This book was published in July 2011, and I recently bought it on Amazon, and was overall quite pleased, despite it being rather academic, and a short 160 or so pages (pre-notes). As the book flap states this is an attempt to study the lives of some famous women in the Liao (907–1125) and Jin (1115–1234) dynasties. This is interesting on several fronts, as the Liao and Jin dynasties have often be portrayed as a the villains in Chinese historical narrative, preying upon the weakened Song Dynasty. Its inhabitants were often seen as utterly barbaric, even though the Liao dynasty eventually reached the same levels of cultural development as the Song, but managed to retain a hybrid culture. This book goes significantly towards setting the record straight. The Women described in this book were celebrated in the Liao History and were “unprecedented.” They rode horseback astride, were good at hunting and shooting, and took part in military battles. Several empresses—and one famous bandit chief—led armies against the enemy Song state. They provided a sharp contrast to the female exemplars of Confucian culture in the Song, many of whom were bound by strict Confucian mores with strictly circumscribed areas of action. These women were skilled cultural mediators, promoting the administrative and literary skills and the Empress Yingtian was also instrumental in creating a written Khitan language. Yet at the same time were able to maintain their native traditions of horsemanship, militancy, and sexual independence and demonstrate leadership and personal bravery while excelling in writing poetry and prose and earning praise for their Buddhist piety and Confucian ethics.
However, as mentioned previously the book is written in a dry dispassionate style with ample footnotes and numerous reference to textural and tomb findings which are beneficial to the researcher. But I believe that the book could have been done differently, in that the lives of these women seem to beg for a more lively treatment (perhaps in a future historical novel format?) and provide an alternative set of role models for modern Chinese women. Indeed this is similar to the argument that Jiang Rong makes in his famous semi-autobiographical novel Wolf Totem, that we have much to learn from the people of the steppes.
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