Wu Zetian rose from the bottom of the hierarchy to become the only empress in China's history. Buddhism, a religion born in India, and Nalanda-trained scholars played an important role as Wu ...

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 was born ...

BEIJING — She entered the world of an ancient empire as a teenage concubine, chosen by the emperor to share his bed for her good looks, immaculate comportment and, above all, her ability to sing.

Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, or, in 1903, the Dowager Empress Cixi. Cixi was 68 and had ruled China for more than four decades. In the West, in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion, she was most ...