In the autumn of 1908, two people died in the Forbidden City within twenty-two hours of each other. The first was the Guangxu Emperor, the nominal sovereign of the Qing dynasty for thirty-three years and an effective prisoner for ten of them; the second was the Empress Dowager Cixi, his aunt by marriage and adoptive mother, who had ruled China behind the screen for almost half a century. The official bulletin said Guangxu had died of illness. Court physicians in the years since have generally concluded that he was poisoned, almost certainly on Cixi’s orders. Her own death came a day later, allegedly from the same food that had killed him. She had chosen her successor in advance: Puyi, the two-year-old son of her nephew Prince Chun, who would be the last emperor of China. Three years after her death, in the Wuchang Uprising of October 1911, the dynasty she had held together would finally collapse.
Cixi’s reign, measured from the Xinyou Coup of October 1861 to her death in November 1908, lasted forty-seven years. No woman had ruled China for so long since Wu Zetian in the seventh and eighth centuries, and none would again. Her regency spanned the most turbulent four decades of modern Chinese history: the Taiping Rebellion, the Nian Rebellion, the Self-Strengthening Movement, the Sino-French War, the First Sino-Japanese War, the Hundred Days’ Reform, the Boxer Uprising, the Boxer Protocol, and the New Policies that tried to rebuild the dynasty in its last years. None of these events happened without her involvement. None of them turned out well for China. Whether that was her fault is the question that historians have argued ever since.
The girl from the Yehe Nara
Cixi was born Yehe Nara Xingzhen on 29 November 1835 in Beijing, the fourth child of Huizheng, a minor Manchu official. The Yehe Nara were a Manchu clan of the Plain Blue Banner, one of the Eight Banners that had conquered China in 1644 and now, two centuries later, were the hereditary military aristocracy of the Qing. They were not among the great clans — the imperial Aisin Gioro, the prominent Borjigit, the famous Suksaha — but they were respectable. Huizheng held a hereditary position in the Banners and served at various times in provincial posts. The family lived in a Beijing lane near the imperial precincts, neither wealthy nor poor, neither influential nor obscure.
The future Empress Dowager’s name is not certain. In Manchu infancy, she would have had a milk-name; in adolescence, she took the name Yixin or, more probably, Yehenara. The honorific Cixi, “Kind Joy” or “Merciful and Joyful,” was given to her on her elevation to Empress Dowager in 1861. It is the name under which she has been known ever since. In Western sources of her lifetime she appears as “Tz’u Hsi,” the Wade-Giles romanisation of the characters Cixi.
She entered the Forbidden City in 1852, at the age of sixteen, as a low-ranking concubine of the Xianfeng Emperor. The selection was through the usual Manchu process: families of the Eight Banners registered their daughters, and the palace chose those who would be presented to the emperor. Cixi was a fifth-rank concubine, the lowest rank given to a member of a Banner family; she had no particular qualifications beyond her appearance and her Manchu standing. The Forbidden City was her home from that point on. She would not leave it for any extended period until the flight to Xi’an in 1900.
What we know of her life inside the Forbidden City before 1856 comes mainly from court records and from the memoirs of eunuchs written after the dynasty’s fall. She was apparently intelligent, well-read for a Manchu woman of her generation, and not unattractive. The critical event of her early years at court was the birth of her son on 27 April 1856. The Xianfeng Emperor had no other surviving sons by any of his consorts. The boy was named Zaichun and would, in due course, become the Tongzhi Emperor. His birth raised his mother’s standing in the Forbidden City from low-ranking concubine to Noble Consort Yi, a substantial promotion but still well below the Empress.
The Empress at this time was Ci’an, daughter of a prominent Manchu official. Ci’an was two years older than Cixi and had entered the Forbidden City a year earlier. The two women were not, at this stage, rivals. Ci’an was the senior consort, and Cixi was the mother of the imperial heir. They would, six years later, jointly seize the regency in a coup that brought them both to the effective head of the dynasty.
The Xianfeng Emperor and the crisis of 1860
The Xianfeng Emperor, who reigned from 1850 to 1861, was an anxious and unhappy sovereign. He inherited the throne at the age of nineteen and presided over the most severe crisis the Qing dynasty had faced since its founding. The Taiping Rebellion, which had broken out in Guangxi in 1850, had by the mid-1850s become the most destructive civil war in human history up to that point. By 1856 the Taiping armies held Nanjing and threatened the Yangzi valley; by 1860 they were within striking distance of Shanghai. At the same time, the Anglo-French expeditionary force of 1860 had marched on Beijing, burned the Summer Palace, and dictated terms at gunpoint. The Xianfeng Emperor fled the capital to the summer resort at Jehol, where he died in August 1861, leaving a will naming eight regents to govern on behalf of his seven-year-old son.
The will was the seed of the coup. The eight regents included Sushun, a Manchu noble who had been the emperor’s chief adviser and who had opposed the emperor’s flight from Beijing. He was a formidable figure but politically isolated. The other regents were less distinguished. Among those excluded from the will were Cixi, Ci’an, and Prince Gong — the Xianfeng Emperor’s brother, who had conducted the negotiations with the Anglo-French force at Beijing in 1860. The exclusion of Prince Gong was especially bitter, because it was he who had salvaged the dynasty’s position after the burning of the Summer Palace.
The Xianfeng Emperor died on 22 August 1861 at the hunting lodge at Jehol. His son became the Tongzhi Emperor. The eight regents took over the government. Prince Gong returned to Beijing and began negotiations with his sister-in-law Cixi and the Empress Dowager Ci’an. The three of them agreed that the regents would have to go. The Xinyou Coup, named for the cyclical day on which it was carried out, took place on 1–2 November 1861, shortly after Cixi, Ci’an, and the young emperor returned to Beijing from Jehol.
The mechanism of the coup was direct. With the support of Prince Gong’s followers among the Banners and the imperial guards, the three regents who were in Beijing were arrested in their homes. Three more were arrested later; one was forced to commit suicide; one was later executed. Sushun, the chief regent, was beheaded on the charges of having disobeyed the late emperor’s instructions and of having mishandled the foreign crisis. The eight-man regency was replaced by a triumvirate of Cixi, Ci’an, and Prince Gong, with the two empresses providing the imperial authority and Prince Gong providing the administrative skill. It was this arrangement that would govern China for the next eleven years.
The Tongzhi Restoration
The decade from 1862 to 1873 is sometimes called the Tongzhi Restoration, after the reign title of the boy emperor. The two empresses dowagers did not rule directly. The Qing system required that imperial authority be exercised through memorials, edicts, and the vermilion brush, and the women could not appear in person to handle documents. A compromise was devised: Ci’an was given the senior seal, the seal that authorised documents, and Cixi was given the reading seal. In practice, Cixi was the more energetic of the two and handled the day-to-day business of government.
The first task was to end the Taiping Rebellion. By 1862 the Taiping had been driven back from their offensive; by 1864 they had been crushed. The Hunan army under Zeng Guofan, the Hubei army under Li Hongzhang, and the Ever-Victorious Army, a foreign-officered force raised by Frederick Townsend Ward and Charles Gordon, took the field against the Taiping. The Taiping capital Nanjing fell in July 1864. The Nian Rebellion in the northern provinces was suppressed in 1868, the same year as the abortive attempt by the British to coerce the Qing over the Arrow incident. By the end of the decade, the great internal rebellions were over.
What remained was the foreign question. The Self-Strengthening Movement, the programme of selective Westernisation that took shape in the 1860s and 1870s, was the response. Arsenals at Jiangnan and Fuzhou were rebuilt with foreign technical assistance; the Zongli Yamen, a department for foreign affairs, was set up in 1861 to manage the new diplomatic relations; the first Chinese diplomatic missions to the West were sent in the late 1860s and 1870s. Robert Hart was confirmed as Inspector-General of the Imperial Maritime Customs Service in 1863, and his efficient administration provided the Qing with their most reliable source of revenue for the next forty years. Tongwen Guan, the school for foreign languages, was founded in 1862; from it would come the first generation of Chinese who could read Western languages.
The Self-Strengthening programme was always limited. The conservative wing at court, led by the Grand Secretary Woren and the censor Zhang Peilun, argued that the Western techniques were useful but the Western institutions were dangerous; what was wanted was the “self-strengthening” of the dynasty, not the transformation of China. Within these limits, much was achieved. Modern arsenals produced modern rifles and ammunition. A modern navy was begun, with ships built at the Fuzhou shipyard and the Jiangnan Arsenal. Telegraph lines were laid. The first railways, in the south, were cautiously approved. The young emperor came of age in 1873, and the regency formally ended.
The succession crisis of 1875
The Tongzhi Emperor came of age in February 1873 and took up the formal duties of the throne. He died less than two years later, on 12 January 1875, of smallpox, complicated, according to court rumour, by the venereal disease he had contracted from a visit to the Beijing brothels. He was nineteen and had no son. The succession became the most consequential decision of Cixi’s career.
The conventional solution would have been to find another imperial descendant in the same generation as the dead emperor and to elevate him to the throne. The Empress Dowager Ci’an and the senior princes urged this. Cixi overruled them. She insisted that the throne should pass to a son of Prince Chun, her brother — in Manchu inheritance terms, an “adoption” into her line rather than the late emperor’s. The boy chosen was Zaitian, then three years old, the son of Prince Chun and Cixi’s sister. He would be the Guangxu Emperor. The technicality was that the adoption made him both the son of Prince Chun and the son of the Xianfeng Emperor in Manchu reckoning, which legitimated his claim.
The succession was the first time Cixi had imposed her will against the senior figures of the dynasty. Prince Gong was particularly opposed. Cixi’s choice made the new emperor, nominally the son of Prince Chun, actually the nephew of Cixi and her sister — her family, in effect, was now the imperial house. From this point on, Cixi was the senior figure in the regency. Ci’an continued to act as co-regent, but the direction of policy was increasingly Cixi’s.
Ci’an died suddenly on 21 April 1881, after a brief illness. The cause of death was not established at the time, and historians have speculated ever since about whether Cixi had a hand in it. The evidence is circumstantial: Ci’an had opposed Cixi over the Guangxu succession, and her death left Cixi as the sole regent. Nothing was proved. Cixi inherited the imperial seals, the formal authority of the dynasty, and from that point on ruled without a co-regent.
The Sino-French War and the limits of self-strengthening
The late 1870s and early 1880s were a period of attempted modernisation. The Fuzhou shipyard produced modern cruisers; the Kaiping coal mines were opened with foreign capital; the first railway, a short line from the Kaiping mines to the coast, was approved despite the conservative opposition; the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company was founded in 1872 to break the foreign stranglehold on coastal shipping; the Beiyang Fleet was built up under Li Hongzhang. By 1885 China possessed a modern navy of wooden and ironclad steamers and a small modern army, mostly in the north.
The Sino-French War of 1884–1885 was the first test. The war had been brewing for a decade, over the French attempt to seize Tonkin in what is now northern Vietnam, and over Chinese claims to suzerainty in the region. The fighting in Tonkin went badly for China, with the French expeditionary force winning the key battles. The naval engagement at Fuzhou in August 1884 was a disaster, with the Chinese fleet destroyed in its own harbour by French ironclads. The subsequent fighting in Taiwan was inconclusive. The war ended in April 1885 with China ceding Tonkin to France, in practice, though not formally. The lesson was clear: the Self-Strengthening programme had produced impressive arsenals and fleets, but they had not proved decisive in modern war.
Cixi responded by accelerating the naval build-up, in particular the Beiyang Fleet. Li Hongzhang, the chief promoter of the navy, was given substantial sums from the imperial treasury. New ironclads were ordered from Germany and Britain. By 1894 the Beiyang Fleet was the largest in Asia. Its two flagships, the Dingyuan and the Zhenyuan, were modern ironclads comparable to the best European and Japanese ships of their tonnage. The next test would be the worst.
The First Sino-Japanese War
The First Sino-Japanese War broke out in July 1894 over competing claims to influence in Korea. Japan had been modernising since the Meiji Restoration of 1868; by 1894 its army and navy were both modern, professional, and tested. The Chinese forces in Korea were unprepared, and the Beiyang Fleet, ordered south to intervene, was not in fighting trim. The land war went badly: the Chinese armies in Korea were defeated at Pyongyang in September 1894; the land war then shifted to Manchuria, where the Japanese routed the Chinese defenders at Fengtian and took Port Arthur. The naval Battle of the Yalu on 17 September 1894 was a Chinese defeat; the Battle of Weihai on 12 February 1895, the destruction of the Beiyang Fleet at its base, was decisive.
The Treaty of Shimonoseki, signed in April 1895, was the most humiliating document the Qing had signed since the Treaty of Nanjing. China recognised the independence of Korea, ceded Taiwan and the Liaodong peninsula to Japan, paid an indemnity of two hundred million taels of silver, and opened four new treaty ports. The European powers, alarmed at Japanese gains, forced the return of the Liaodong peninsula, but the indemnity was paid and the treaty was otherwise enforced. The defeat destroyed the credibility of the Self-Strengthening Movement and the prestige of Li Hongzhang.
Cixi was personally identified with the defeat. She had taken sixty per cent of the Beiyang Fleet’s annual maintenance funds in 1891, supposedly for the repair of the Summer Palace, and had reallocated them for the imperial household. The story, reported by Li Hongzhang in his memoirs and accepted by most historians, is that the Beiyang Fleet’s ammunition was short in 1894 because the funds had been diverted. Whatever the exact figures, Cixi was blamed, and the blame was substantially justified. The destruction of the fleet at Weihai was, in part, the consequence of years of neglect.
The Hundred Days’ Reform
The Sino-Japanese defeat provoked a serious debate about the limits of the Self-Strengthening programme. Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, two Cantonese scholars, argued that China needed political reform, not just technological modernisation; that the examination system should be reformed or abolished; that the schools should be reorganised; that the bureaucracy should be rationalised. Their ideas gained the support of the Guangxu Emperor, who had come of age in 1889 and had been formally in charge since then, though Cixi retained a veto through her position as Empress Dowager.
In June 1898, the Guangxu Emperor launched what came to be called the Hundred Days’ Reform, a programme of sweeping changes that touched almost every branch of the government. Provincial assemblies were to be convened. The examination system was to be reformed. Modern schools were to be set up. The currency was to be reformed. The army and navy were to be reorganised. The railways and mines were to be developed by joint-stock companies rather than as official enterprises. The imperial court was to be reorganised. The traditional calendar of Confucian rituals was to be supplemented by a modern civil religion.
The reform edicts were issued rapidly, in some cases without proper consultation, and they alarmed the conservative wing of the bureaucracy. Cixi, who had not been consulted, feared that the changes were destabilising and would give foreign powers an opening. On 21 September 1898, she launched a counter-coup. The Guangxu Emperor was put under house arrest in the Ocean Terrace of the Forbidden City, an island in the imperial lake connected to the rest of the palace by a single controlled bridge. Six of the leading reformers were arrested and executed. Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao fled abroad. The reform edicts were rescinded. The conservative ascendancy was restored.
Cixi reasserted her own regency and resumed her place behind the screen, the vermilion brush in her hand. The Guangxu Emperor remained nominally on the throne but was effectively her prisoner. She would hold him under varying degrees of restraint until his death ten years later.
The Boxer Uprising and the flight from Beijing
The Boxer Uprising of 1899–1901 was the crisis that broke Cixi’s regime. The Boxers, a loose anti-Christian and anti-foreign movement in the northern provinces, had been growing through the 1890s. They practised a ritual that they believed made them invulnerable to bullets, and they attacked Chinese Christians and foreign missionaries, then foreign legations, then foreign troops. By mid-1900 the Boxers had spread from Shandong to the Zhili plain around Beijing. Cixi was initially uncertain of how to respond. The Boxers had support among the Manchu nobility and the conservative wing of the bureaucracy, and they might be useful against the foreigners; but the foreign legations in Beijing were protected by international treaties, and an attack on them would provoke retaliation.
In June 1900 Cixi sided with the Boxers. The legation quarter in Beijing was besieged. The foreign legations, including the British Minister Sir Claude Macdonald, held out behind barricades in the summer heat, relieved only by a small international force under Admiral Edward Seymour that attempted to reach them and was turned back at the Tientsin railway. The decision to back the Boxers was the worst mistake of Cixi’s career. When the international expeditionary force of eight nations — Britain, France, Germany, Russia, the United States, Japan, Italy, Austria-Hungary — took Tianjin in July and marched on Beijing in August, the dynasty collapsed. Cixi and the Guangxu Emperor, with a small court, fled the capital on 14 August 1900 in a baggage train for the western city of Xi’an.
The occupation of Beijing lasted fourteen months. The foreign troops looted the imperial precincts and the city. The Forbidden City itself was largely spared by order of the Allied commanders, who feared that the dynasty would fall and be replaced by something worse, but the surrounding city was not. The foreign commanders demanded the heads of the chief pro-Boxer officials; Cixi, then in Xi’an, complied. The Boxer Protocol, signed in September 1901, imposed an indemnity of four hundred and fifty million taels, distributed among the eight nations; barred China from importing arms for two years; required the destruction of the Taku forts; and demanded the execution or exile of a long list of officials. Cixi returned to Beijing in January 1902.
The New Policies
What followed the Boxer Protocol was the most remarkable reversal of policy in the dynasty’s history. From 1901 onwards, Cixi and her advisers launched what came to be called the New Policies — a programme that accepted most of what the Hundred Days’ Reform had proposed in 1898, but did so in an orderly, bureaucratic fashion. The provincial assemblies were convened in 1907, and a national assembly was set up in Beijing. The examination system was abolished in 1905, with the announcement that no further examinations would be held; modern schools were promoted in their place. The Zongli Yamen was reorganised into a proper foreign ministry. A modern legal code, drafted with Japanese assistance, was promulgated in 1907. The army was reorganised along Japanese lines; the New Army, as it was called, would be the dynasty’s last major military creation.
In 1906 Cixi announced that China would become a constitutional monarchy, with a written constitution and elected assemblies. The timetable was cautious: provincial assemblies in 1907, a national assembly in 1908, a constitution in 1912, and a constitutional monarchy in 1917. The conservative Manchu nobility, including Prince Chun, was alarmed; the moderate reformers thought the timetable too slow; the revolutionaries, who had been organising since the 1890s, thought it too late. Cixi was trying to save the dynasty by reforming it, but the margin between reform and revolution was narrower than she understood.
The New Policies were substantial and, by the standards of late Qing bureaucracy, well-executed. But they were also expensive, and they required money that the post-Boxer state did not have. The indemnity payments to the eight powers absorbed a quarter of the state’s revenue. The provincial governments, now more autonomous than ever, were reluctant to forward funds to Beijing. The foreign loans that might have financed the reforms were politically impossible to negotiate. By 1908 the New Policies were underfunded and the court was improvising. Cixi’s response was to centralise: to bring the provincial governors and the modernisers under direct imperial supervision, and to try to keep the dynasty’s last years on the rails.
The succession of 1908 and the end of the regency
In November 1908 the dynasty’s last succession was arranged. The Guangxu Emperor, still nominally on the throne, was dying. On 14 November 1908, the day before Cixi herself died, the court announced that he had died of illness. The same bulletin announced the appointment of Puyi, the two-year-old son of Prince Chun, as the new emperor, with Prince Chun as regent. Cixi was reported to have died the following afternoon. The cause of Guangxu’s death has been the subject of repeated forensic investigation, including an exhumation in 2008 that confirmed a high level of arsenic in his hair, consistent with poisoning.
Cixi’s death removed the one figure who had held the dynasty together for nearly half a century. Her regency had survived Taiping, Nian, Sino-French, Sino-Japanese, the Boxer catastrophe, and the start of reform. The regency that followed her, under Prince Chun, lasted less than three years. The Wuchang Uprising of October 1911 was a provincial revolt that escalated out of control when the New Army units in Hubei mutinied. The dynasty had no answer. Sun Yat-sen, who had been in exile in the United States, returned to China and was elected provisional president of the Republic of China on 1 January 1912. Puyi abdicated on 12 February 1912. The dynasty that had ruled China since 1644 was over.
What the regency meant
Cixi has been the subject of more historical revision than any other late Qing figure. The first wave of Western historiography, beginning with the Boxer Uprising and continuing through the 1930s, presented her as a reactionary despot, the “Dragon Lady” of popular Western imagery, who had held China back from modernisation and was personally responsible for the disasters of the late Qing. The Chinese nationalist historiography of the 1940s and 1950s, in both its KMT and CCP variants, agreed with this view. Cixi was a feudal autocrat who had suppressed the Hundred Days’ Reform, backed the Boxers, and stood in the way of the bourgeois revolution.
A second wave of revisionist historiography, beginning in the 1980s and continuing to the present, has given a more nuanced account. The Self-Strengthening Movement, on this reading, was not a failure of half-measures but a substantial modernisation that preserved Chinese sovereignty through the 1860s and 1870s. The Sino-Japanese War was lost because of long-term structural factors — the Japanese adoption of a modern conscript army, the Chinese retention of a regionalised force structure, the diplomatic isolation of China — not because of Cixi’s neglect of the navy. The Boxer Protocol was a national humiliation that the dynasty could not have avoided; the question was whether the dynasty would survive at all. The New Policies after 1901 were substantial and, given the constraints, well-conceived. The abolition of the examination system in 1905, the promotion of modern schools, the provincial assemblies, and the constitutional timetable were all reasonable steps.
On this view, Cixi was a competent ruler operating within severe constraints. She maintained the dynasty through forty-seven years of crisis. She preserved Chinese sovereignty when more aggressive reform might have invited foreign intervention. She responded to the Boxer catastrophe by launching reforms that, though they came too late, were substantial. She failed, in the end, because the structural problems of late Qing China — overpopulation, fiscal exhaustion, military weakness, regional fragmentation, foreign pressure — were beyond the capacity of any one ruler to solve.
Whether one adopts the older view or the revisionist, Cixi remains the most consequential figure of late imperial China. Her regency spanned the most important four decades in the modern transformation of China: the slow climb out of the Taiping catastrophe, the opening to the international system, the first modern wars, the first serious efforts at reform, the catastrophic encounter with the West in 1900, and the attempted regeneration of the dynasty in its last years. Whatever her personal qualities, the history of the late Qing was, in large measure, the history of her decisions.
