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).