Read: 2025-11-03
Recommend: 10/10
This is another historical figure who was written about eloquently by the author Jung Chang. I’m very grateful that she took an interest in Cixi and helped dispel many of the negative misconceptions that had been cast upon her.
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
Cixi was not made the empress. She was a concubine, and a low-rank one at that. There were eight rungs on the ladder of imperial consorts, and Cixi was on the sixth, which put her in the lowest group (the sixth to the eighth). At her rank, Cixi had no private cow and was only entitled to 3 kilos of meat a day. She had four personal maids, while the empress had ten, in addition to numerous eunuchs.
On the plaque were inscribed four enormous characters – zheng-da-guang-ming – ‘upright, magnanimous, honourable and wise’, an imperial motto.
These were the same men who had ordered the capture and abuse of Elgin’s messengers, which had resulted in some of them dying horribly – and had led to the burning of the Old Summer Palace. These were the same men who had helped Emperor Xianfeng make all his disastrous decisions, which ended with his own death. Cixi could see that with these men in charge, stumbling along the same self-destructive road, there would be no end to catastrophe, which promised to destroy her son as well as the empire. She made up her mind to act, by launching a coup and seizing power from the Regents.
The two women did more than resolve a major problem, they went on to form a political alliance and launch a coup. Cixi was twenty-five years old and Empress Zhen a year younger. Facing them were eight powerful men in control of the state machine. The women were well aware of the risk they were taking. A coup was treason, and if it failed the punishment would be the most painful ling-chi, death by a thousand cuts. But they were willing to take the risk. Not only were they determined to save their son and the dynasty, but they also rejected the prescribed life of imperial widows – essentially living out their future years as virtual prisoners in the harem. Choosing to change their own destiny as well as that of the empire, the two women plotted, often with their heads together leaning over a large glazed earthenware water tank, pretending to be appraising their reflections or just talking girls’ talk.
Cixi devised an ingenious plan. She had noticed a loophole in her late husband’s deathbed arrangements. The Qing emperors demonstrated their authority by writing in crimson ink. For nearly 200 years, beginning with Emperor Kangxi as a young adult, these crimson-inked instructions had always been written strictly by the hand of the emperor. Now, however, the monarch was a child and could not hold the brush. When the decrees were issued by the Board of Regents in the child’s name, there was nothing to show authority. There was the official seal, but it was only used on very formal occasions, and not on everyday communications. This deficiency was pointed out to the Board after it issued the first batch of decrees. It was told, then, that the late emperor had given one informal seal to the child, which was kept by Cixi, and another similar seal to Empress Zhen. It was suggested to the Board that these seals could be stamped on the decrees as the equivalent of the crimson-ink writing, to authenticate them. It was undoubtedly one or both of the women who pointed out the deficiency and made the suggestion. Such informal seals, numbering in the thousands in the Qing court, were not political items, but objects of art commissioned by the emperors for their pleasure, which they sometimes stamped on their paintings and books – or gave as presents in the privacy of the harem. The Board of Regents accepted the solution and announced that all future edicts would be stamped with the seals. They made the announcement as a postscript on a decree that had already been written and was about to be issued – a sign that the idea had only just been put to them, that they had approved it and had hurriedly put it into practice. The postscript also stated that they were issuing the current edict without the seals, as there was no time to stamp it. Clearly they had not known about the existence of the seals until then and had to have them fetched from the harem. A formal proclamation followed, making the use of the two seals obligatory on all edicts: one at the beginning and the other at the end.
So, two months after her husband died, the twenty-five-year-old Cixi completed her coup with just three deaths, no bloodshed otherwise and no upheaval. The British envoy in Beijing, Frederick Bruce, was amazed: ‘It is certainly singular that men, long in power, disposing of the funds of the state and of its patronage, should have fallen without a shot of resistance, and without a voice or hand raised in their defence.’ This showed just how popular Cixi’s coup was. As Bruce wrote to London, ‘As far as I am able to ascertain, public opinion seems unanimous in condemning Su-shun and his colleagues, and in approving the punishments awarded to them.’ Not only did the coup reflect people’s wishes, but it had ‘certainly been managed with great ability’, causing no more ‘confusion’ than ‘a change of ministry’. Word got out that it was Cixi who had brought off the coup, and she gained tremendous esteem. The Viceroy in Canton, ‘in great spirits’, praised her to the British consul, who reported his words to London: ‘the Empress Mother is a woman of mind and strong will’, the coup was ‘well done’ and ‘there will be hopes now’. The famed military chief and later major reformer, Zeng Guofan, wrote in his diary when he learned the details of the coup from friends: ‘I am bowled over by the Empress Dowager’s wise, decisive action, which even great monarchs in the past were not able to achieve. I am much stirred by admiration and awe.’
Indeed, through Prince Gong’s reports, and the fact that the British-French troops had withdrawn from Beijing, Cixi had come to the conclusion that amicable relations with the West were possible, and she began to strive for such a relationship. She asked the most fundamental and clear-eyed questions: Are foreign trade and an open-door policy such bad things for China? Can we not benefit from them? Can we not use them to solve our own problems? This fresh way of looking at things heralded the Cixi era. She was pulling China out of the dead end into which it had been rammed by Emperor Xianfeng’s all-consuming hatred and by the closed-door policy of 100 years. She was setting the country on a new course: opening it up to the outside world.
As a check to its policies, the dynasty had the traditional institutionalised watchdog, the Censors, yu-shi, who were the official ‘criticisers’. In addition to these, Cixi encouraged critical comments from other officials, starting a trend that led to the involvement of the literati in state affairs, a sharp break from the tradition that discouraged their political participation. These informal ‘opposers’ became a substantial force in the land and acquired a collective name, qing-liu, or ‘clear stream’, signifying that they were above self-interest. Their targets included Cixi herself. Over the years, members of the government would complain that these attacks hindered their work, but Cixi never tried to silence them. Instinctively she seems to have known that a government needs dissenting voices. Among those voices she spotted outstanding people and promoted them to high office. One such man was Zhang Zhidong, who became one of the most eminent reformers. Cixi took care not to go against majority opinion, but the final decision was always hers. Running the empire needed more language skills and more knowledge of the classics than Cixi possessed. So she studied with educated eunuchs. Her lessons were like bedtime readings and took place before her after-lunch siesta or at night. She would sit cross-legged on her bed, with a book of poetry or one of the classics in her hand. The eunuchs would sit on cushions on the floor at a low table. They would go through the texts with her, and she would read after them. The lesson would go on until she fell asleep.
Under Cixi, China entered a long period of peace with the West. The British government, for instance, noted that ‘China is now prepared to enter into intimate relations with foreigners instead of . . . endeavouring to prevent all intercourse whatever with them’. And ‘since the policy of China is to encourage commerce with the nations of the world, it would be suicidal on our part not to endeavour to assist the enlightened Government of China . . .’ Britain and other powers therefore adopted a ‘co-operative policy’. ‘Our present course,’ said Lord Palmerston, now British Prime Minister, ‘was to strengthen the Chinese empire, to augment its revenues, and to enable it to provide itself with a better navy and army.’
The immediate benefit that Cixi gained from this new friendly relationship was the help of the Western powers in defeating the Taiping. At the time, in 1861, these peasant rebels had been waging ferocious battles in the heartland of China for a decade, and were holding large swathes of the country’s richest land along the Yangtze River, together with some of the wealthiest cities, including Nanjing, their capital, next door to Shanghai. Because the rebels claimed to be Christians, Westerners had at first been rather sympathetic towards them. But disillusion eventually set in, when it became all too clear that the Taiping had little in common with Christians. Their leader, Hong Xiuquan, for a long time imposed total sexual abstinence on ordinary members and decreed the death penalty for those who broke the ban, even if they were husbands and wives; but he officially bestowed up to eleven wives on each of his chiefs and took eighty-eight consorts for himself. He wrote more than 400 crude ‘poems’ telling the women how to serve him – the Sun, as he called himself. And this was not the worst thing, as hordes of peasant rebels indulged in cruel and wanton slaughter of the innocent, burning villages and towns wherever they went. The area they devastated was as large as all Western and Central Europe combined. The English-language North China Herald came to the conclusion that the ‘whole history’ of the Taiping ‘has been a succession of acts of bloodshed, rapine, and disorganisation; and its progress from the south to the north, and now in the east of this unhappy land, has been invariably attended by desolation, famine, and pestilence’. The rebels were not friendly to Western Christians, either: they turned down their request to leave Shanghai alone, and instead tried to seize the city, jeopardising Westerners’ own business and security.
Cixi had noted the immense potential of international trade, whose centre was now Shanghai, where the Yangtze River, having originated in the Himalayas and having crossed the middle of China, flows into the sea. Within months after her coup, by the beginning of 1862, she had told Prince Gong: ‘Shanghai is but a remote corner, and is imperilled [threatened by the Taiping] like piled-up eggs. And yet, thanks to the congregation of foreign and Chinese merchants, it has been a rich source for maintaining the army. I hear that in the past two months, it has collected 800,000 taels in import duty alone.’ ‘We must do our best to preserve this place,’ she said. Shanghai showed her that opening up to the West presented a tremendous opportunity for her empire, and she seized it. In 1863, more than 6,800 cargo ships visited Shanghai, a giant leap from the annual 1,000 or so under her late husband.
Employing Hart and a large number of other foreigners caused resentment in the civil service. It was a courageous move. The motto of Cixi’s government was ‘Make China Strong’ – zi-qiang. Hart wanted to show Beijing how to achieve this through modernisation. His aim, as he put in his diary, was: ‘to open the country to access of whatever Christian civilization has added to the comforts or well being, materially or morally, of man . . .’ He wanted ‘progress’ for China. And progress in those days meant modern mining, telegraph and telephone, and above all the railway. In October 1865, Hart presented a memorandum to Prince Gong, offering his advice. In his eagerness ‘to get a fresh start out of the old dame’ – China – Hart admonished and threatened. ‘Of all countries in the world, none is weaker than China,’ he asserted, blaming the country’s military defeats on its rulers’ ‘inferior intelligence’. He wrote ominously that if China did not follow his advice, Western powers ‘may have to start a war to force it’. These words reflected a common attitude among Westerners, who felt ‘they know better what China wants, than China does itself’, and they ought to ‘take her by the throat’ and ‘enforce progress’.
people believed that the tombs were their final destination where, after they died, they joined their deceased nearest and dearest. This comforting thought removed the fear of dying. The most deadly blow one could deal to one’s enemy was to destroy his ancestral tomb, so that he and all his family would become homeless ghosts after death, condemned to eternal loneliness and misery.
Like most of her contemporaries, Cixi associated ancestral tombs with profound religious sentiment. Faith was essential in her life, and the only thing that frightened her was the wrath of Heaven – the mystical and formless being that was the equivalent of God to the Chinese of her day. Believing in Heaven was to them not incompatible with having faith in Buddhism or Taoism. Chinese religious feelings were not as well defined as those in the Christian world. To have more than one religious belief was common. Indeed at grand ceremonies, such as an extravagant funeral, which might last well over a month, prayers were said by both Buddhist and Taoist priests as well as the lamas of Tibetan Buddhism, alternating every few days. In this tradition, Cixi was both a devout Buddhist and a devotee to Taoist doctrine. Her most revered Bodhisattva was Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy, the only female god in Buddhism, who was a Taoist Immortal as well. She frequently prayed in her personal chapels to a statue of Guanyin, with her palms together in front of her chest. The chapels were also her private sanctuaries where she went to be alone, to clear her mind before making critical decisions. As a Buddhist, she followed the ritual of setting captured creatures free. For her birthday, she would buy many birds – latterly as many as 10,000, according to her court ladies – and on the day, choosing the most auspicious hour, she would climb to the top of a hill and open the cages carried by the eunuchs one after another, watching the birds fly away.
One major episode concerned the first modern educational institution, Tongwen College, the School of Combined Learning. It was set up in 1862, soon after Cixi’s reign began, to train interpreters. At the time, it met with relatively little resistance – after all, China had to deal with foreigners. The school was housed in a picturesque mansion where, amidst date trees and groves of lilac and winter jasmine, a little bell tower announced class hours. Then in 1865, when, on Prince Gong’s advice, Cixi decided to turn it into a fully fledged college teaching sciences, the opposition became frenzied. For two thousand years only the classics had been regarded as a fit subject for education. Cixi defended her decision by saying that the College only intended ‘to borrow Western methods to verify Chinese ideas’, and would ‘not replace the teachings of our sacred sages’. But this did not assuage the officials who had risen to their present positions through imbibing Confucian classics, and they attacked the Foreign Office and Prince Gong as ‘stooges of foreign devils’. Graffiti abusing the prince were pasted on city walls.
While Cixi was full of innovative ideas, her son was entirely lacking in them. Nor was there any particular impetus for change. Cixi had brought peace, stability and a degree of prosperity to the empire. There was no peasant rebellion, or foreign invasion. Nevertheless, even as a purely bureaucratic emperor, Tongzhi had at least to be hands-on, in order for the machine to run smoothly. Yet he grew tired of it. The tall, good-looking and fun-loving teenager stayed in bed later and later. The number of audiences decreased, until he saw just one or two people a day, and each time asked only a few stock questions. The ever-flowing reports often went unread and he would simply write on them the standard ‘Do as you propose’, whether there was actually a ‘proposal’ or not. Realising this, the ministries did as they saw fit, and the administration became lax.
Cixi announced that the two of them would adopt a son for their late husband – and themselves – a child who would be raised by them. It was obvious that Cixi intended to rule the empire again as the dowager empress and to do so for as long as possible. The normal and correct thing to do would have been to adopt an heir for her late son. But if that were to happen, it would be hard for Cixi, the grandmother, to justify her rule. Emperor Tongzhi’s widow, Miss Alute, was still alive at that time and she would have become the dowager empress. And yet Cixi’s irregular arrangement roused no objection. Most welcomed her return to power. She had done an outstanding job prior to her son’s accession. In contrast, her son’s brief reign promised only disaster. Indeed, nearly all of them had been wilfully rebuked, and quite a few dismissed, by the late emperor, and who knew what would have happened if Cixi had not been around to bring him to heel. That she would be holding the reins again came as a huge relief – especially for the reformers, who had been frustrated by the stagnation of the last few years. Then Cixi named the new emperor: Zaitian, the three-year-old son of her sister and Prince Chun.
The earl had by now emerged as the foremost moderniser of the country. He had surrounded himself with Westerners and made friends with many of them. Among their number was former US president Ulysses S. Grant, and the two men saw a great deal of each other in Tianjin in 1879. The missionary Timothy Richard described the earl thus: ‘Physically he was taller than most, intellectually he towered above them all, and could see over their heads to the far beyond.’ The earl became the key man in Cixi’s modernisation drive. He and Prince Gong, who headed the Grand Council, and whose name was to Westerners ‘synonymous with Progress in China’, were now the empress dowager’s right-hand men. With their assistance, Cixi steadily, yet radically, pushed the empire towards modernity. As Earl Li wrote to Cixi, expressing their shared aspiration, ‘From now on all sorts of things will be introduced into China, and people’s minds will gradually open up.’ They did not exclude the conservatives. Cixi’s style was to work with people like Grand Tutor Weng as well as the reformists, always using persuasion rather than brute force, and being prepared to let time and reason change people’s minds.
Cixi also set her heart on replacing the country’s outdated currency, silver ingots, with manufactured coins. These ingots put China at a huge disadvantage in international trade: because their silver content varied, they tended to be valued too low. Only modern minting could solve this problem, as well as make the Chinese currency compatible with the outside world. It was no small undertaking, especially as it required a sizeable initial investment. Facing stubborn resistance, Cixi was adamant and offered to pay the start-up costs out of the royal household allowance. The project took off, with a proviso that it would be reviewed in three years. The most conspicuous project that Cixi did not launch in 1875, or in subsequent years, was the railway. It touched on something akin to religion. The numerous ancestral tombs dotted across the country, all lovingly built by their families in accordance with feng-shui, could not be moved. Nor could they be left where they were, if they were near a railway line: people believed that the dead souls would be disturbed by the roaring trains. Cixi wholeheartedly believed that the tombs were sacrosanct.
Cixi did not embrace industrialisation indiscriminately or unreservedly. In 1882, when Earl Li asked for permission to build textile factories, she objected, saying with unmistakable annoyance: ‘Textile making is our basic domestic industry. Machine-produced fabrics take away our women’s work and harm their livelihood. It is bad enough that we can’t ban foreign textiles; we shouldn’t be inflicting further damage on ourselves. This matter must be considered carefully.’ In those days, ‘textile making’ was called can-sang, literally meaning ‘silkworms and mulberry leaves’, as silk production had been a major activity of Chinese women for thousands of years. To maintain this tradition, every year in spring, when the silkworms began their labour, Cixi led court ladies to pray in a special shrine in the Forbidden City to the God of the Silkworm, begging his protection for the little worms. She and the ladies would feed the silkworms four or five times a day, gathering leaves from the mulberry trees in the palace grounds. When a silkworm had finished spinning a silk thread and had enclosed itself inside the cocoon it had made with its silk, the cocoon would be boiled and the thread, which averaged many hundreds of metres, would be wound onto a spool, ready for weaving. All her life Cixi kept some of the silk she had woven as a young girl, to see if the new silk was as fine and lustrous as the old. She did not want to see the old ways disappear altogether. While she was determined to drive through change in some areas, in others she either resisted change or accepted it only reluctantly. Under her China’s industrialisation did not move like a bulldozer out to destroy all traditions.
At the beginning of 1889, at the height of her achievements, the empress dowager announced that she was going to retire and cede power to her seventeen-year-old adopted son. Under her reign China’s annual revenue had doubled. Before she came to power, it had been around forty million taels, even at the most prosperous times under Qianlong the Magnificent. Now it stood at nearly eighty-eight million, of which as much as one-third came from Customs duties – the result of her open-door policy. Before returning to the harem she issued an honours list, thanking about 100 officials, living and dead, for their services. The second on her list was Robert Hart, Inspector General of Customs, for building up a well-organised and efficient fiscal institution, free of corruption, which had ‘produced very considerable and ever increasing revenues for China’. Customs revenue helped save millions of lives. In the previous year, 1888, when the country was struck by floods, earthquakes and other natural disasters, it could afford to spend ten million taels of silver to buy rice to feed the population. The honour she conferred on Hart was the Ancestral Rank of the First Class of the First Order for Three Generations – the highest distinction because the title was bestowed on his ancestors for three generations, not his descendants. Hart wrote to a friend, ‘from the Chinese, nothing could be more honourable; in any case it is extremely satisfactory to myself that the Empress Dowager should do this before retiring . . .’
One guest who spoke spontaneously that day was Charles Denby, the American minister to Beijing from 1885 to 1898. He later wrote of Cixi’s ‘splendid reputation’ among Westerners at this time, and of her many achievements. Along with ending internal strife and maintaining the integrity of the empire: a fine navy was created, and the army was somewhat improved. The electric telegraph covered the land. Arsenals and shipyards were located at Foochow [Fuzhou], Shanghai, Canton, Taku [Dagu], and Port Arthur. Western methods of mining were introduced, and two lines of railway were built. Steamers plied on all the principal rivers. The study of mathematics was revived, and the physical sciences were introduced into the competitive examinations. Absolute tolerance of religious faith existed, and the missionaries could locate anywhere in China . . . During the time covered by the rule of the empress many schools and colleges were established in China by our own countrymen . . .
Furthermore, Cixi’s reign was the most tolerant in Qing history; people were no longer killed for what they said or wrote, as they had been under previous emperors. To alleviate poverty, she initiated large-scale food import and each year spent hundreds of thousands, even millions, of taels to buy food to feed the population. As Denby observed, ‘To her own people, up to this period in her career, she was kind and merciful, and to foreigners she was just.’ Foreign relations were fundamentally improved, and the relationship between China and the US stayed ‘tranquil and satisfactory’. Most importantly, the American minister pointed out: ‘It may be said with emphasis that the empress dowager has been the first of her race to apprehend the problem of the relation of China to the outside world, and to make use of this relation to strengthen her dynasty and to promote material progress.’ Indeed, Cixi had ended China’s self-imposed isolation and had brought it into the international community – and she had done so in order to benefit her country. ‘At that time,’ Denby summed up, ‘she was universally esteemed by foreigners, and revered by her own people, and was regarded as being one of the greatest characters in history . . . Under her rule for a quarter of a century China made immense progress.’ The embryo of a modern China had taken shape. Its creator was Cixi. As Denby stressed, ‘It will not be denied by any one that the improvement and progress above sketched are mainly due to the will and power of the empress regent.’ With this impressive legacy, Cixi handed over the reins of the empire to her adopted son, Emperor Guangxu.
Emperor Guangxu did nothing to follow up Cixi’s reforms, and let them lapse. He returned to the age-old way of running the empire: mere bureaucratic administration, writing brief minutes in crimson ink on the daily dispatches – ‘Report received.’ ‘Do as you propose.’ ‘To the relevant office.’ His audiences were routine and brief. It was widely known that the emperor ‘has a hesitation in his speech . . . he speaks slowly and with difficulty’. Indeed his voice was barely audible, and he had a stammer. To spare him the obvious pain of having to speak, officials advised each other to produce a monologue after the emperor’s first question and thus fill the obligatory minimum ten minutes. The emperor still fretted about the ‘hard life of the people’. Once, when a flood burst a dyke, poured into Beijing and lashed at the walls of the Forbidden City, the distressed emperor worried about the numerous people living in the path of the flood. But he did no more than the traditional opening of the rice centres and praying to Heaven. It does not seem to have entered his mind that modernisation could provide some solutions. Food imports continued, as did foreign trade, but the country went into a ‘period of slumber’, noticed Westerners, ‘in which the foreign traders alone were enterprising’.
Cixi detested age-old prejudices against women. During one opera performance, when a singer sang the oft-repeated line ‘the most vicious of all is the heart of a woman’, she flew into a rage and ordered the singer off the stage. Her rejection of the traditional attitude was undoubtedly shaped by her own experience. No matter how successful her rule on behalf of her son and adopted son, she would always be denied the mandate to rule in her own right. Once the boys entered adulthood, she was obliged to give way and could no longer participate in politics. She could not even voice her opinions. Watching Emperor Guangxu shelving the modernisation projects she had initiated, Cixi could not fail to despair. And yet there was nothing she could do. Any attempt at changing the status quo would have to involve violent and extreme means, such as launching a palace coup – which she was not prepared to contemplate. Only one woman in Chinese history – Wu Zetian – had declared herself emperor and run the country as such. But she had had to do so in the face of mighty opposition, which she had quelled using hair-raisingly cruel means. On the long list of alleged bloody murders was that of her own son, the crown prince. Cixi was a different character and preferred to rule through consensus: winning over the opposition rather than killing them.
The earl’s present-giving confirmed that he was an expert at pleasing his bosses through their weak spots. Indeed, Cixi found it hard to turn down this haul. And if she accepted the earl’s gifts, she had to accept other people’s. Birthdays celebrating a new decade were the chief gift-giving occasions, but her fiftieth birthday had been hit by the war with France, and she had had to veto all presents. Must she really forgo this opportunity again? The temptation proved too strong. After a few days’ agonising, Cixi persuaded herself that accepting birthday presents was not incompatible with fighting the war. This was similar to her self-delusion in the past when she thought that taking a relatively small sum of money each year from the naval funds made no difference to the navy. Now she effectively rescinded her own decree, and sent eunuchs to announce that officials above a certain high rank could present gifts if they wished to do so.
The demand was insane, not only because it came at a time when the empire was crushed by colossal debts, but also because she was asking for the construction of a pleasure palace to be put on the state budget. She had made no such demand when she built her Summer Palace. In fact she had given a specific public assurance that it would not be funded by the state. Any public money she had used had been effectively stolen. Now, it was as if she were taunting the grandees: ‘You had the money to give to the Japanese; I might as well have some for my use. It is you who have bankrupted the country and you have no right to deny me!’ And, indeed, the grandees had forfeited the moral right to oppose her demand. Grand Tutor Weng sheepishly set out to explore ways to fulfil her wishes.
Given that the Qing regime had brought such disasters to the country, the case for an alternative government was unanswerable. Whether Kang would have made a better leader is open to debate. But one thing is certain: he did not have a political programme to turn China into a parliamentary democracy, as is often claimed. He never advocated this; on the contrary, he argued in one of his articles that democracy, while good for the West, did not suit China. He wrote, ‘An emperor is like the father of a family, and the people are like children. The Chinese people are all like toddlers and infants. May I ask how the family of a dozen babies can function if the parents don’t have the exclusive right to make decisions, but instead let all the toddlers and infants make their own decisions? . . . I can tell you that in China, only the emperor must rule.’ Wild Fox Kang wanted to be the emperor, and had been trying to create a mandate for himself. First, he claimed that he was the reincarnation of Confucius. The assertion had indeed attracted attention, and even Westerners had heard him spoken of as ‘the modern Sage’ and ‘the second Confucius’. Next, with his small but vocal band of disciples, Kang attempted to establish that Confucius had actually been crowned King of China, replacing the emperor of the time. To propagate the idea, they started a newspaper that used a ‘Confucian Calendar’, in which the year of Confucius’s birth was Year One. As this strategy directly threatened Emperor Guangxu, the Wild Fox abandoned it when he began to ingratiate himself with the emperor. The moment he realised that the emperor was falling under his spell, Kang most anxiously explained to the monarch in one of his clandestine letters that he had been misunderstood and that he had never held the view that Confucius had been crowned king. Kang was eager to expunge any idea that he coveted the throne. With Emperor Guangxu seduced, Kang could fulfil his dream by first becoming the puppeteer behind the throne. This route was now blocked by Cixi with a will of iron, and the only way for the Wild Fox to achieve his goal was to remove her by force.
So the story of Wild Fox Kang’s attempted coup and murder of Cixi lay in darkness and obscurity for nearly a century, until the 1980s, when Chinese scholars discovered in Japanese archives the testimony of the designated killer, Bi, which established beyond doubt the existence of the plot. Meanwhile, the six men executed, four of them conspirators, have gone down in history as having died heroically for the Reforms, acquiring the household name of ‘the Six Gentlemen’. Wild Fox Kang entered myth as the hero who lit the beacon of reform and even had a vision to turn China into a parliamentary democracy. Kang largely created the myth himself, by revising and falsifying his writings and petitions – deleting, for instance, his article that specifically rejected parliamentary democracy as a desirable political system for China. He was a first-rate myth-maker and propagandist. While promoting himself, he and his right-hand man, Liang, tirelessly vilified Cixi, inventing many repulsive stories about her in interviews, speeches and writings, some of which were carried in newspapers in the Treaty Ports, while others were produced as pamphlets in Japan and posted into China. In these, they charged Cixi with poisoning Empress Zhen, driving her son Emperor Tongzhi to death, forcing the son’s widow to kill herself by swallowing a lump of gold, exhausting the naval funds to the tune of tens of millions of taels to build her Summer Palace, and causing China’s defeat in the war with Japan. Almost all the accusations that have since shaped public opinion about Cixi, even today, originated with the Wild Fox. It was he who first represented Cixi as a debauched despot, alleging that she had many male concubines and nightly orgies with eunuchs. People believed Kang largely because he implied that his source was Emperor Guangxu himself, who had given him the ‘secret edict’, smuggled out of the Forbidden City sewn into a belt. The emperor, Kang declared, did not regard Cixi as his mother, but ‘merely as a concubine of a late emperor’s’ – and ‘a licentious concubine’ at that.
Emperor Guangxu never showed a trace of resentment – not even when eunuchs poked fun at him during parlour games, which he often played with them. This behaviour led many to believe that he was pretending to be an idiot and was biding his time. Others, like the American painter Katharine Carl, observed that the slender and delicate monarch had ‘a Sphinx-like quality to his smile . . . Over his whole face there is a look of self-repression, which has almost reached a state of passivity.’ Even Cixi with her sharp eye could not figure out what lay behind the passive, expressionless mask. In his prison villa, the emperor read translations of Western books as well as Chinese classics, practised calligraphy and played musical instruments. (He said he did not like sad tunes.) He continued to dismantle and reassemble clocks. Once he tackled a broken music box, and apparently not only brought it back to life, but also added a Chinese tune to it. What he was most fond of doing was drawing devil-like figures on pieces of paper, on the back of which he would always write the name of General Yuan, the man who had informed on the plotters and caused his imprisonment. He would then paste the drawings on the wall, shoot at them with bamboo arrows and afterwards cut the tattered drawings to shreds.
It was all too clear that Cixi was the only person who could hold the empire together. Her demise would result in civil war, which for Westerners would mean especially the collapse of trade, the default of loans and the emergence of more Boxers. And so, for these overwhelming reasons, the Allies decided not to pursue the empress dowager. On 26 October 1900, confident of her safety, Cixi took up residence in Xian. Her representatives, Prince Ching and Earl Li, opened negotiations with the powers.
And yet, for more than a hundred years since her death, no recognition or credit has been given to Hart by the country for which he arguably did more than any other foreigner – and most natives. Today he is virtually unknown to the average Chinese, while the Boxer Indemnity is in all the textbooks, constantly invoked to condemn ‘the imperialists’ and denounce Cixi for pawning her country. America has fared better than Hart, in that its behaviour has been given due credit: after receiving payment for a few years, it wrote off the rest, specifying that the money was to be used in education. This enabled the top Chinese university, Tsinghua, to be founded, and a large number of young people to receive scholarships and study in the States. America was also the only country to return to China the silver bullion it had seized during the invasion: in 1901, American soldiers had captured 500,000 taels in the office of the Salt Commissioner in Tianjin, and its equivalent, US $376,300, was restored to China six months later.
But before all else, the day after she returned from exile Cixi honoured Imperial Concubine Pearl, whom she had had drowned in a well just before she fled. This was an act of contrition. It was also an attempt to make amends to her adopted son, who had given her his cooperation over several years, especially during the exile. Above all, perhaps, Cixi was making a gesture to the Western powers, who had been appalled by the murder. She was determined to win their goodwill. It would make an enormous difference to the country, and to the way she herself would be treated. The yearly payment of the Boxer Indemnity could vary considerably, depending on the exchange rates, and, with goodwill, the foreign powers could adopt the method of calculation that was advantageous to China. Besides, her transformation of the empire needed the cooperation of a friendly international community.
One of Cixi’s first revolutionary decrees, proclaimed on 1 February 1902, was to lift the ban on Han–Manchu intermarriage, a ban as old as the Qing dynasty itself. In a family-oriented society the ban had meant that there was little social intercourse between the two ethnic groups. Even if officials were close colleagues, their families hardly ever met. The American physician Mrs Headland described one occasion when two Manchu princesses and the granddaughter of a Han Grand Councillor encountered each other in her house. For a while, getting them to converse was ‘like trying to mix oil and water’. Now the Manchu–Han segregation was to be dismantled. The same decree required the Han Chinese to abandon their tradition of foot-binding, stressing that the practice ‘harms creatures and violates Nature’s intentions’ – an argument that appealed to a deeply held belief: respect Nature’s creation. Aware of the tenacity of the custom that had been in place for a thousand years, and anticipating resistance that could lead to violent collisions, Cixi approached the implementation of her injunction with characteristic caution. She bid grass-roots leaders make all households aware of her message and use example and persuasion to convince the families, explicitly and emphatically forbidding the use of brutal coercion. Cixi’s style was not to force through drastic change, but to bring it about gradually through perseverance. When her American friend Sarah Conger asked her if her edict would have an immediate effect in the empire, she replied, ‘No; the Chinese move slowly. Our customs are so fixed that it takes much time to change them.’ Cixi was prepared to wait. Her emphasis on gradual change contributed to the fact that many young girls (including this author’s grandmother) still had their feet broken a decade later. But they were the last generation to be subjected to this suffering.
At stake for her was the god-like sacredness of the throne, which was the one thing that gave the throne its hold over the vast empire. Kneeling was the manifestation and reinforcement of that sacredness, without which – without all those bent knees – the throne, and even the empire, might falter. To hold on to this symbol of total submission in an increasingly enlightened empire, Cixi sacrificed her curiosity and never rode in a car. She had been presented with one by General Yuan, who had stepped into Earl Li’s shoes in ways more than one. Not only had he inherited the earl’s jobs and role as a close adviser to the empress dowager, but, like the earl, he was a talented gift-giver. The car he bought for her was lacquered in imperial yellow, with a dragon motif and a throne-like seat within. Cixi longed for a ride, particularly as she had just had fun riding a tricycle, also a present from the General. But with a car there was an insurmountable problem: it was impossible for the chauffeur to operate the wheel while kneeling, or even standing. The chauffeur would have to sit down, right in front of her. The car remained the only modern device that was interesting and available to the empress dowager which she did not try.
CIXI WAS AWARE that the throne could not be sustained for long by symbols. Something more solid was needed to ensure its survival. There was the option of shutting down her revolution and winding back the clock, but she rejected it and chose to press forward. In 1905 she set the ball rolling for the most fundamental of all her reforms: to turn China into a constitutional monarchy (li-xian) with an elected parliament. She hoped that a constitution would set in concrete the legitimacy of the Qing dynasty, while enabling a large part of the population – most of all Han Chinese – to participate in the affairs of the state. This historic move, involving an election with as wide an electoral base as in the West, meant the introduction of the vote into China. Cixi was convinced that China was unable to do as well as Western countries because there was not the same sense of connection between the ruled and the rulers. ‘In foreign countries,’ she remarked, ‘the ruled [xia] feel connected with the ruling [shang]. This is why they are so formidable.’ Only the vote could produce this connection. From her vantage point, she saw clearly the benefit of a parliamentary monarchy such as Britain. Once, talking about Queen Victoria, Cixi observed, ‘England is one of [the] great powers of the world, but this has not been brought about by Queen Victoria’s absolute rule. She had the able men of parliament back of her at all times and of course they discussed everything until the best result was obtained . . .’ In China, ‘I have 400,000,000 people, all dependent on my judgment. Although I have the Grand Council to consult with . . . anything of an important nature I must decide myself.’ Proud though she was of her own abilities, she conceded that even she had made a disastrous mistake, in the case of the Boxers. Her adopted son had been calamitous. Indeed, she could think of no one at court remotely capable of succeeding as an absolute monarch, especially in the modern world.
Two years later, on 27 August 1908, a draft outline of the constitution was published with Cixi’s endorsement. This historic document combined the political traditions of the East and the West. Continuing the age-old oriental custom, it gave real political power to the monarch, who would still head the government and retain the final say. Parliament would draw up laws and proposals, but all were subject to the approval of the monarch, who would then issue them. The inviolable power of the throne was stressed in the draft outline, not least through its opening line: ‘The Qing dynasty shall rule over the Qing empire for ever, and shall be honoured through all ages.’ Drawing from Western practices, the people were guaranteed a number of fundamental rights, including the ‘freedoms of speech, writing, publication, assembly and association’ – and the right to be ‘members of parliament as long as they were qualified by law’. A parliament was to be founded, where elected representatives of the people would have a significant say in state affairs, including the budget. The draft outline omitted to say what would happen in the inevitable event of a clash between the throne and parliament. But the drafters’ letter to Cixi indicated a solution: ‘the monarch and the people would both make concessions’.
America was the only foreign country in which Cixi entertained a little hope. In late 1907, she received two pieces of encouraging news. America was returning the outstanding part of the Boxer Indemnity, and it was dispatching a major fleet into the Pacific. Seeing the proof of America’s friendliness towards China and its obvious intention to rival Japan, Cixi decided to send an emissary to America to explore possibilities to forge closer links, while conveying thanks for the return of the indemnity. The emissary would then visit Germany and other European countries. But the return of the indemnity was delayed and the emissary did not depart for a year. The fact that Cixi neither instructed her minister in Washington to talk about the Kaiser’s proposed Entente, nor dispatched a special emissary for this purpose, suggests that she did not regard it as a real possibility. America would not go to war with Japan on behalf of China; it was more likely to sacrifice China’s interest for its own. Indeed, before long, America also signed a deal with Japan, the Root–Takahira Agreement, by which America endorsed Japan’s dominance in southern Manchuria, in return for Japan’s acquiescence to America’s occupation of Hawaii and the Philippines.
A Grand Council secretary drafted Cixi’s own official will according to her wishes, ‘with my hand and heart trembling, everything seeming unreal’, he recorded in his diary. This will recalled her involvement in China’s state affairs for nearly fifty years and her efforts to do what she regarded as her best. It reiterated her determination to transform China into a constitutional monarchy, which, the will stated with much regret, she was now unable to see to completion. The two wills made unmistakably clear that it was Cixi’s dying wish that the Chinese should have their parliament and their vote.
Empress Dowager Cixi’s legacy was manifold and towering. Most importantly, she brought medieval China into the modern age. Under her leadership the country began to acquire virtually all the attributes of a modern state: railways, electricity, telegraph, telephones, Western medicine, a modern-style army and navy, and modern ways of conducting foreign trade and diplomacy. The restrictive millennium-old educational system was discarded and replaced by Western-style schools and universities. The press blossomed, enjoying a freedom that was unprecedented and arguably unsurpassed since. She unlocked the door to political participation: for the first time in China’s long history, people were to become ‘citizens’. It was Cixi who championed women’s liberation in a culture that had for centuries imposed foot-binding on its female population – a practice to which she put an end. The fact that her last enterprise before an untimely death was to introduce the vote testifies to her courage and vision. Above all, her transformation of China was carried out without her engaging in violence and with relatively little upheaval. Her changes were dramatic and yet gradual, seismic and yet astonishingly bloodless. A consensus-seeker, always willing to work with people of different views, she led by standing on the right side of history. She was a giant, but not a saint. Being the absolute ruler of one-third of the world’s population and the product of medieval China, she was capable of immense ruthlessness. Her military campaigns to regain Xinjiang and to quell armed rebellions were brutal. Her attempts to use the Boxers to fight invaders resulted in large-scale atrocities by the Boxers. For all her faults, she was no despot. Compared to that of her predecessors, or successors, Cixi’s rule was benign. In some four decades of absolute power, her political killings – whether just or unjust – which are recorded in this book, were no more than a few dozen, many of them in response to plots to kill her. She was not cruel by nature. As her life was ending, her thoughts were about how best to prevent bloody civil war and massacres of the Manchu people, whose survival she ensured by sacrificing her dynasty.
Cixi had struggled to thwart Japan’s attempts to turn China into part of its East Asian empire, and had murdered her adopted son to prevent it. Ironically, if she had delivered China to Japan, it is almost certain that her last resting place – and her remains – would have been respected.
While post-war Japan metamorphosed into a flourishing democracy, China was plunged into an unprecedented abyss by Mao’s twenty-seven-year rule, which swallowed the lives of well over seventy million people in peacetime – until his death in 1976 put a stop to his atrocities. For his misrule Mao offered not a word of apology, unlike Cixi, who publicly expressed remorse for the damage she had done – which, though grave, was a fraction of what Mao inflicted on the nation.
The past hundred years have been most unfair to Cixi, who has been deemed either tyrannical and vicious or hopelessly incompetent – or both. Few of her achievements have been recognised and, when they are, the credit is invariably given to the men serving her. This is largely due to a basic handicap: that she was a woman and could only rule in the name of her sons – so her precise role has been little known. In the absence of clear knowledge, rumours have abounded and lies have been invented and believed. As Pearl Buck observed, those who hated her were simply ‘more articulate than those who loved her’. The political forces that have dominated China since soon after her death have also deliberately reviled her and blacked out her accomplishments – in order to claim that they have saved the country from the mess she left behind. In terms of groundbreaking achievements, political sincerity and personal courage, Empress Dowager Cixi set a standard that has barely been matched. She brought in modernity to replace decrepitude, poverty, savagery and absolute power, and she introduced hitherto untasted humaneness, open-mindness and freedom. And she had a conscience. Looking back over the many horrific decades after Cixi’s demise, one cannot but admire this amazing stateswoman, flawed though she was.
On her deathbed in 1908, Cixi made her two-year-old great-nephew, Puyi (standing), the next emperor, and his father, Zaifeng (seated holding Puyi’s brother), the Regent.