Empresses of China’s Forbidden City, 1644–1912 an exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, August 18, 2018–February 10, 2019; and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, D.C., March 30–June 23, 2019.
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Daisy Yiyou Wang and Jan Stuart.
Peabody Essex Museum/Freer Sackler, 261 pp., $60.00 (paper) (distributed by Yale University Press)
An enormous portrait of the Chinese empress dowager Cixi, arguably the most powerful woman in Chinese history, stands in the entrance hall of the Sackler Gallery as an introduction to “Empresses of China’s Forbidden City, 1644–1912,” an exhibition of more than two hundred objects from the Palace Museum in Beijing that marks the fortieth anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the US and the People’s Republic of China. Painted by the…
