AN EASTERN EMPRESS

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31077, 4 June 1966, Page 4

AN EASTERN EMPRESS

The Last Great Empress of China. By Charlotte Haldane. Constable. 291 pp. Index.

Charlotte Haldane's book “The Last Great Empress of China" is valuable as a record of the facts, so far as they can be ascertained, about the reign of a woman, whose commanding position in China during the second half of the nineteenth century was never successfully challenged. The Empress Tzu Hsi. the Eastern Empress, is presented In her capacity as politician and intriguer: and, where the author speculates, it is about the springs of political action that she does so. It perhaps follows that readers of this book are likely to be students of Chinese history, rather than readers of biography, who are, no doubt, a much less strenuous race.

Of course, it is unfair to expect a writer to go beyond the limits he has set himself. Nevertheless it is tempting to quote a single sentence from what Sir Edmund Gosse wrote about this very Empress in his book “French Profiles.” “Here, in the Forbidden City, the Empress, until a month or two before, had played the goddess among her ladies, in an indolent magnificence of flowers and satins and music.” The sentence has an imaginative quality that brings the personage to life upon the page. Miss Haldane never achieves this, although she does remark that Tzu Hat liked theatricals and picnics on the crater, and was once interrupted while she was painting bamboo stems on a square of silk. Generally ■peaking, however, the

Empress in this volume appears to be dominated by events. What is suggested is a very big wheel being moved round in a vast HeathRobinsvn machine. On the other hand, the objective accounts of tendencies and happenings in China during the last century are often excellent. For in-

stance, the life and death of the other empress, Tzu An, the Eastern Empress, as she was called, are memorable, though not felt to be particularly tragic; and much later the account of the Boxer movement and the matter-of-fact description of the siege of the legations are of great interest.