Fiction Historical Romance

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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Anchee Min offers a powerful revisionist portrait based on extensive research of one of the most important figures in Chinese history. Viciously maligned by the western press of the time as the “Dragon Lady,” a manipulative, blood-thirsty woman who held onto power at all costs, the woman Min gives us is a compelling, very human leader who assumed power reluctantly, and who sacrificed all she had to protect those she loved and an empire that was doomed to die.

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Empress Orchid

More in Empress Orchid Series

The Last Empress

Books similar to Empress Orchid

The Last Empress

The Kitchen God’s Wife

Peony in Love

Tai-Pan

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

The Samurai’s Garden

Lady Tan’s Circle of Women

Shanghai Girls

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