A fascinating peek inside the Forbidden City at the life of an empress-in-training

Orchid's father is dead. His survivors have been traveling for two months with his reeking corpse, trying to reach Peking for his proper burial. Orchid's mother has sold her last jade hairpin, and the footmen bearing the coffin are rightly worried they won't be paid.

So really, the family's only asset is Orchid's loveliness. At 17, she could be married off to Eleventh Uncle's retarded bastard son Bottle, but wouldn't that be selling short? Upward mobility should be possible for a Manchu girl with Orchid's looks and brains — why, she should be a concubine! In the nationwide Selection of Imperial Consorts, she might win a sandalwood bed inside the Forbidden City — where her mentor, Big Sister Fann, has told her, after one glimpse "you will never be an ordinary person again."

Orchid, the main character in Anchee Min's latest novel, certainly wasn't. The only concubine of luckless 19th-century emperor Hsing Feng to bear a son, she would become Empress Dowager Tsu Hsi. She would rule for 46 years as the power behind a succession of flimsy boy emperors and generally be scorned in Chinese history. (In vilification, she resembles Jiang Ching, the subject of Min's previous book, "Becoming Madame Mao." Min has recognized that China's willingness to blame concubines means she'll never run out of great material.)

"Empress Orchid" (Houghton Mifflin, $24) covers the early life of Tsu Hsi, the years in which her innocence is corroded by the decadence of the imperial court. Once she becomes a consort (the third of seven in her admitting class, but one of thousands of women made available to the emperor), Orchid is carried everywhere on palanquins borne by slaves, fed as often as 20 times a day, coiffed with jewels and bathed by ladies-in-waiting who praise the smell of her flatulence. Her head eunuch spies and feints for her and communicates secret counsel by modulating the way his head plunks on the floor when he kowtows. (Tunk, tunk, tunk signals mild disagreement; ponk, ponk, ponk sounds alarm.) When she tires of watching silkworms mate, she plots to become the emperor's favorite by visiting the House of Lotus. There she learns the "fan dance," a technique that involves a dozen eggs, a stack of paper money and some agility that must be to Kegel exercises what snowboarding is to sitting still.

Orchid is nothing if not a fast learner, and she gives the emperor a son. The baby is taken over by top wife Empress Nuharoo and spoiled rotten. Hsing Feng is destined to die young and set off a succession struggle that pits wives against overreaching eunuchs against Manchu relatives against warlords, and so on.

Wealth of sociological detail is what makes historical fiction a pleasure. But lots of writers can do research. The difference between a Michener and a Min is the difference between linen and silk. Min comes to all her work with a sympathy for any woman who has been portrayed as the devil. (Her debut book, "Red Azalea," was a memoir of her rescue at age 17 from a "re-education" camp to the movie studio run by Madame Mao. Hers are credentials extraordinarily conducive to spin-detecting.) These habits of mind are supplemented by a graceful writing style that any native speaker of English would envy and that leads readers to conclude that whoever contributed to Min's English As a Second Language instruction should be our national superintendent of public instruction. To top it all off, she has a way of postponing the introduction of some small fact (a character's age, for example) that pretty much guarantees her readers will, in addition to savoring every paragraph, gasp with surprise every 50 or so pages. Jealous minds, like those who defamed Orchid, might assume this trick was learned at the House of Lotus. Readers who appreciate well-crafted fiction will know to applaud Min's talent and exceptional work.

Carol Doup Muller is an editor in San Jose.