A minor bio­graphy of a major figure in which, as in so much curr­ent pop­u­lar hist­ory writ­ing, the prior­ity seems to be on making the sub­ject acc­ess­ible to a gen­e­ral, if not down­right under-edu­cated, reader­ship.

Clements is so intent on this that he ends up trans­lat­ing Chin­ese words that really don’t need it, so the simple “Prince Dan of Yan” becomes the almost imposs­ibly unwieldy “Red Prince of the Land of Swall­ows”, which will only infuri­ate any reader who’s already fam­il­iar with the sub­ject. Sim­i­larly, such matt­ers as Chin­ese Five Ele­ment theory, a cruc­ial part of the pol­iti­cal thought of the time, are merely ment­ioned in pass­ing as “super­stit­ions”, as are such matt­ers as number myst­ic­ism, al­chemy and the Taoist quest for imm­ort­al­ity; in effect, those things which were of cent­ral int­er­est to the Emp­eror and which, one would have thought, made him int­er­est­ing to a modern reader, take second place to the por­trayal of a blood­thirsty founder of a tot­ali­tar­ian regime.