Empress Dowager Cixi

Jung Chang reappraises Empress Dowager Cixi, a widowed imperial consort who effectively ruled China for nearly four decades. Chang argues that Cixi, far from the cruel despot of popular myth, drove China's transition from a medieval empire to a modern state during the last decades of the Qing dynasty, the Manchu dynasty that ruled China.

In 1852, a 16-year-old Manchu girl from a family of government employees was selected as a low-ranking concubine for Emperor Xianfeng in the Forbidden City. Later known as Cixi, she received only a rudimentary education but possessed sharp political intuition. She befriended the emperor's chief consort, Empress Zhen, who protected Cixi when her attempts to offer political advice provoked the emperor's anger. In 1856, Cixi gave birth to the emperor's only surviving son, Zaichun, elevating her status.

The empire faced catastrophic external threats. Chang traces how Britain and France forced open China through the Opium Wars. During the Second Opium War (1856-60), British envoy Harry Parkes was captured under a flag of truce and 21 of 39 captives died. British envoy Lord Elgin retaliated by burning the Old Summer Palace, a vast complex of palaces and gardens, an act that planted lasting hatred. Emperor Xianfeng fled with the court beyond the Great Wall, where he died on 22 August 1861, having appointed a Board of eight Regents to govern for his five-year-old son.

Cixi, now 25, resolved to overthrow the Regents she judged incompetent. She and Empress Zhen recruited Emperor Xianfeng's half-brother Prince Gong, who had been excluded from the Board, and Cixi's brother-in-law Prince Chun. Cixi persuaded the Regents to accept two informal seals as authenticating stamps on imperial decrees, then used those seals to legitimize a coup edict. She had the Regents arrested; the coup was completed with only three deaths. Cixi became the real ruler of China, operating from behind a yellow silk screen and issuing decrees in her son's name.

Cixi immediately reversed her late husband's hostile stance toward the West. She opened China to foreign trade, encouraged Western officers to train Chinese forces fighting the Taiping Rebellion, a massive peasant uprising that ended in 1864 after causing some 20 million deaths, and appointed Robert Hart as Inspector General of Chinese Maritime Customs, where he built a corruption-free organization that became a major revenue source. She launched modernization under the motto "Make China Strong": A modern navy was founded, arms manufacturing began, and Tongwen College was established to teach Western sciences.

Cixi's personal life intersected with politics when she fell in love with a eunuch named Little An and sent him on a journey outside Beijing. Prince Chun led the demand for Little An's execution, and Cixi experienced a prolonged mental health crisis that temporarily suspended modernization. In 1870, an anti-Christian riot apparently instigated by Prince Chun's protégé erupted in Tianjin, killing over 40 people. Cixi condemned the violence but recognized Prince Chun as a dangerous obstacle to reform.

When Cixi's son Emperor Tongzhi died in January 1875 without an heir, Cixi designated her three-year-old nephew Zaitian as the new Emperor Guangxu. Zaitian was the son of Prince Chun and Cixi's own sister. This arrangement ensured Cixi could continue ruling as dowager empress. It also served as revenge against Prince Chun: Losing his only son devastated the prince, who was compelled to resign all posts.

Cixi's second period of rule accelerated modernization. She expanded the navy, introduced the telegraph and electricity, launched modern coal mining, and after years of deliberation authorized China's railway age in 1889. She defended the empire's borders by reconquering Xinjiang, a vast western territory, forcing Russia to return the region of Ili, and fighting France to a standstill in the Sino-French War (1884-85). By her retirement in early 1889, China's annual revenue had doubled.

Emperor Guangxu, raised by Grand Tutor Weng as a model Confucian monarch with no preparation for the modern world, proved a passive ruler who shelved Cixi's reforms and halted naval purchases. When Japan provoked war in 1894, China suffered devastating defeats. Cixi was initially barred from war decisions but forced her way back and alone advocated rejecting Japan's demands. Emperor Guangxu and the Grand Councillors, members of the empire's top governing council, signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki (1895), ceding Taiwan and paying a massive indemnity that ruined China financially.

European powers seized strategic positions along the coast. Shaken, Emperor Guangxu sought Cixi's guidance, and on 11 June 1898 he relayed a decree from Cixi ordering the adoption of Western methods. But Kang Youwei, an ambitious reformer whom Chang calls "Wild Fox Kang," gained influence over the emperor through a diplomat Chang identifies as likely a Japanese agent. When Cixi blocked Kang's bid for power, he sent a conspirator to General Yuan Shikai with a plan to kill the empress dowager. Yuan denounced the plotters, and Cixi placed Emperor Guangxu under house arrest. Kang fled to Japan, where he created a lasting myth portraying Cixi as a reactionary villain.

Cixi's fear that Japan would use the imprisoned emperor as a puppet led to her worst miscalculation. When the Boxer movement, a xenophobic uprising fueled by drought and foreign encroachment, exploded across north China in 1900, Cixi gambled on using the Boxers against Western invaders and declared war on eight foreign powers. She quietly ensured the survival of the besieged legations through Junglu, her trusted military commander, whose troops fired deliberately high. On 15 August, as Allied forces stormed Beijing, Cixi fled, ordering the drowning of concubine Pearl before departure.

During exile in Xian, Cixi maintained her authority; the Viceroys, powerful regional governors-general, reaffirmed their allegiance. She issued a "Decree of Self-reproach," acknowledging responsibility for the catastrophe. The Boxer Protocol of 1901 imposed a 450-million-tael indemnity but did not hold Cixi personally responsible or demand territory.

Cixi returned to Beijing in January 1902 and launched sweeping reforms. She lifted the ban on Han-Manchu intermarriage, required the abandonment of foot-binding through persuasion, abolished the millennium-old Imperial Examination system, and replaced it with Western-style schools. She initiated a legal revolution that abolished "death by a thousand cuts" and prohibited torture. She created a Ministry of Commerce, established the yuan currency, completed the Beijing-Wuhan Railway, and coordinated with Britain to eradicate opium. She also cultivated friendships with Western women, including Sarah Conger, wife of the American minister.

In 1905, Cixi set in motion her most radical reform: establishing a constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament. A draft constitution published in 1908 guaranteed freedoms of speech, publication, assembly, and association. An Electoral Regulation extended the vote to qualified adult males over 25, with a nine-year timetable for opening parliament.

As her health failed in 1908, Cixi ordered the poisoning of Emperor Guangxu with arsenic, confirmed by forensic examination of his remains a century later, to prevent him from becoming a Japanese puppet. He died on 14 November. She designated Zaifeng, a prince she had groomed, as Regent for his two-year-old son Puyi and placed ultimate authority in Empress Longyu, Emperor Guangxu's wife and Cixi's niece, calculating that Longyu would abdicate peacefully if Republican uprisings proved overwhelming. Cixi died on 15 November 1908. Three years later, Empress Longyu signed the Decree of Abdication on 12 February 1912, ending more than two thousand years of absolute monarchy. Chang concludes that Cixi brought medieval China into the modern age through dramatic yet remarkably bloodless reforms.