Guarding myself from criticism, I listen but speak little. In front of me is a gauze curtain-a translucent screen symbolically separating the female from the male. When I sit on the throne my appearance is gracious, pleasant and placid. I am like a painting from the Imperial portrait gallery. For half a century, I participated in the elaborate etiquette of the court in all its meticulous detail. Not a day has gone by when I haven’t felt like a mouse escaping one more trap. My world has been an exasperating place of ritual where the only privacy has been inside my head. My dynasty, the Ch’ing, has been beyond saving ever since we lost the Opium Wars to Great Britain and its allies. The dynasty’s conspiracies were old, and men and women were caught up in cutthroat rivalries long before I entered the Forbidden City and became a concubine. My life was shaped by forces at work before I was born. I laugh when I hear people say that it was my desire to rule China from an early age.

THE TRUTH IS that I have never been the mastermind of anything. Chinese textbook (in print 1949–1991) MAP OF THE FORBIDDEN CITY She was a mastermind of pure evil and intrigue. has shown herself to be benevolent and economical. One of the ancient sages of China foretold that China will be destroyed by a woman. In 1974, somewhat to Oxford’s embarrassment and to the private dismay of China scholars everywhere, Backhouse was revealed to be a counterfeiter … The con man had been exposed, but his counterfeit material was still bedrock scholarship. I had kept an unusually close record of my secret association with the Empress and others, possessing notes and messages written to me by Her Majesty, but had the misfortune to lose all these manuscripts and papers. My intercourse with Tzu Hsi started in 1902 and continued until her death. Little does she know that China will collapse around her, and that she will be its last Empress. Orchid trains herself in the art of pleasuring a man, bribes her way into the royal bed, and seduces the monarch, drawing the attention of dangerous foes.

But beneath its immaculate façade lie whispers of murders and ghosts, and the thousands of concubines will stoop to any lengths to bear the Emperor's son.

When she is chosen as a lower-ranking concubine she enters the erotically charged and ritualised Forbidden City. To rescue her family from poverty and avoid marrying her slope-shouldered cousin, seventeen-year-old Orchid competes to be one of the Emperor's wives. One woman will rise from poverty to change its history for ever. It is the 19th century, and China is in chaos. Like all good novelists, she implies as much as she says, and her characterisation is subtle and worldly-wise' GLASGOW HERALD ' Empress Orchid is strong on both sexual chicanery and violent conspiracy.

Empress orchid