Anchee Min, Empress Orchid
Empress Orchid is based on the true story of China’s last empress. Orchid, a young girl from an aristocratic family, lives in poverty since the death of her father, a governor devoted to the emperor. To avoid an unattractive fate marked by a wedding with the simple-minded son of her benefactor and uncle, Orchid signs up to become one of the wives or concubines of young emperor Hsien Feng instead. Chances are, she will be rejected, or at best become one of hundreds of servants who never even see the emperor in their lives, though he has the right, in theory, to sleep with each one of them if he chooses. But she hardly dares dreaming of becoming one of the emperor’s seven wives. The selection is exhausting and humiliating, as the young woman have to stand naked in front of eunuchs and be submitted to physical exams, but Orchid passes them all. Finally, she faces the emperor and his intimidating step-mother, and manages to catch the flitting interest of the emperor,… and she is selected. Not as a first wife, of course, but as one of the other six.
But Orchid, who has romantic dreams of love between a man and a woman, feels jealous towards the other wives, and sad, since months pass without the emperor calling her to his bed. In the Forbidden City, where a girl ignorant of customs and rules, like Orchid, could quickly become an easy prey to gossips and shenanigans, Orchid manages to secure the loyalty of An-te-hai, an ambitious eunuch, well informed and intelligent. An-te-hai will secure a meeting between the emperor and her, and from then she only has to find a way to his heart. Orchid learns in a brothel the tricks to please a man, and with her perky personality she surprises Hsien-Feng, bored by an easy life and the company of submitted women. For a while, the emperor makes Orchid his favorite, neglecting the others and provoking their jealousy. She gives birth to a son, Tung Shih…
But the fate of Orchid is not to be a happy one. Around the forbidden City, China is already falling apart. The loss of the Opium Wars, the obligation to deal with English and Russian invaders and the peasants’ revolts threaten the empire. Hsien Feng’s personality doesn’t help: sickly, depressed, he turns into himself instead of facing difficulties, giving more and more unofficial power to Orchid, who ends up taking decisions instead of her husband…
I must admit I didn’t know much about the Dowager empress (as she is usually referred to) before reading this novel, but she has a reputation for endless ambition and cruelty. Anchee Min wanted to show her in a much better light. I thought Empress Orchid was an interesting novel, even if a bit slow going at times, and heterogeneous. The first part makes us believe that the threats to Orchid reside inside the walls of the Forbidden City and are bound to come from either one of the other wives or the stepmother of the emperor, but nothing comes from there. Later, we realize that the main threat comes from Su Shun, the man who is designed by the emperor to reign until his son is of age. Finally, I think I would have been more interested in learning more about life in the Forbidden City and its strange ways, than about the collapse of the Chinese Empire… I guess there will be a follow-up to Empress Orchid since it only covers the first part of her life. I will also be looking for other books by the same author (Becoming Madame Mao and Red Azalea, the story of Anchee Min’s life in China)…
Rating: 3,5/5
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