Memoir of a Chinese Princess

Princess Der Ling was the daughter of Lord Yu Keng, head of the Chinese Foreign Office, then Minister to France between 1899 and 1903. Wishing his daughters to have a progressive education, Lord Ku Yeng defied censure and even attempts at impeachment by placing them in European schools. When he and his family returned to China in 1903, Princess Der Ling became First Lady-in-Waiting to Tzu-Hsi, the Empress Dowager, who was fascinated by the young woman's travels and experiences in places the Empress would never see. Der Ling served her Empress for two years inside the walls of Gu Gong, Peking's Forbidden City, a walled palace built in the year 1407, and which had been the seat of government for 24 Chinese emperors. Her intimate observations of court life under the Empress Dowager, aunt to China's last emperor, P'u Yi, allow a rare look into life in a time and place still shrouded in mystery, into the last years of imperial Chinese rule, and most importantly, into the character of the remarkable woman who ruled China for more than 40 years.

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