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Empress Orchid #1

Empress Orchid

Name: Empress Orchid
Rating: 3.9 (25845 reviews)
Author: Anchee Min

Anchee Min December 15, 2003

3.9 25.8k Ratings

Ongoing Status

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Synopsis

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. When she is chosen as a lower-ranking concubine she enters the erotically charged and ritualised Forbidden City. 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.

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. Little does she know that China will collapse around her, and that she will be its last Empress.

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The last decades of the nineteenth century were a violent period in China’s history marked by humiliating foreign incursions and domestic rebellion, ultimately ending in the demise of the Ch’ing dynasty. The only constant during this tumultuous time was the power wielded by one person, the resilient, ever-resourceful Tzu Hsi, Lady Yehonala -- or Empress Orchid, as readers came to know her in Anchee Min’s critically acclaimed novel covering the first part of her life.

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Empress Orchid

More in Empress Orchid Series

The Last Empress

Books similar to Empress Orchid

The Last Empress

Peony in Love

Tai-Pan

The Kitchen God’s Wife

Noble House

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

The Samurai’s Garden

Heaven Official’s Blessing: Tian Guan Ci Fu (Novel), Vol. 1

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