With the Empress Dowager of China

In 1903, American artist Katharine Carl traveled to Peking with a seemingly impossible task: paint the official portrait of Empress Dowager Cixi, the woman who had effectively ruled China for decades and whose name evoked terror in the West. What she found defied every expectation. Rather than the ruthless tyrant of Western imagination, Carl discovered a cultured, witty, and surprisingly warm sovereign who would become, improbably, her patron and friend. This memoir offers an intimate glimpse behind the jade walls of the Summer Palace at a moment when imperial China teetered on the edge of transformation. Carl writes with disarming honesty about the cultural collisions, the maddening court protocols, and the quiet hours spent capturing Cixi's likeness in the twilight of a dynasty. The portrait itself now hangs in the Smithsonian, but this book preserves something the painting cannot: the living voice of history's most misunderstood empress, as witnessed by an American woman who arrived as a stranger and left as a witness to the human being behind the legend.