Vanity fair

On the second morning Dutchman Hubert Vos was carefully sketching the Empress Dowager Cixi, an unexpected thing happened. China's most powerful royal left her chair and walked down to see how his drawing was progressing. But she was not happy, especially with the shape of her eyebrows and shadows around her eyes and nose.

'I was pretty when I was young. I want my people to remember my beauty,' she told the artist.

After 20-hours of painful toil and touch-up in a temporary workshop set up in his Beijing hotel, Hubert Vos finished the portrait. He portrayed the 70-year-old empress as an appealing woman aged in her 30s.