The “famous woman” biography became a popular genre in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Egypt. These biographies were for most part directly translated from European sources, but in one particular case, these European sources were paired with Nahadawi writings about a non-European other using a practice that I am here defining as “triangular translation.” While biographies of renowned Western women such as Queen Victoria and Catherine the Great offered a clear image of ideal womanhood, the biographies of the Empress Dowager of China Cixi provided a confusing and internally contradictory depiction of one of the most powerful women in the East. In effective control of late Qing China from 1862 to 1908, the Empress Dowager Cixi has been the heroine of many eroticizing fantasies in European-language Orientalist writings, in which she was often referred to as the “dragon lady” and the “monster.” Arabic biographies of the Empress Dowager Cixi were published in the 1900 issues of widely circulated journals like al-Hilal and al-Muqtataf. Entitled sul??naat a?-??n wa mash?kiluh? (The Sultana of China and Her Problems) and ’imbur???raa a?-??n (The Empress of China), these biographies sought to go beyond “Orientalism by proxy” and provide an Arabic perspective of the female ruler of China. This paper will examine these two Arabic biographies of Cixi and propose the concept of “triangular translation” as a way to interpret how Nahdawis wrote about a Chinese figure by relying on but also adding to translated European sources. One example of such “triangular translation” is the usage of orientalist descriptions of Cixi, such as calling her a wrestler or a monster, quoted directly from European language journals. However, the authors also added contradictory accounts such as comparable her favorably to European Monarchs as counter examples. I argue that this “triangular translation” strategy constructed confusion about the Empress Dowager’s gender, personality, and identity. I will analyze how this confusion was produced by contradictory descriptions, quotes from European sources, and illustrations of her. Building on Marilyn Booth’s assumption that Nahdawi authors were writing the biographies of famous women as exemplars for female audience to imitate, I will investigate the function of the biographies of the Empress Dowager of China as an ambiguous female exemplar from the East.