Empress Orchid: A Novel (Paperback)

Born in China, Anchee Min experienced the Cultural Revolution first hand. She has written about her country in several books, notably the bestseller Becoming Madame Mao. This edition of her new novel, Empress Orchid, comes with book club questions and a short interview, in which she clarifies her goals in writing about China’s last Empress. “In China,” she says, “children learn that the collapse of every dynasty was the fault of the concubine . . . [they] are taught that the Empress was responsible for destroying China’s two-thousand-year imperial culture.” The same was true of Madame Mao, who was executed, whereas her husband “was seen as the George Washington of China.” It’s a gift when an author lays bare her intentions: “I could not let lies be the only record,” says Min of this revisionist history of a near-destitute girl whose intelligence, beauty, and resolve made her one of the world’s most powerful rulers.
Orchid’s journey to power begins, she tells us, with “a rotten smell”; the family is trying to transport her father’s rapidly decaying corpse to Peking for burial, running out of cash to pay the bearers as they do so. The fifteen-year-old Manchu girl’s adored father was a provincial governor. His health deteriorated after being dismissed by the Emperor, who blamed him for the peasant revolts in his region. Arriving in Peking with her mother and siblings to share the shabby house of an unwelcoming Eleventh Uncle, Orchid is to be married off to her handicapped cousin. Instead, she enters the Manchu Dynasty’s concubine sweepstakes, as it were, where her looks and carefully flirtatious smile land her in the heart of the Forbidden City.
Much of her early story concerns the making of a princess; as such it carries timeless echoes of everyone from Cinderella to the late Princess Diana. A girl is plucked from obscurity and finds herself in the spotlight, amid lavish digs and a complex system of court politics. The Grand Empress doesn’t like her, but the feckless Son of Heaven does-at first. Three thousand concubines are her competition and powerful eunuchs are plotting and scheming to oust her. She has a faithful servant, but few allies; even her son is not safe from her rivals. Min has done her homework. We learn much about the Manchu’s elaborate court, which resembles a long-running Chinese opera, awash in silk, jade, gold, precious stones, paintings, art, and fancifully named palaces. On the downside, castration leaves the eunuchs, the court’s “in-house police force”, leaking urine.
There are riveting bits of gore (an armless and legless princess kept alive in a jar as a warning against ambition), and evidence of constant, lethal plotting, but it’s the sheer detail of de luxe descriptions that weigh down the narrative, which is occasionally saved by Min’s lightness of phrasing. Big Sister Fann, who helps Orchid with court knowledge and dress, was “known to have a scorpion mouth but a tofu heart.” Usually such felicitous depictions read like translations from the original. But not always. Riding in a damp palanquin several years later, Orchid, sounding like Paris Hilton, complains to her “big sister”, the ineffably elegant Empress Nuharoo, that she is “sick of having a wet butt.” Such jolts are rare, however, and the narrative seems firmly rooted in imperial China, where the “rotten smell” is less from a parent’s decaying corpse than from the inability of a culture several thousand years old to modernise itself as the barbarians-British, French, Russians-arrive at the Imperial Gates.
Things grow more exciting as Orchid matures. She learns about the affairs of state and acknowledges the weakness of her handsome but effete husband; she comes to admire his younger brother, Prince Kung, a much more realistic man, and she daringly defeats the courtiers who plan to seize power after her husband’s death. Among the more frustrating things Orchid comes to understand is that her own son is too spoiled, too much like his father; the novel ends just as she and Prince Kung have formed an alliance, and it comes as no surprise that the forty-six years of her reign will form the subject of Min’s next book.
Nancy Wigston (Books in Canada)

Talk about story arc: poor girl from rural China auditions for a job as royal concubine, winds up as emperor's wife number four, gives birth to the "last Emperor," rules China as regent for 46 years. The fascinating, implausible life of Tsu Hsi, or "Orchid," was reviled by the revolutionary Chinese, but here it receives a sympathetic treatment from Min (Red Azalea; Becoming Madame Mao), who once again brilliantly lifts the public mask of a celebrated woman to reveal a contradictory character. Sexually assertive, intellectually ambitious, socially striving, Min's Orchid is also "isolated, tense, and in some vague but very real way, dissatisfied." Even after giving birth to the emperor's only son, Orchid feels trapped by the stultifying imperial rituals and persecuted by the other residents of the Forbidden City: six other royal wives, 3,000 invisible concubines and 2,000 scheming eunuchs. In addition to these powerful distractions, she has to discipline her overindulged son, outmaneuver the ruthless politician Su Shun (who wants her buried alive when the emperor dies) and advise the ailing emperor how to fend off both the Boxers and the Western "barbarians." Min, herself a survivor of China's Cultural Revolution, has done a prodigious amount of on-site research to capture the glorious, hopeless last days of the Ching dynasty. At times her writing is textbook-flat, and she sometimes loses track of her teeming cast of characters (for example, Orchid's dangerous mother-in-law and mentally ill sister). But readers will be enthralled by the gorgeously woven cultural tapestry and the psychologically astute portrait of the empress-a talented girl from the provinces who married (way) up.
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