num_pages: 368
description: To rescue her family from poverty and avoid marrying her slope-shouldered cousin, seventeen-year-old Orchid competes to be one of the Emperor's wives. When she is chosen as a lower-ranking concubine she enters the erotically charged and ritualised Forbidden City. But beneath its immaculate façade lie whispers of murders and ghosts, and the thousands of concubines will stoop to any lengths to bear the Emperor's son.Orchid trains herself in the art of pleasuring a man, bribes her way into the royal bed, and seduces the monarch, drawing the attention of dangerous foes. Little does she know that China will collapse around her, and that she will be its last Empress.
language: English
title: Empress Orchid
titlecomplete: Empress Orchid (Empress Orchid, #1)
characters: Prince Kung, Tzu Hsi, Emperor Hsien Feng
genres: China, Asian Literature, Historical, Cultural, Adult, Asia, Romance, Historical Fiction, 19th Century, Fiction
ratings_count: 24162
places: China, Beijing, The Forbidden City
series: Empress Orchid
publisher: Mariner Books