Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless

searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the

telly we share what we've been watching

Cladie Aide.

Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming.

Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige.

And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less

searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC sounds.

Now witness history with me Rebecca Keseby and today we explore the story of one of

China's most powerful and controversial women the the Empress Dowager Tzu Shi.

She was the power behind the Chinese throne for nearly 50 years until she died in

1908. She presided over monumental change but was vilified as a tyrant for decades.

It wasn't until the 1970s that her story was properly documented.

I've been speaking to the Chinese American academic who first

revisited her legacy.

She was described as an evil ruler domineering. She supposedly murdered her son, murdered her nephew, she was

bloodthirsty and she brought down the Manchu rule of China.

So it's fair to say then that history had not been kind to the Empress Dowager

Sir-Shee, a contemporary of Queen Victoria, she was little known outside China and

little respected under the communist regime that eventually followed her.

Most of the accounts used as evidence for any academic comment about her had been based on

palace gossip and rumor. That is until a young PhD student at the University of

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