little upheaval.

One request most tentatively and anxiously made concerned the date when the portrait would be finished. It had to be an auspicious one: the painter could not simply finish when she wished.

Yu Keng had been working under Viceroy Zhang, who put him in charge of dealing with clashes between the local population and Christian missions in the provinces. The bilingual Louisa Pierson was able to talk to both sides, helping to smooth out misunderstandings and resolve disputes.

Looking back over the many horrific decades after Cixi's demise, one cannot but admire this amazing stateswoman, flawed though she was.

It was all too clear that Cixi was the only person who could hold the empire together.

For Cixi, what the Viceroy as done was best left unsaid.

Few of her achievements have been recognised and, when they are, the credit is invariably given to the men serving her. This is largely due to a basic handicap: that she was a woman and could only rule in the name of her sons-so her precise role has been little known.

The past hundred years have been most unfair to Cixi, who has been deemed either tyrannical and vicious or hopelessly incompetent or both.

The ordeal of the invasion rather than damaging Cixi's authority, had enhanced it and brought her a new sense of security and confidence.

For all her faults, she was no despot.

She was a giant, but no saint.

Her changes were dramatic and yet gradual, seismic and yet astonishingly bloodless.

In China, one was accustomed to a certain amount of injustice

O não-plantio da safra de 1958 mandava um aviso de que ia haver escassez de alimentos, embora as estatísticas oficiais mostrassem um aumento de dois algorismos na produção agrícola. Anunciou-se oficialmente que em 1958 a safra de trigo da China tinha superado a dos Estados Unidos. O jornal do Partido, o Diário do Povo, abriu uma discussão sobre o tema Como podemos enfrentar o problema da produção excessiva de alimentos?

When a man gets power, even his chickens and dogs rise to heaven.

I remember when my mother pointed to a stone, and she said this was the kind of stone people used to place on the feet of the baby girls to stop them trying to climb away and unbind their feet.

It's taken us 10 years, and it was constant excitement. I was constantly shocked by how evil he could be. Mao was very, very shrewd but he didn't have human feeling.

I no longer have the terrible nightmares that I used to have. Mao had just died in 1976, and China began to open up. For the first time scholarships to go to the West to study were awarded on academic merit.

China is more prosperous than before. The people have better lives but they are not happy and confident because the scars are still there.