She is an Honorary Fellow of SOAS University of London. She has received a number of honorary doctorates from universities in the UK and USA (Buckingham, York, Warwick, Dundee, the Open University and Bowdoin College, USA). She has won many awards, including The NCR Book Award (UK, 1992, the forerunner of the Samuel Johnson Prize), UK Writers' Guild Best Non-Fiction (1992), Fawcett Society Book Award (UK, 1992), Book of the Year (UK, 1993). Her books have been translated into more than 40 languages and sold more than 15 million copies worldwide. Her latest book, Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister: Three Women at the Heart of Twentieth-Century China (2019), is regarded as 'another triumph' (Evening Standard London). Jung Chang is the author of the bestselling books Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (1991), which the Asian Wall Street Journal called the most read book about China Mao: The Unknown Story (2005, with Jon Halliday), which was described by Time magazine as 'an atom bomb of a book' and Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (2013), a New York Times 'notable book'. Packed with drama, fast paced and gripping, it is both a panoramic depiction of the birth of modern China and an intimate portrait of a woman: as the concubine to a monarch, as the absolute ruler of a third of the world's population, and as a unique stateswoman. Based on newly available, mostly Chinese, historical documents such as court records, official and private correspondence, diaries and eyewitness accounts, this biography will revolutionize historical thinking about a crucial period in China's-and the world's-history. Chang comprehensively overturns the conventional view of Cixi as a diehard conservative and cruel despot. She inaugurated women's liberation and embarked on the path to introduce parliamentary elections to China.
It was she who abolished gruesome punishments like "death by a thousand cuts" and put an end to foot-binding. Under her the ancient country attained virtually all the attributes of a modern state: industries, railways, electricity, the telegraph and an army and navy with up-to-date weaponry. In this groundbreaking biography, Jung Chang vividly describes how Cixi fought against monumental obstacles to change China. d and made herself the real ruler of China-behind the throne, literally, with a silk screen separating her from her officials who were all male. Cixi at once launched a palace coup against the regents appointed by her husban. When he died in 1861, their five-year-old son succeeded to the throne.
Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern ChinaĪt the age of sixteen, in a nationwide selection for royal consorts, Cixi was chosen as one of the emperor's numerous concubines.
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