Empress Cixi
29 November 1835 - 15 November 1908), of the Manchu Yehe
Nara clan, was a Chinese noblewoman, concubine and later
regent who effectively controlled the Chinese government in
the late Qing dynasty for 47 years, from 1861 until her death
in 1908. Selected as a concubine of the Xianfeng Emperor in
her adolescence, she gave birth to a son, Zaichun, in 1856.
After the Xianfeng Emperor’s death in 1861, the young boy
became the Tongzhi Emperor, and she assumed the role of
co-empress dowager, alongside the Emperor’s widow, Empress
Dowager Ci’an
The reign of the Xianfeng Emperor was marked throughout by
the Taiping and other rebellions and by wars with the
Europeans, and that of the Tongzhi Emperor by the great
Mohammedan risings. There began also a conflict with Japan
which lasted until 1945. The Tongzhi Emperor came to the
throne as a child of five, and never played a part of his
own. It had been the general rule for princes to serve as
regents for minors on the imperial throne, but this time the
princes concerned won such notoriety through their intrigues
that the Beijing court circles decided to entrust the regency
to two concubines of the late emperor. One of these, called
Cixi (born 1835), of the Manchu tribe of the Yehe-Nara,
quickly gained the upper hand. The empress Cixi was one of
the strongest personalities of the later nineteenth century
who played an active part in Chinese political life. She
played a more active part than any emperor had played for
many decades.
Cixi was a woman of strong personality, but too uneducated
- in the modern sense - to be able to realize that
modernization was an absolute necessity for China if it was
to remain an independent state. The empress failed to realize
that the Europeans were fundamentally different from the
neighbouring tribes or the pirates of the past; she had not
the capacity to acquire a general grasp of the realities of
world politics. She felt instinctively that Europeanisation
would wreck the foundations of the power of the Manchus and
the gentry, and would bring another class, the middle class
and the merchants, into power.
When in 1902 the dowager empress returned to Beijing and
put the emperor back into his palace-prison, she was forced
by what had happened to realize that at all events a certain
measure of reform was necessary. The reforms, however, which
she decreed, mainly in 1904, were very modest and were never
fully carried out. They were only intended to make an
impression on the outer world and to appease the continually
growing body of supporters of the reform party, especially
numerous in South China. The south remained, nevertheless, a
focus of hostility to the Manchus. After his failure in 1898,
Kang Youwei went to Europe, and no longer played any
important political part. His place was soon taken by a young
Chinese physician who had been living abroad, Sun Yat-sen,
who turned the reform party into a middle-class revolutionary
party.
In 1908 the Empress dowager Cixi fell ill; she was
seventy-four years old. When she felt that her end was near,
she seems to have had the captive Guangxu Emperor, Zaitian
assassinated (at 5 p.m. on November 14th); she herself died
next day (November 15th, 2 p.m.): she was evidently
determined that this man, whom she had ill-treated and
oppressed all his life, should not regain independence. As
Zaitian had no children, she nominated on the day of her
death the two-year-old prince Pu Yi as emperor (reign name
Xuantong Emperor, 1909-1911).
