Page:China Under the Empress Dowager - ed. Backhouse and Bland - 1914.pdf/8

China Under the Empress Dowager

(Some London Press Opinions)

"Rarely is a book written round State papers which is at once so sound in learning, so informing, and so fascinating to read as this. It publishes for the first time documents which, but for the diligence of the authors, would probably never have come under English eyes; it gives us an enthralling narrative of the vicissitudes of feeling and policy in the Forbidden City at the time of the Boxer rising and the attacks on the Legations in Pekin; and it comes as near as any book could to explaining the enigmatic character of the Empress Dowager. She was the Queen Elizabeth of the Chinese Throe. No one who wishes to understand the China of the last half-century — we might say also the China of immemorial ages — should leave this book unread." — The Spectator.

"For the first time this remarkable volume lifts the veil that diplomacy had allowed to fall over the share of the Empress in the events of 1900. It is a document more illuminating than perhaps any that has ever come out of China. We see, as to a looking-glass, the inner life of the Palace. It presents for the first time a vivid and coherent picture of the whole career and character of the masterful woman who was for half-a-century a de facto ruler of the Chinese Empire. Historically this document is of the highest importance." — The Times.

"Of the greatest possible interest. The diary affords a panorama of Chinese Court life in its most poignant moments, such as without doubt has never before been offered to European judgment. The whole of the historical narrative is carefully wrought and closely argued; the authorities consulted are first-hand and valuable; and the picture is always fall of movement and colour." — The Daily Telegraph.

"The authors have done more than write an admirable biography. They have given a picture, authoritative, instructive, and absorbingly interesting, of the tangled skein of China's political vicissitudes in the last sixty years. And it is out of the China of yesterday that the China of to-morrow must emerge." — The Daily News.

"We have the Empress Dowager to the life. . .a vital, arresting, commanding woman, whose word was law in China for half-a-century. It is a narrative that holds one with an intense fascination. This sober record of events surpasses in interest the wildest fancies of romantic writers." — The Daily Chronicle.