Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

At sixteen, Cixi was chosen as one of the Emperor's concubines. When she bore him a son who succeeded to the throne, she seized power in a palace coup that would make her the de facto ruler of China for nearly fifty years, guiding the empire through its most turbulent period of modernization. Jung Chang's revisionist biography draws on newly available Chinese archive material to argue that Cixi was not the cruel conservative tyrant of received history, but a pragmatic reformer who abolished torture, ended foot-binding, and set China on the path toward parliamentary democracy.

Jolene Kim narrates this substantial biography with the measured authority and cultural attentiveness that a subject of this sensitivity demands. Her performance across nearly sixteen and a half hours keeps Chang's complex historical argument accessible, and her voice gives the imperial court's intricate politics a navigable structure. The biography's revisionist argument comes through clearly in Kim's delivery, giving listeners both the historical narrative and the scholarly reframing simultaneously.