My intercourse with Tzu Hsi started in 1902 and continued until her death. I had kept an unusually close record of my secret association with the Empress and others, possessing notes and messages written to me by Her Majesty, but had the misfortune to lose all these manuscripts and papers.

--Sir Edmund Backhouse, coauthor of China Under the Empress Dowager (1910) and Annals and Memoirs of the Court of Peking (1914)

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 facade lie whispers of murders and ghosts, and the thousands of concubines will stoop to any lengths to bear the Emperor’s sort. Orchid trains herself in the art of pleasuring a mian. 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.