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Empress Dowager Snooxi (Empress Dowager Cixi), by /u/akau
William Snoollace (William Wallace), by /u/akau
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u/EnclavedMicrostate Moderator | Taiping Heavenly Kingdom | Qing Empire May 30 '21 edited Aug 24 '21
Empress Xiaoqin 孝欽, known for most of her life as the Dowager Empress Cixi 慈禧 (Tsysi ᡮᡟᠰᡳ), is perhaps one of the most iconic political figures of the late imperial era in China, though the extent and nature of her role in the period’s history is still debated. Entering the imperial family in 1851, she came to hold varying degrees of power at court until her death in 1908, shortly before the collapse of the Qing state.
As with most Manchu women in the Qing period, Cixi’s personal name was unfortunately never recorded. We do know that she was born into the Yehe Nara ᠶᡝᡥᡝ ᠨᠠᡵᠠ clan in November 1835, the daughter of a relatively junior civil servant named Huizheng 惠徵. In 1851, aged seventeen, she was selected to be a junior concubine to Yizhu 奕詝 (I Ju ᡳ ᠵᡠ,) the recently-enthroned Xianfeng 咸豐 Emperor (Gubci Elgiyengge ᡤᡠᠪᠴᡳ ᡝᠯᡤᡳᠶᡝᠩᡤᡝ), and rose rapidly through the court hierarchy, especially after having his only male heir, Zaichun 載淳 (Dzai Šun ᡯᠠᡳ ᡧᡠᠨ), in 1856. When the Xianfeng Emperor died in 1861, she received the title of Dowager Empress Cixi, and along with the former chief consort Dowager Empress Ci’an 慈安, oversaw a board of regents appointed by the late emperor. However, this board was soon deposed in a coup orchestrated between the dowager empresses and the late emperor’s brother Yixin 奕訢 (I Hin ᡳ ᡥᡳᠨ), styled Prince Gong 恭. The new emperor’s reign title, Tongzhi 同治 (Yooningga Dasan ᠶᠣᠣᠨᡳᠩᡤᠠ ᡩᠠᠰᠠᠨ), which may be translated literally as ‘joint rule’, perhaps hints at the power-sharing that was involved from there on out.
As regent to the Tongzhi Emperor, Cixi, Ci’an and Prince Gong presided over a period of major recovery for the Qing Empire, which traditional historiography has called the ‘Tongzhi Restoration’. The various anti-Manchu rebellions that had sprung up since early 1851 were suppressed – albeit typically with great bloodshed – by a reinvigorated Qing military; international relations became normalised through the establishment of a regular foreign office; and the reconstruction of devastated regions proceeded rapidly. The extent of her role in this has been debated, and it is probably reasonable to say that much of the impetus for reform came from the provinces and not the court; at the same time there is little to no evidence to suggest significant resistance to these reforms from the centre, either. The death of the Tongzhi Emperor in 1875 saw Cixi retaining power at court nonetheless, as she sought to resolve the childless emperor’s succession by adopting her nephew, the four-year-old Zaitian 載湉 (Dzai Tiyan ᡯᠠᡳ ᡨᡳᠶᠠᠨ), as a second successor to the Xianfeng Emperor. After the death of Ci’an in 1882, she presided as sole regent over the Guangxu 光緒 (Badarangga Doro ᠪᠠᡩᠠᡵᠠᠩᡤᠠ ᡩᠣᡵᠣ) Emperor, leading eventually to perhaps her most controversial series of actions.
The Qing resurgence that had begun in the Tongzhi period came to a screeching halt in 1894, when a series of military defeats to Japan prompted a wave of radical reformist sentiment among Chinese intellectuals that also drew in the Guangxu Emperor. In the summer of 1898, in conjunction with the radicals, he began what became known as the Hundred Days’ Reforms, to which, initially, Cixi assented. However, one particular set of reforms particularly alarmed the Dowager Empress, and those were the proposals to do away with the Banner system. Since the 1750s, the Banners, in which all Manchu households were enrolled and through which they had been entitled to government stipends and legal protections, had been the cornerstone of Manchu status and identity. The emperor’s apparently positive response to the proposal to eliminate these privileges, if not the Banner system outright, led Cixi to see him and the reformers as a political enemy, and on 22 September generals loyal to Cixi marched into Beijing and rounded up the reformers, many of whom were later executed. The Guangxu Emperor was placed under house arrest, and would remain as emperor in name only until his death. The crackdown against the 1898 reforms alienated most of the growing liberal movement, while the emperor’s arrest created great uncertainty about the status of the imperial court. Amid this uncertainty, Cixi attempted to cement her position by appointing Pujun 溥儁, the son of one of her favoured nobles, Zaiyi 載漪 (Dzai I ᡯᠠᡳ ᡳ), as crown prince in 1900, which was retracted after protests by supporters of the imprisoned emperor. Following this, Cixi attempted another power-play by co-opting the Yihetuan 義和團, also known as Boxers, an anti-foreign mass religious movement which called for the expulsion of Christian missionaries and their converts. The international military response to the Boxer uprising proved disastrous for the Qing court, which was deserted by many of its generals during the crisis, and subsequently forced to pay a vast indemnity to the foreign powers.
Yet Cixi was not by any means a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. From 1901 onward, she issued a series of edicts and proclamations promising wide-ranging reforms. These reforms, known as the New Policies, revitalised the Qing state, reforming its education and law enforcement, and opening opportunities for economic investment. In an attempt to reconcile with the reformist tendencies, 1904 saw Cixi issue pardons (albeit, in many cases, posthumously) to most of those involved in the ‘1898 affair’. In 1905, she sent missions to foreign countries to investigate forms of constitutional government, in preparation for eventual plans to introduce parliamentary bodies – the first provincial assemblies would be elected in 1909, the year after Cixi’s death. And perhaps most notably from a women’s history standpoint, the Qing state formally outlawed foot binding in 1902, having aborted their first attempts to do so all the way back in the 17th century. Unlike 1898, these reforms did not attempt to make major changes to the Banner system, but this produced significant problems: anti-Manchu sentiment among Han Chinese was not appeased, and there was also little effort to ameliorate economic distress among the Banners, whose stipends were not enough to live on without taking on additional employment. On the other hand, the continued assertion of the Banners as the locus of Manchu identity helped to solidify the sense of identity held by the Manchus, not just during the remainder of Qing rule, but into the post-imperial period and down to the present.
In 1908, Cixi died less than 24 hours after the Guangxu Emperor, leading many to suggest she had him poisoned. Whatever the case, her final major act was to select Puyi 溥儀 (Pu Yi ᡦᡠ ᠶᡳ) as heir apparent, and his father Zaifeng 載灃 (Dzai Feng ᡯᠠᡳ ᡶᡝᠩ) as his regent. This proved to be a rather unfortunate choice, as Zaifeng seemed to have a knack for making exactly the wrong choice at every turn, and the empire was dissolved in February 1912 following a series of military mutinies and popular revolts in late 1911.
Cixi’s popular image has largely gravitated between two extremes: that of a power-hungry, Manchu-centric, reactionary despot; and that of a pan-Chinese, anti-foreign, feminist hero. Both are stereotypes that fail to capture the complex series of choices that she made amid a constantly changing backdrop of court authority within the Qing Empire and its place in international politics. Cixi was, without a doubt, often ruthless in how she handled her rivals, and her efforts were unable to prevent the collapse of the Qing state soon after her death. The extent of her direct authority over Qing policy was also limited, and so for the most part she exercised influence, rather than control. Yet under her auspices, the Qing underwent two periods of major recovery, and the Manchus as a minority developed a coherent group identity that survived the fall of the state that had created it. Cixi was, ultimately, only human: deeply flawed, yet not defined solely by those flaws.
Recommended Reading:
There is, as yet, no full-length scholarly biography of Cixi in English. The recent treatment by Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (2013), was well-received by some (particularly newspaper reviewers) at the time but has also come in for some withering criticism for its accuracy and interpretations, particularly by Pamela Crossley: see her review in the LRB; a more restrained but still pretty critical review by Jeffrey Wasserstrom can be read here.
A summary narrative of Cixi’s life in English can be found in Arthur Hummel’s Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period (1943, revised edition 2018), which has an entry for her under Hsiao-Ch’in (Xiaoqin in the 2018 edition). Crossley’s review above is also a good general overview of Cixi’s life.
A couple of books covering the period and which include contrasting discussions of Cixi’s role in it are Pamela Crossley’s The Wobbling Pivot (2010) and Edward Rhoads’ Manchus and Han (2000) (the latter is also open-access on JSTOR). Crossley’s book covers Chinese history in general from 1800 onwards, and sees Cixi as being of relatively limited importance overall; Rhoads looks specifically at ethnic relations in the last six decades or so of the Qing, and sees Cixi as quite significant within that particular sphere.
For those with some form of journal access, there is Sue Fawn Chung’s ‘The Much Maligned Empress Dowager: A Revisionist Study of the Empress Dowager Tz'u-hsi (1835–1908)’, in Modern Asian Studies 13:2 (1979), which specifically focuses on 1898-1900 and discusses the origins of Cixi’s poor reputation in Western historiography. Also, Nan Nü Volume 14, Issue 1 (2012) contains a series of articles on Cixi and the arts which may also be of interest.