(THE CONVERSATION) In sixth-century China, a woman known to history as Empress Dowager ... use of the emperor. Officers had responded to a stabbing victim suffering from non-life-threatening ...

That was Empress Dowager Cixi’s life story ... Cixi was brought in as a concubine – a sort of secondary wife – to emperor Xianfeng. She wasn’t a very high-ranking concubine, but this ...

Historians do not know her birth name or in what year she was born, but they do know that she served as empress dowager between 515 and 528. As the spouse of a ruling emperor prior to his death ...