Empress Dowager Cixi by Jung Chang

JUNG CHANG was born in Sichuan Province, China, in 1952. She was a Red Guard briefly at the age of fourteen and then worked as a peasant, a "barefoot doctor," a steelworker, and an electrician before becoming an English-language student and, later, an assistant lecturer at Sichuan University. She left China for Britain in 1978 and was subsequently awarded a scholarship by York University, where she obtained a PhD in linguistics in 1982, the first person from the People's Republic of China to receive a doctorate from a British university.