Two Years in the Forbidden City

Der Ling was the daughter of a Chinese diplomat, educated in Paris, and in 1903 she was summoned with her sister to be first lady-in-waiting to the Empress Dowager Cixi. For two years she lived inside the court — interpreting for foreign ministers' wives, dressing the Empress, managing the theatricals and the birthday ceremonies, watching the eunuchs and the Young Empress and the shut-away Kuang Hsu Emperor — and this is her account of it, written afterwards in English for readers who knew the Empress only as a newspaper villain.

The book was published in 1911, the year the dynasty fell. It is a first-hand record of the last Manchu court by someone inside the household and outside its assumptions, and much of what it describes — the routines, the etiquette, the daily management of the palace — is not documented anywhere else.

This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete text.