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Historical person
1831–1861
The Xianfeng Emperor ruled Qing China from 1850 to 1861 during the Taiping Rebellion, the Nian uprising and the Second Opium War. Foreign armies occupied Beijing and destroyed the Old Summer Palace, while military and fiscal crises weakened central authority before his early death.
In Pearl S. Buck’s Imperial Woman, Tzu Hsi enters the Forbidden City as one of many young women selected for the Xianfeng Emperor's household. In George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman and the Dragon, captured by Qing forces, he enters the orbit of the Xianfeng Emperor and the concubine who will become Empress Dowager Cixi before witnessing the allied occupation and destruction of the Old Summer Palace.
Series
The ‘Twas on the China Station series follows George Mayhew as he leaves naval life and builds a merchant house in Shanghai during the violent transformation of mid-nineteenth-century China. Beginning in 1850, the novels place commercial ambition beside the Taiping Rebellion, Qing political weakness and the expanding power…
All books in this series
The Flashman Papers present the supposed memoirs of Sir Harry Paget Flashman, the bully expelled from Rugby School in Tom Brown’s School Days who becomes a decorated Victorian soldier despite being a coward, liar, opportunist and sexual predator. George MacDonald Fraser places this fictional witness inside documented nineteenth-century…
All books in this series
Standalone books
