The Manchu Junior Concubine Who Became the Effective Ruler of China for 47 Years and Died the Day After Her Adopted Nephew the Emperor

Yehenara (later given the imperial-consort name Cixi, 1835–1908) was born to a minor Manchu civil-service family in Beijing. She entered the Forbidden City in 1851 at age 16 as a fifth-rank concubine of the Xianfeng Emperor — the lowest of the eight ranks of imperial concubines, with no expectation of personal contact with the emperor and no political role.

In 1856 she bore the emperor’s only surviving son. The birth elevated her to second-rank consort. By 1860, when the Anglo-French expedition burned the Old Summer Palace during the Second Opium War and the Xianfeng Emperor fled Beijing for the Manchurian hunting palace at Rehe, Cixi was involved in the emperor’s political correspondence — the surviving documents indicate that she had been reading state papers aloud to him during his progressively failing health and that she had been advising him on responses.

The Xianfeng Emperor died at Rehe on 22 August 1861, aged 30. The crown prince — Cixi’s 5-year-old son the Tongzhi Emperor — became nominal emperor under a regency. The Xianfeng will had named eight regents to govern during the minority.

The Xinyou coup

Cixi and the senior empress Ci’an (the Xianfeng’s principal wife, who had borne no surviving children) — together with the late emperor’s younger brother Prince Gong — organised a coup against the eight regents within ten weeks. The regents were intercepted on the road from Rehe to Beijing on 2 November 1861, arrested, and forced to commit suicide.

From November 1861 to her death 47 years later, Cixi was the effective ruler of China. The titular emperor was successively her son, then her adopted nephew, then her two-year-old great-nephew. The political authority was hers.

What she did with it

The Cixi regency presided over a Qing dynasty in structural decline. The 1850-1864 Taiping Rebellion had killed approximately 20 million people; the 1856-1873 Panthay and Dungan rebellions had killed several million more; the 1860 Anglo-French expedition had demonstrated the military superiority of European industrial technology over the Qing armed forces. The regency’s senior officials — Zeng Guofan, Li Hongzhang, Zuo Zongtang — undertook the Self-Strengthening Movement of 1861-1895, an attempt to selectively adopt European military and industrial technology while preserving the Confucian political-administrative structure.

The Self-Strengthening Movement produced approximately 20 modern arsenals, several shipyards, a small but technically modern Beiyang Fleet, and a partial railway system. The system’s limitations were exposed by the 1894-1895 Sino-Japanese War — Japan’s more thorough Meiji-era modernisation produced a quick Japanese victory against the partially-modernised Qing forces, with the loss of Taiwan and the entire Korean tributary zone.

The post-1895 reform pressure produced the Hundred Days’ Reform of 1898 — a programme of Westernising reforms ordered by Cixi’s adopted nephew the Guangxu Emperor without her advance approval. The reforms were substantial: a new constitution, parliamentary government, modern Western-style education, abolition of the imperial examination system. Cixi opposed the speed of the reforms (not necessarily their substance) and reversed them on 21 September 1898 in a coup that put the Guangxu Emperor under house arrest. Substantially several of the senior reform leaders were executed. Substantially several others escaped to Japan and continued exile-based reform politics until the 1911 Revolution.

The Guangxu Emperor remained under house arrest at the Ying-t’ai pavilion in the Forbidden City for the next ten years.

The Boxer

Cixi’s 1900 decision to support the Boxer Rebellion — see the separate article — produced the Eight-Nation Alliance invasion of Beijing, the occupation of the Forbidden City, and indemnity payments that crippled the Qing finances. Cixi fled the capital and returned in early 1902.

The post-Boxer Cixi restarted the Self-Strengthening reform programme on the Hundred Days’ Reform model that she had suppressed in 1898. The reforms were substantial: abolition of the imperial examination system in 1905; preparation of a constitutional government framework; reorganisation of the army on Japanese-trained European-style models. The 1908 draft of a Qing constitution would have produced a parliamentary monarchy.

14-15 November 1908

The Guangxu Emperor died at the Ying-t’ai pavilion at approximately 6 p.m. on 14 November 1908. He was 37. The official cause of death was natural illness.

The 2008 chemical analysis of preserved hair samples from the Guangxu Emperor’s mausoleum — conducted by the China State Administration of Cultural Heritage — identified arsenic concentrations approximately 2,000 times normal baseline. The Guangxu Emperor had been poisoned with arsenic.

The probable source of the arsenic was the Empress Dowager Cixi. The timing of the poisoning — within hours of her own death — suggests that she had ordered the Emperor’s elimination on the discovery that her own death was imminent and that the Emperor would regain political authority on her demise.

Cixi died at the Forbidden City at approximately 5 p.m. on 15 November 1908, 23 hours after her nephew. She was 72.