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Person1835 – 1908

Empress Dowager Cixi

Also called: Tz’u-hsi

Consort of the Xianfeng Emperor and mother of the Tongzhi Emperor who held real power in Qing China for nearly half a century and crushed the 1898 reforms

A consort of the Xianfeng Emperor and mother of the Tongzhi Emperor, she staged a coup when Xianfeng died in 1861 and began to rule from behind the screen with the Empress Dowager Ci’an. When Tongzhi died young she installed her nephew as the Guangxu Emperor and kept real power. She tolerated the Self-Strengthening Movement but, when the 1898 reforms threatened her position, confined the emperor in a coup. In 1900 she backed the Boxers and declared war on the powers, fled to Xi’an, and on her return launched the New Policies.

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2 related events

  1. 1
    1898Hundred Days’ Reform and the Coup of 1898related figure

    Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao persuaded the Guangxu Emperor to launch reforms toward a constitutional monarchy on the Meiji model, but Empress Dowager Cixi’s coup ended them after about a hundred days.

  2. 2
    1899 – 1901Boxer Rebellion and Boxer Protocolrelated figure

    Under the slogan "Support the Qing, destroy the foreigners", the Boxers attacked churches and railways and besieged the foreign legations in Beijing. An eight-nation alliance occupied Beijing, and by the Boxer Protocol China paid a vast indemnity and accepted foreign troops on its soil.

People who appear alongside

  • Kang Youwei1858 – 1927

    Qing reformer who led the Hundred Days’ Reform, seeking a constitutional monarchy on the model of Meiji Japan

  • Liang Qichao1873 – 1929

    Disciple of Kang Youwei in the Hundred Days’ Reform who, after the coup, spread new ideas from exile in Japan through his journals

  • Guangxu Emperor1871 – 1908

    Eleventh Qing emperor (r. 1875–1908) who backed Kang Youwei’s reforms but was confined after the coup of 1898

  • Li Hongzhang1823 – 1901

    Qing viceroy who steered policy toward Korea after 1882 and signed the Tianjin Convention and the Treaty of Shimonoseki with Itō Hirobumi

Themes this person appears in

  • The Opening of East Asia1839 – 1901

    From the Opium War to the Boxer Protocol — sixty years in which China, Japan and Korea, forced open by Western gunboats, each tried to reform and went separate ways