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DRAGON LADY The Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China. By Sterling Seagrave with the collaboration of Peggy Seagrave. Illustrated. 601 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $30.

CHINESE women rulers occupy their own doubly damned circle in historians' hell. For traditional Confucians, enthroning a female meant not only breaking the laws of imperial succession but also violating the natural order. When the weak, wicked female principle -- the yin -- presumed to prevail over the male yang, Heaven would signal its discontent by means of comets, earthquakes and floods. This was the myth of it. In fact, women were deeply involved in Chinese court politics, serving as biological and political kingmakers -- and for 2,000 years even occasionally wielding the imperial seals as regents for boy emperors.

The two longest-serving regents were Empress Wu, who held power from 661 to 705 in the Tang Dynasty and was the only woman ever to become "holy and divine emperor" in her own right; and Empress Dowager Tzu Hsi, who ruled with her son and her nephew from 1861 to 1908. She was not actually the last empress, as Sterling Seagrave calls her, but she was the last royal personage to wield real power in China, and her rule spanned the bloodiest civil war of all time, plus a series of foreign wars and land grabs that dealt blow after blow to a tottering imperial system.

Although Empress Wu and Empress Dowager Tzu Hsi lived in totally different worlds, more than a millennium apart, Chinese historians have conjured up a one-size-fits-all portrait of two nymphomaniacal and homicidal concubines, each of whom seduced and murdered her way to power and then abused that power extravagantly, licentiously and superstitiously for nearly half a century. Their legacy was so lethal that as soon as Mao Zedong's wife, Jiang Qing, began to reach for power in the 1960's, she was dubbed an empress dowager redux. She herself was so leery of guilt by gender association that she never mentioned Tzu Hsi's name in 60 hours of reminiscences with her American biographer, Roxanne Witke, though at other times she had a good word for Empress Wu.

Enter Sterling Seagrave, who, with his wife, Peggy, rides to the rescue of defamed dowagers, shouting "Bum rap." In "Dragon Lady: The Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China," a racy, pacy biography of Tzu Hsi, he goes beyond asserting that the Empress Dowager and her predecessors were maligned by old-time misogynists. He sets out to prove that Tzu Hsi was deliberately slandered by three Englishmen (writers for The Times of London) and three Chinese (two political reformers and a Singapore anti-Manchu propagandist), who fabricated evidence of her villainy for their own political and commercial purposes. Once their stories started circulating in 1898, Mr. Seagrave argues, they acted like computer viruses, infecting the most respectable subsequent histories in both Chinese and English.

Even after one of Tzu Hsi's British biographers, Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse, was belatedly unmasked in 1974 by Hugh Trevor-Roper as a hoaxer and a forger, his image of her as a depraved termagant went on being recycled. Only a few scholarly voices spoke out against it. Mr. Seagrave, whose previous books include "The Soong Dynasty" and "The Marcos Dynasty," builds his case on those dissents and on several accounts by foreign observers at the Ching court. He describes his search for the truth about Tzu Hsi as "like removing overlays from a painting."

Mr. Seagrave is on to something. If Tzu Hsi actually did poison her fellow dowager Tzu An in 1881, it is surely curious that no allegations were made for 17 years until the embittered reformers Kang Yu-wei and Liang Chi-chao started denouncing a demonic Empress for expelling them from court in 1898. (She was also accused, among other things, of murdering three emperors: her husband, her son and -- hours before her own death in 1908, apparently from natural causes -- her nephew.) If Tzu Hsi managed to hide an illegitimate pregnancy under her imperial robes, it is strange that whispering did not begin until she was in her 60's. Indeed, in 1889 an American envoy, Charles Denby, reported to Washington that "her private character has been spotless."

But Denby also described her as "benevolent and economical." This is hard to square with her taste for luxury -- Mr. Seagrave reports that she had 3,000 boxes of "everyday" jewels -- and with the oft-told tales of her diversion of huge sums from China's naval budget to pay for rebuilding a marble boat at the Summer Palace and for numerous pleasure pavilions. Mr. Seagrave pits himself against historical orthodoxy in insisting that the money was appropriated not by Tzu Hsi herself but by fawning courtiers. "There is no evidence that she had any idea where the funds originated," he maintains.

The difficulty for a historical revisionist is that Chinese royal edicts of this period rarely reveal who initiated anything. One of the most serious crimes attributed to Tzu Hsi was the execution of six men who had been helping her nephew, the young Emperor, draft some fundamental political reforms in 1898. The historian Jonathan Spence, in "The Gate of Heavenly Peace," notes that the reformers' trial was interrupted by an execution order, "presumably from the Empress Dowager." The smoking gun simply isn't there. Mr. Seagrave says she was forced to go along with the executions and the short-circuiting of the Hundred Days' Reform out of fear that an army backing the Emperor's conservative enemies would otherwise run amok.

He argues that Tzu Hsi was not an archconservative and did not oppose the sweeping political reforms that the Emperor brought in during those 100 summer days. Since aunt and nephew conferred frequently, she had ample opportunity to block him. She seized her old powers back, Mr. Seagrave asserts, only when conservative princes gave her false evidence of a plot to dethrone her. He also absolves her of the xenophobia that is said to have led her to order the siege of foreign legations in Beijing two years later during the Boxer Rebellion, which cost China millions of dollars in indemnities and further weakened a dying dynasty. She wasn't antiforeign and she didn't call out the troops, he insists.

Mr. Seagrave is at his best when he is debunking conventional certitudes. Like Josephine Tey's detective pursuing the truth about Richard III in "Daughter of Time," he does an amateur's demolition job on professional historians and their tainted sources. But he is less effective at putting an alternative history in place. He calls his book "Dragon Lady," but the Empress herself is a phantom figure, a bit player in the last decades of imperial decline. When he tries to construct a role for her, he fills historical gaps just as he accuses others of doing, by making imaginative leaps.

Another favorite technique of Mr. Seagrave's that he denounces in Backhouse and others is "to publish a slander and then deny its truth." This is one way of turning dusty history into titillating pornography. Mr. Seagrave, ever the earnest biographer, omits nothing, from Backhouse's unpublished fantasizing about his own couplings with the aged Empress Dowager to seventh-century prescriptions for preventing male orgasm (slip on a sheep's eyelid, eyelashes intact) to graphic descriptions of sexual acrobatics -- "Shooting the Arrow While Galloping" and "Twin Dragons Teasing the Phoenix" -- that Empress Wu devised to wear out her emperor husband. Piously, Mr. Seagrave notes that "chroniclers savored these orgies, dwelling on sexual details that nobody could have witnessed." But no sexual detail is too implausible for him to record. Books are for selling.

Still, Mr. Seagrave does have a higher purpose, though he is hobbled in achieving it because he apparently does not read Chinese and could not use the Beijing archives. He is a captive of English-language sources, the most reliable of which he deems to be the letters and diaries of Sir Robert Hart, an Irishman who ran the Chinese Customs Service for 40 years. Hart was, in fact, the best-connected and best-informed foreigner in Beijing, and his picture of her as strong-willed and hot-tempered but not conspiratorial, sinister or manipulative must be taken seriously. Mr. Seagrave sums up: "She was not the mastermind of tragic events but their victim."

The century-old caricature of the Empress Dowager as scheming virago has outlived its time. But Mr. Seagrave's hapless pawn of warring princes is not a convincing substitute. Tzu Hsi herself did not believe in realistic renderings. In 1905 an American artist, Hubert Vos, was invited into the Forbidden City to paint the 70-year-old dowager. He was informed by eunuchs that she must be portrayed as she wanted to be remembered. His painting, of a 25-year-old in the bloom of widowhood, is in Beijing's Summer Palace. Back in his New York studio Vos did a second painting, of the Empress as he saw her: a sad-eyed, strong-willed monarch, settled into her 45th year on the throne. This portrait, which appears on the cover of the Seagrave book, is now undergoing a conservator's face lift at Harvard's Fogg Museum. Just as Josephine Tey's fictional sleuth used a picture of Richard III to inspire a vindication of this vilified king, Tzu Hsi's next biographer could start at the Fogg and go on to Beijing. DESPERATE DECISIONS

[ The Empress Dowager's ] weakness in managing the court may be traceable to her feelings of parental rejection and worthlessness as a child. Her husband had rejected her. . . . Her son had rejected her to pursue a suicidal sex life. . . She was no master of realpolitik, and was repeatedly confronted by dilemma. She could never stop the incessant intriguing of the princes. There were only three times in her life when she had taken dramatic action, in each case frightened by great danger. . . . Each crisis could have led to a coup, so her steps were taken in desperation, not because she had a grand strategy. After each emergency she withdrew, rearranged her gauze curtain, and settled back into her role as mediator and empress mother. If she had a guiding political philosophy it was to avoid tragedy, and in that she failed not once or twice but continually. From "Dragon Lady."

Copyright 1992 The New York Times Company