Anchee Min

It is the end of the nineteenth century and China is riding on the crest of great change, but for nine-year-old Willow, the only child of a destitute family in the small southern town of Chin-kiang, nothing ever seems to change. Until the day she meets Pearl, the eldest daughter of a zealous American missionary.
Pearl is head-strong, independent and fiercely intelligent, and will grow up to be Pearl S Buck, the Pulitzer- and Nobel Prize-winning...

The last decades of the nineteenth century were a violent period in China"s history marked by humiliating foreign incursions and domestic rebellion, ultimately ending in the demise of the Ch"ing dynasty. The only constant during this tumultuous time was the power wielded by one person: the resilient, ever-resourceful Tzu Hsi, or Empress Orchid, as readers came to know her in Anchee Min"s critically acclaimed novel covering the first part of this complex...

"The setting is China's Forbidden City in the last days of its imperial glory, a vast complex of palaces and gardens run by thousands of eunuchs and encircled by a wall in the center of Peking. In this highly ordered place - tradition-bound, ruled by strict etiquette, rife with political and erotic tension - the Emperor, "the Son of Heaven," performs two duties: he must rule the court and conceive an heir. To achieve the latter, tradition provides...