Empress Dowager Cixi

Empress Dowager Cixi (November 29, 1835 – November 15, 1908), of the Manchu Yehe Nara clan, is a Chinese empress dowager and regent who effectively controls the Chinese government in the late Qing dynasty for forty-seven years, from 1861 until her death in 1908.

Selected as a concubine of the Xianfeng Emperor in her adolescence, she gives birth to a son, Zaichun, in 1856.

After the Xianfeng Emperor's death in 1861, the young boy becomes the Tongzhi Emperor, and she becomes the Empress Dowager.

Cixi ousts a group of regents appointed by the late emperor and assumed regency, which she shares with Empress Dowager Ci'an.

Cixi then consolidates control over the dynasty when she installs her nephew as the Guangxu Emperor at the death of the Tongzhi Emperor in 1875, contrary to the traditional rules of succession of the Qing dynasty that had ruled China since 1644.\

Cixi supervises the Tongzhi Restoration, a series of moderate reforms that helps the regime survive until 1911.

Although Cixi refuses to adopt Western models of government, she supports technological and military reforms and the Self-Strengthening Movement.

She supports the principles of the Hundred Days' Reforms of 1898, but fears that sudden implementation, without bureaucratic support, will be disruptive and that the Japanese and other foreign powers will take advantage of any weakness.

She places the Guangxu Emperor, who she thinks had tried to assassinate her, under virtual house arrest for supporting radical reformers, publicly executing the main reformers.

After the Boxer Uprising leads to invasion by Allied armies, Cixi initially backs the Boxer groups and declares war on the invaders.

The ensuing defeat is a stunning humiliation.

When Cixi returns to Beijing from Xi'an, where she had taken the emperor, she becomes friendly to foreigners in the capital and begins to implement fiscal and institutional reforms aimed to turn China into a constitutional monarchy.

The death of both Cixi and the Guangxu Emperor in 1908 leaves the court in hands of Manchu conservatives, a child, Puyi, on the throne, and a restless, deeply divided society.

Historians both in China and abroad have debated her legacy.

Conventionally denounced as a ruthless despot whose reactionary policies—although successfully self-serving in prolonging the ailing Qing dynasty—lead to its humiliation and utter downfall in the Wuchang uprising, revisionists suggest that Nationalist and Communist revolutionaries scapegoated her for deep-rooted problems beyond salvage, and lauded her maintenance of political order as well as numerous effective, if belated reforms—including the abolition of slavery, ancient torturous punishments and the ancient examination system in her ailing years, the latter supplanted by institutions including the new Beijing University.

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