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A carregar... Green Phoenix : A Novel of the Woman Who Re-Made Asia, Empress Xiaozhuangpor Alice Poon
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With the fate of East Asia hanging in the balance, one Mongolian woman manipulated her lovers, sons and grandsons through war and upheaval to create an empire that lasted for 250 years. The Green Phoenix tells the story of the Empress Dowager Xiaozhuang, born a Mongolian princess who became a consort in the Manchu court and then the Qing Dynasty's first matriarch. She lived through harrowing threats, endless political crises, personal heartaches and painful losses to lead a shaky Empire out of a dead end. The story is set against a turbulent canvas as the Chinese Ming Dynasty is replaced by the Qing. Xiaozhuang guides her husband, her lover, her son and her grandson - all emperors and supreme leaders of the Qing Empire - to success against the odds. Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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Wed as a young girl to the conqueror Hong Taiji as part of his alliance with Mongol tribes, her story becomes one of relations among the three peoples: Manchus of the new Qing dynasty, their Chinese subjects, their Mongol neighbours in the north.
Alice Poon envisages Bumbutai as an influence for the integration of these peoples, advocate of a politics that respects and doesn’t upset subjects. From her position as emperor’s wife, mother or grandmother she tries to keep the court clear of corruption and remove futile violence as a strategy.
I don’t suppose we can know exactly how influential such women were. The extent of their input was disguised by the way courts functioned, by the way official history was written – even when they were honoured as significant, like Bumbutai. Poon takes her perspective, through three emperors and a rocky regency. With Bumbutai’s consistency and continuity of message from one period to the next – as she outlives those who possess a more overt power – this royal woman emerges as a guiding hand over Qing’s first three-quarter century.
It was a troubled time, and there is a lot of incident, that reaches the garish and the ghoulish.
At court, figures are seen in different lights, in shifting lights. Bumbutai’s husband, given her at what is child age to us, she cannot love but learns to value; another figure is her passion but his politics takes on an ugly cast. I liked the lack of perfection in characters we sympathise with, and the good points we didn’t expect in those with whom we don’t.
In Chinese history, I find particularly interesting the interplay of ethnicities, which comes to a crunch in the conquest dynasties. So I appreciated this novel about the early strategies of Qing as Manchu invaders. It also de-obscures one of the women whose participation in historical events is still underestimated, because of the way the record works.
I look forward to more from this author, who promises a next novel that centres on a character we met in brief in this one. (