Shan Sa, an acclaimed Chinese painter, poet, and fiction writer, has created a dazzling portrait of Empress Wu, the only female emperor in Chinese history, a controversial figure who in this telling emerges as a complicated woman who understood the nature of power better than anyone in her time. She rose from humble beginnings in the seventh-century Tang Dynasty to help foster the golden era of Chinese poetry and painting, and the story of her life, recreated in French (Shan Sa moved to Paris after the violent suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989) and ably translated into English, is an emblem of the mysteries and machinations at the heart of political life. Empress Wu navigated those difficult waters with a sense of style that Flaubert would have admired.