Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908) is the most important woman in Chinese history. She ruled China for decades and brought a medieval empire into the modern age.

At the age of sixteen, in a nationwide selection for royal consorts, Cixi was chosen as one of the Emperor’s numerous concubines and sexual partners. When he died in 1861, their five-year-old son succeeded to the throne. Cixi at once launched a palace coup against the regents appointed by her husband and made herself the real ruler of China – behind the throne, literally, with a silk screen separating her from her officials who were all male.

In this groundbreaking biography, Jung Chang vividly describes how Cixi fought against monumental obstacles to change China. Under her the ancient country attained virtually all the attributes of a modern state: industries, railways, electricity, telegraph, and an army and navy with up-to-date weaponry. It was she who abolished gruesome punishments like ‘death by a thousand cuts’ and put an end to foot-binding. She inaugurated women’s liberation, and embarked on the path to introduce parliamentary elections to China. Jung Chang comprehensively overturns the conventional view of Cixi as a diehard conservative and cruel despot.

Cixi reigned during extraordinary times and had to deal with a host of major national crises: the Taiping and Boxer Rebellions, wars with France and Japan – and the invasion by eight allied powers including Britain, Germany, Russia and the United States. Jung Chang not only records the Empress Dowager’s conduct of domestic and foreign affairs, but also takes the reader into the depths of her splendid Summer Palace and the harem of Beijing’s Forbidden City, where she lived surrounded by eunuchs – with one of whom she fell in love, with tragic consequences. The world Jung Chang describes here, in fascinating detail, seems almost unbelievable in its extraordinary mixture of the very old and the very new.

Based on newly available, mostly Chinese, historical documents such as court records, official and private correspondence, diaries and eye-witness accounts, this biography will revolutionise historical thinking about a crucial period in China’s – and the world’s – history. Packed with drama, fast-paced and gripping, it is both a panoramic depiction of the birth of modern China and an intimate portrait of a woman: as the concubine to a monarch, as the absolute ruler of a third of the world’s population, and as a unique stateswoman.

About the Author

Jung Chang is the bestselling author of
Wild Swans
(1991, which the
Asian Wall Street Journal
called the most read book about China), and
Mao: The Unknown Story
(2005, with Jon Halliday), which was described by
Time
magazine as ‘an atom bomb of a book’. Her books have been translated into more than 40 languages and sold more than 15 million copies outside mainland China where they are both banned. She was born in China in 1952, and came to Britain in 1978. She lives in London.

Also by Jung Chang

WILD SWANS: THREE DAUGHTERS OF CHINA

MAO: THE UNKNOWN STORY

(with Jon Halliday)

List of Illustrations

Cixi dressed as Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy.
Old Beijing Streets.
A caravan of camels passing in front of a Beijing city gate.
Cixi carried by eunuchs.
Prince Chun, who was married to Cixi’s sister.
Prince Gong, Cixi’s right-hand man.
Viceroy Zhang Zhidong.
Li Hongzhang (Earl Li) with Lord Salisbury and Lord Curzon.
General Yuan Shikai, later first President of the Republic of China.
Junglu entertaining Western visitors.
Anson Burlingame heads the first Chinese delegation to the West.
Charles ‘Chinese’ Gordon.
Sarah Conger with Cixi and other ladies of the American Legation.
Sir Robert Hart with his Western band of Chinese musicians.
Painting by Cixi.
Panel showing Cixi’s calligraphy.
Painting and calligraphy by Emperor Xianfeng.
Cixi playing Go with a eunuch.
Airbrushed photograph of Cixi.
Portrait of Emperor Xianfeng.
‘Lootie’, a Pekinese given to Queen Victoria.
Emperor Tongzhi as a child, playing with his half-sister.
Portrait of Emperor Guangxu.
Portrait of Empress Zhen.
The harem at the rear of the Forbidden City.
The front and main part of the Forbidden City on the occasion of Emperor Guangxu’s wedding.
The audience room in the Forbidden City.
The Summer Palace.
Portrait of Cixi by Katharine Carl.
Katharine Carl in Chinese costume.
Cixi in the snow with Louisa Pierson, Der Ling and Rongling.
Yu Keng, Louisa Pierson and family with Prince Zaizhen in Paris.
Rongling, ‘the First Lady of modern dancing in China’.
Hsingling dressed as Napoleon.
A Chinese courtesan.
Chinese children sent to America for education.
Pearl, Emperor Guangxu’s favourite concubine.
Grand Tutor Weng.
Cixi in a temple with Empress Longyu.
Sir Yinhuan Chang.
Kang Youwei.
Liang Qichao.
Japanese banknote showing Itō Hirobumi.
The Boxers in 1900.
Allied forces entering the Forbidden City.
Cixi waving to a foreign photographer.
Postcard of the imperial locomotive.
Girls with bound feet.
Convicts in cangues.
Cixi putting a flower in her hair.
Cixi smiling.
Cixi on a barge on the lake of the Sea Palace.
On a barge in opera costume.
Court ladies at the American Legation.
Sarah Conger’s courtyard.
Cixi in the snow with eunuchs and Der Ling.
Regent Zaifeng with the child Emperor Puyi.
Sun Yat-sen with soldiers.
Cixi’s funeral parade.
The Eastern Mausoleums of the Qing monarchs where Cixi was buried.

About the Sources

This book is based on historical documents, chiefly Chinese. They include imperial decrees, court records, official communications, personal correspondence, diaries and eye-witness accounts. Most of them have only come to light since the death of Mao in 1976, when historians were able to resume working on the archives. Thanks to their dedicated efforts, huge numbers of files have been sorted, studied, published, some even digitalised. Earlier publications of archive materials and scholarly works have been reissued. Thus I have had the good fortune to be able to utilise a colossal documentary pool, as well as consulting the First Historical Archives of China, the main keeper of the records to do with Empress Dowager Cixi, which holds twelve million documents. The vast majority of the sources cited have never been seen or used outside the Chinese-speaking world.

The Empress Dowager’s Western contemporaries left valuable diaries, letters and memoirs. Queen Victoria’s diary, Hansard and the copious international diplomatic exchanges are all rich mines of information. The Archives of the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, in Washington DC, is the only place that possesses the original negatives of the photographs of Cixi.

Author’s Note

The ‘tael’ was the currency of China at the time. One tael weighed about 38 grams and was valued at roughly a third of a pound sterling (£1 = Tls. 3).

Chinese (and Japanese) personal names are given surname first, except for those who chose to render their names differently.

The
pinyin
system is used where transliteration is needed. Thus there are non-
pinyin
Chinese names, e.g. Canton, Tsinghua (University).

The dates and ages of people are given according to the Western system (which is used in China today). The exceptions are stated.

In the Bibliography, the publication dates are of the editions which this author consulted. Many very old books may therefore give the appearance of having been published quite recently.

To Jon

Empress Dowager Cixi

The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

Jung Chang

PART ONE
The Imperial Concubine in Stormy Times (1835–1861)

1 Concubine to an Emperor (1835–56)

IN SPRING 1852,
in one of the periodic nationwide selections for imperial consorts, a sixteen-year-old girl caught the eye of the emperor and was chosen as a concubine. A Chinese emperor was entitled to one empress and as many concubines as he pleased. In the court registry she was entered simply as ‘
the woman of the Nala family’, with no name of her own. Female names were deemed too insignificant to be recorded. In fewer than ten years, however, this girl, whose name may have been lost for ever,
^fn1had fought her way to become the ruler of China, and for decades – until her death in 1908 – would hold in her hands the fate of nearly one-third of the world’s population. She was the Empress Dowager Cixi (also spelt Tzu Hsi). This was her honorific name and means ‘kindly and joyous’.

She came from one of the oldest and most illustrious Manchu families. The Manchus were a people who originally lived in Manchuria, beyond the Great Wall to the northeast. In 1644, the Ming dynasty in China was overthrown by a peasant rebellion, and the last Ming emperor hanged himself from a tree in the back garden of his palace. The Manchus seized the opportunity to smash across the Great Wall. They defeated the peasant rebels, occupied the whole of China and set up a new dynasty called the Great Qing – ‘Great Purity’. Taking over the Ming capital, Beijing, as their own, the victorious Manchus went on to build an empire three times the size of the Ming empire, at its peak occupying a territory of 13 million square kilometres – compared to 9.6 million today.

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