August 8
On August 8, 1899, Empress Dowager Cixi made a decision that would shape the collapse of the Qing dynasty: she suspended the Hundred Days Reform, placed the Guangxu Emperor under house arrest, and effectively resumed control of the Chinese state after a reformist interlude she had quietly watched fail.
She had been running China, in various configurations of power, since 1861.
Cixi was born on November 29, 1835, as a Manchu girl of the Yehe Nara clan. She entered the Forbidden City at sixteen as a low-ranked imperial concubine — one of dozens competing for the attention of the Xianfeng Emperor. She bore the only son the emperor produced. When the emperor died in 1861, her five-year-old son became the Tongzhi Emperor and Cixi, at twenty-five, became de facto co-regent.
For the next forty-seven years, with brief pauses, she ran the empire. She ruled through the self-strengthening movement, through the First Sino-Japanese War, through the Boxer Rebellion, through two emperors' minorities, through two emperors' deaths under circumstances that have never been fully explained.
Western historians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries created a Cixi who was monstrous: vain, corrupt, sexually voracious, responsible for every modernization China failed to achieve. George Morrison of The Times was particularly inventive. The "Dragon Lady" trope — the foreign despot whose exotic cruelty explained Asian backwardness — was applied to her so thoroughly that it became the template for a century of Western representations of Asian women in power.
The scholarship since the 1980s has been more measured. Jung Chang's 2013 biography Empress Dowager Cixi argues for a modernizing reformer who was hemmed in by court conservatism and Western imperialism simultaneously. The truth is probably neither pure vindication nor the Victorian portrait. She was a politician who survived forty-seven years at the center of a declining empire by deploying every form of power available to her. She died one day after the Guangxu Emperor, whom she had placed under house arrest. His death has never been satisfactorily explained.
Cixi governed an empire of four hundred million people for nearly five decades. The Western account of her, constructed largely by British journalists who had never met her and had strong geopolitical reasons to frame Chinese governance as incompetent, shaped how she was understood for a century. The "Dragon Lady" did not come from her actions — it came from a representational tradition that required a particular kind of woman to explain imperial China's resistance to Western interests.
A new forgotten woman, every day. Direct to you.