The story of Wu Chao, the only woman who became emperor of China, is highly unusual. We speak of a time when, due to Confucian beliefs, women were little more than objects. Instruments of pleasure, given the incredible sexualisation of society, which increased the higher one went on the social scale. From this point of view, the biography of this woman is of great interest, however, the writing is decidedly heavy and the organisation of the material is confusing. Furthermore, there are parts (such as the long list with descriptions of the positions involved in coitus) that could have been collected in an appendix, so as not to interrupt a narrative that is already difficult to follow. A pity.

I cannot believe I haven't given feedback on this book. I LOVED IT SO MUCH. I read it slowly, digesting it because the writing and story were so fascinating. So good.

I know nothing about this era so was really looking forward to reading this book but I found it very hard to read and get into.
You only have to read the first three chapters to see that extensive research has been undertaken to write this book and although it was very interesting it was very intense and felt like a history lesson. I was more interested in the woman but found this was overtaken by the immense facts given
Maybe it wasn't the right book for me.

As an Asian studies major and avid devourer of all things related to imperial Chinese history in particular, I was eager to tackle a book on the life of Empress Wu. Unfortunately, I did not get the new and deep insight into this particular era of the Tang Dynasty that I wanted. What I found instead was a book with too many flaws that I found myself unable to finish it.

All too often wandered off into various areas to overload me with with excessive details about Tang China that did little to help me understand the woman who is supposed to be at the book's focus. Besides that, there was also quite an uncomfortably strong focus on matters of sex, murder, and other such things that made this feel much less like a decent historical novel of any sort. Instead, it feels like it just carries on the centuries-long tradition of painting high-powered women in imperial China as all being part of the same basic mold as nothing fierce, conniving power-hungry souls with a large deviant streak.

Certain sensational details may make this book interesting to some. But as a quality source on the life of a fascinating woman, I found this to be a heavy disappointment.

This was a difficult read.

There is a lot of really interesting information here (I will never forget about Jade Stems and Jade Gates as long as I will live), but it's sprinkled amongst SO MUCH INFORMATION. I was really interested in learning about this little-covered era of history but after a full detailed chapter about Li Ching-yeh's rebellion I was more than flagging.

I just wanted to learn about the rule of the only woman Emperor, but instead I got a book to rival Water Margin. At least Water Margin has focus!

My Review:
The mystery of the Orient hits an ultimate high when you talk about the Forbidden City of China. This whole book pretty much takes place there as you follow the narrator from birth to death and all the twisty turns in between of the only woman to become Emperor. There were many empresses over the years and dynasties, but only one female emperor.

Wu Chao was not born to the palace. In fact, she was a commoner. Her father was a woodcutter. Her mother was of a noble family, however, and raised her as a lady. She was also extremely intelligent and inquisitive. So when she met Great General Li, she impressed him. He later mentioned her to the people at the palace and she was ordered to come to serve at the palace. Being smart, she took advantage of each and every opportunity as it came and created others. One emperor died and she married another before she was in a position to usurp the power of the throne. She literally became the power behind the throne initially. Her husband was not as adept at running the government as she was. She sat in a chair behind a curtain hung behind the throne and advised him. Eventually, they did away with the curtain and her chair was beside his. Finally, he just let her make all the decisions because she was so much better at it than he was. She was constantly outraging the traditions for women of the time.

This was a bloody time in history. Not only were countries fighting countries, but within China, families were fighting for position and power. Even within families, there were hostilities and power plays. They killed each other frequently or were ordered into exile or to commit suicide. Only the emperor could order someone to commit suicide, and they did. Everyone from high-ranking officials to members of their own family. Even their own children. There were rumors that when this emperor was a concubine, she may have even killed her own infant daughter to throw the empress into disrepute. As I said, it was a bloody time in history.

Mr. Cawthorne has researched extensively and included a lot of peripheral history and details. In some places, it seemed that he may actually have gotten sidetracked with the peripherals and lost the main line. With the accounting of a person's life, you would expect the story to stop with their death or shortly thereafter. Again, Mr. Cawthorne seemed to get a bit lost and rambled on for awhile until he seemed to run out of things to say. If you are a strict history buff, you may enjoy this tome. This is an accounting of her life, not a novel.

This eARC was provided to me by Endeavor Press and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I am not being compensated in any way. All opinions are fully my own.
~ Judi E. Easley for Blue Cat Review

I found this book boring. The initial set of names is difficult to remember, expecially because it is only mentioned and not clearly explicated, and this fact hasn't prompted me to try to understand better or more. Every now and then a line looks promising, but then the pedantry resumes. I'm very sorry. The argument seemed to me very interesting, but the book could not involve me.

Ho trovato questo libro noioso. La serie iniziale di nomi difficili da ricordare in quanto solo nominati, non mi hanno stimolato a cercare di capire meglio o di più. Ogni tanto qualche riga sembra promettere bene, ma poi riprende la pedanteria. Sono veramente dispiaciuta. L'argomento mi sembrava veramente interessante, ma il libro non è riuscito a coinvolgermi.

Wow is this book a mess and incredibly difficult to plod through. Reading like a tabloid version of a historical biography, it's all sex, more sex, some random facts, a LOT of tangents, more sex, and then some cannibalism and horror. Those who have read David Jennings will likely feel right at home here: Cawthorne has gone to great lengths to find every gory or sex-related detail, from mating positions, how people were cooked/boiled/prepared, how toilet paper was constructed, dildos, to architecture. I felt like I was reading switching between pornography, horror , and then the driest historical text. And that would all be on the same page!

The book is loosely written in Wu Chen's life's chronological order but you can't really tell because every paragraph goes off on a wild tangent that has little if nothing to do with Wu Chen. Each tangent is punctuated by something sexual in nature - there's even whole chapters of nothing but graphic and detailed descriptions of how the concubines were prepared for the emperor. It got to be too much - I felt like I was given only salacious details meant to titillate rather than a grounded and informative historical biography.

When the description says this book is sensational, they don't mean in a superlative sense. This is sensational for the point of shocking/titilating rather than educating; almost a throw back to the more graphic fiction of the 1970s. And that's only if you can slog through random tangents of how a city was laid out, the entire antecedents of the latest emperor, what cities were built at the time and why, and how lavatories worked in the era. Talk about confusing, my eyes started to cross from all the random fairly unrelated facts. And I still never got a feel for the woman herself.

Not recommended for anyone. There has to be a better biography than this. Reviewed from an advance reader copy provided by the publisher.

Daughter of Heaven starts off with a confusing medley of names and titles in a huge rush of Chinese history. As a history student, I found the overall work jarring and that it seemed to take liberties in identifying what should and shouldn't be taken as historical fact.

The work intersperses the overarching tale of Wu ZeTian with lengthy and unappealing descriptions of architecture and geography. While sometimes helpful in history books, these felt unnecessarily detailed and were only tangentially related to the overall topic. Additionally, the variations in the transliteration of Chinese names, including the addition of accent marks not found in Chinese standard pinyin, make it confusing for readers who are at all familiar with Mandarin. The book is lengthy and convoluted by the constant introducing and immediate executing of multitudinous characters. Several long sections are dedicated to describing works surrounding sexual pleasure that don't particularly add to the tale beyond shock and awe value. Overall, I felt the topic was not presented well and that the author had an automatic bias concerning the Empress Wu from the very beginning - her as a historical character and Tang Dynasty China were not approached, in my opinion, with respect or appropriate historical rigor.

Thanks to the publisher for an ARC in exchange for a fair review.

Well researched, and written in a fairly easy style, this would make a great primer on China of the time of the Empress Wu Zhao, but it loses itself, and the reader, in filling in background details as it goes along.

Neither fish nor fowl this one, and it failed to hold my attention, despite a recent renewed interest in ancient China. Too bad really.

Will not post negative reviews.

I couldn't resist this biography of Wu Chao, a remarkable woman in the 7th century who clawed her way up from the status of a lowly concubine to become Emperor of China in her own right. She was, predictably, a fascinating character and her court, in its intrigues, corruption and eventual dissipation, makes the worst excesses of Westeros look like a village fete. Her rise and fall are worthy of a Greek tragedy but, alas, this book isn't the best way for a newcomer to encounter her story.

Every stage of Wu Chao's rise to power is knotted about with court intrigues, double-bluffing, and a cast (it often seemed) of thousands. And this is where I ran into problems. As I've indicated, I'm completely wet behind the ears so far as Chinese history is concerned. I'm still hazy about the order of the dynasties and, as an ignorant Westerner, I'm daunted by the fact that many of the names in this book are so similar one to the other. There is a glossary of names at the back, but that isn't much help in a Kindle version. To make matters more confusing, we're dealing with primarily royal characters and so the names change: suddenly someone is given the rank of a duke or prince and so they're referred to by their new title, and of course emperors adopt their temple names once they ascend the throne. And, even more baffling, Cawthorne uses a different style of Westernised transliteration than that given on Wikipedia, for example. As if keeping track of this wasn't hard enough, dates are always given in two formats: once using the Western system and once using the traditional Chinese system, in which years are counted from the beginning of a reign name. And reign names change to something different whenever the Emperor wishes it.

It's also difficult to maintain narrative tension - which is important, even in a biography, and especially so in a life as dramatic as Wu Chao's - when the book is weighed down with detail about absolutely everyone and everything we encounter. For example, in the first couple of chapters we encounter Wu Chao for the first time and follow her to Chang'an. But, along the way, we have block digressions on female beauty in the Tang era, on the desired physical attributes of virgin women, the layout of Chang'an, the positions and specialisations of the markets, a detailed overview of the road system with measurements given in feet, and the Chinese system of calculating house numbers. On balance, it feels as if half the book is about Wu Chao and the other half is a primer on Tang life. I find it hard to actually criticise this. Of course I want to get a flavour of the times when I read a biography! And it's often fascinating to wander through the chapters, picking out quirky facts here and there. But it frequently felt like an in-depth textbook for someone with some grounding in this fiendishly complicated period and culture.

From a technical viewpoint, there are several issues with the Kindle version which don't help to make the book more accessible. The formatting is erratic, with names sometimes appearing hyphenated and sometimes not, words merging together, and lines of text sometimes being scrambled out of order. And there are unfortunate malapropisms: 'incest' for 'incense'; 'filmed' for 'famed'; 'brides' for 'bribes'. A sharp editorial eye over the digital edition wouldn't have gone amiss.

This is not a bad book, but it isn't easy to read either. I suspect I'd have fared better with a preexisting knowledge of Tang China and that, if I came back to this book in the future, more informed, I'd get much more out of it.

For the full review, to be published on 11 February 2017, please see my blog:
https://theidlewoman.net/2017/02/11/daughter-of-heaven-nigel-cawthorne

The premise of this book is intriguing, I give it that. I had a difficult time with it though. Unfortunately, the writing style is not well done, editing is bad, and it is way too heavy on the history. Only my opinion.

A brilliant, enthralling history book that brings to life the world of ancient China and how one woman through sheer force of will became the most powerful person in the Middle Kingdom. From her obscure roots to the pinnacle of power, we really get to understand the woman behind this masterful ascent.