The photographs of the Empress ... the empress dowager on a pedestal.” By 1903, the year Cixi posed for Xunling, she needed a boost. True, she had been the de facto ruler of China since 1881 ...

(THE CONVERSATION) In sixth-century China, a woman known to history as Empress Dowager Ling ruled over an empire called the Northern Wei. Historians do not know her birth name or in what year she ...

Stephanie Balkwill, University of California, Los Angeles (THE CONVERSATION) In sixth-century China, a woman known to history as Empress Dowager Ling ruled over an empire called the Northern Wei.