Empress Dowager Cixi: the Dragon Lady and the Twilight of Imperial China

Introduction

For nearly five decades, the fate of China's four hundred million people rested in the hands of a woman who was never supposed to rule. Empress Dowager Cixi — born Yehe Nara Xingzhen on November 29, 1835 — entered the Forbidden City as a teenage concubine of modest rank, yet she outlasted emperors, humiliated reformers, survived invasion by eight foreign powers, and died on November 15, 1908, after designating one final emperor to succeed her. She had governed, in one capacity or another, since 1861. No other figure in the long twilight of the Qing dynasty left so deep and so contested a mark upon China's passage from imperial civilization to the modern world.

The story of Cixi is inseparable from the story of China's nineteenth-century crisis. The Qing dynasty, founded by Manchu conquerors in 1644, had reached its zenith under the Qianlong Emperor and then entered a prolonged decline marked by population pressure, fiscal exhaustion, administrative corruption, natural catastrophe, and the relentless commercial and military pressure of Western powers. By the time Cixi's future husband, the Xianfeng Emperor, ascended the throne in 1850, China faced the most serious internal rebellion in its history — the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom — while simultaneously confronting British and French gunboats, Russian territorial expansion in the north, and the humiliations imposed by the Treaty of Nanking following the First Opium War of 1839 to 1842. Into this compound crisis was born the woman who would attempt, for five decades, to hold together a civilization that the forces of modernity were determined to shatter.

Cixi's reputation has oscillated wildly across time and geography. Western observers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drawing on sensational accounts from foreign missionaries and journalists, depicted her as an oriental despot of almost limitless cruelty — the Dragon Lady who murdered rivals, imprisoned emperors, and unleashed the Boxers upon civilization. Chinese nationalist historiography of the Republican and Maoist eras condemned her as the chief architect of national humiliation, a woman so addicted to power and luxury that she squandered naval funds on a marble boat while Japan built a modern fleet. More recent scholarship, drawing on newly available archival materials and freed from both orientalist condescension and revolutionary polemic, has produced a considerably more complex portrait: a politically astute survivor who operated within severe structural constraints, who implemented reforms when she judged them necessary, and whose failures were in significant measure failures of the entire imperial system rather than of any individual will.

This article examines Cixi's life in full: her origins in the Manchu Yehe Nara clan, her ascent from minor concubine to imperial consort, the Xinyou Coup of 1861 that first brought her to power, the decades of regency over successive emperors, her complex relationship with the reform movements of the 1890s, her fateful decision to back the Boxer Uprising in 1900, the punishing Boxer Protocol and the decade of genuine institutional reform that followed, and finally her death — separated by only twenty-two hours from the death of the emperor she had spent a decade imprisoning. The full arc of her life is a study in the terrible demands placed upon those who inherit power within a collapsing order, and in the price paid by an entire civilization when its rulers cannot match the pace of change the world demands.

Origins and Early Life

Cixi was born on November 29, 1835, into the Yehe Nara clan, one of the Manchu clans of the Plain Blue Banner. The Manchu conquerors who founded the Qing dynasty in 1644 had maintained their distinct ethnic and social identity through the banner system — a military-social organization that divided Manchu society into eight color-coded banners and governed both military service and civil status. Being born into a banner family conferred certain privileges and obligations: banner men received stipends from the imperial treasury, and their daughters were eligible for selection as imperial concubines. But the Yehe Nara clan, while noble, was not among the most exalted Manchu lineages, and Cixi's family circumstances were modest rather than grand.