I'm Rory Stewart and I grew up wanting to be a hero and I'm still fascinated by the ideas of heroism.

In my new series, I'm taking in the long sweep of history from Achilles to Zelensky and asking, what is a hero?

Simply doing your job, being a decent human being.

A true hero is someone who just kind of shines by

their own light and that light is to be recognised by others. The long history of heroism

with me, Rory Stewart. Listen on BBC Sounds. Now witness history with me, Rebecca Kesby, and today we explore the story of one of China's most powerful and controversial women, the Empress Dowager Tsir She.

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 Tsir She,

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 rum rumor. That is until a young PhD student

at the University of California, Sue Fawn Chung, decided to forensically study the original documents,

probably the first person ever to do so. I thought this very important leader of China has never really

been studied in a scholarly manner

and really needs to be done. So that's how I embarked on this subject.

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