Empress Orchid
Life as a writer is full of discovery, but life as a reader even more so. I love discovering a writer new to me, but very rarely do I discover a perfect writer, a flawless book. In Anchee Min’s Empress Orchid I have found both.
Writers who read can be a pain in the butt, mentally editing every page. “Shouldn’t have put it that way - that bit’s leaden - typo! - this character talks like a lifestyle show host…” and so on and so on. I don’t go as far as red pencilling lines, but from my library borrowing there are plenty of readers who do.
I doubt anyone would do that with Anchee Min. Her prose is so beautifully constructed, so spare and pristine, yet managing to convey a tapestry of rich, complex emotion, that I am utterly in awe of it. My inner editor slunk away in shame.
Empress Orchid is the story of the last Empress of China, Tzu Hsi, who is painted by history as `a mastermind of pure evil and intrigue’. But the portrait Min has drawn from her extensive research is very different - the last Empress was a proud, intelligent and passionate woman, a jewel in the setting of the Forbidden City in Peking.
The novel stretches over some of the most turbulent times of 19th century China, but it is more than a historical record. The details Min paints - of the beauty and the ugliness of the Forbidden City, the place of women in that society, and the struggle for a woman with brains to use them without getting hanged, beheaded or buried alive - are breathtaking. Her prose is simple, utterly readable, yet the images she conveys to the reader’s mind are filled with colour and passion.
It is astonishing to read that the Emperor had 3000 wives and concubines and was expected to service them all, and provide hoards of children. But Tzu Hsi’s husband only managed to produce two and one of these was Tzu Hsi’s son.
These women were not permitted any life but to wait on the Emperor’s pleasure - and Tzu Hsi soon got bored with dressing up every day in case she was called to the Imperial bed. She was the sort of woman who had to take charge of her own destiny, which she already had done by joining the `contest’ to become one his wives. It was an Imperial version of the Bachelor, or the Flavor of Love - with the exception that the rejects joined the lower ranks of the concubines and were effectively denied any chance of bearing a child unless they managed to catch the Emperor’s attention.
But as any history buff knows, it is not wise to stand on superior judgement of the past - we are just as crazy in our own way today, and you don’t even have to watch reality shows to know that.
I am off to seek out Anchee Min’s other books, and eagerly await her second volume in the story of Tzu Hsi.
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