Empress Dowager Cixi

In the autumn of 1860, as Anglo-French forces advanced on Beijing during the closing stages of the Second Opium War, the court of the Qing dynasty fled in panic toward the hunting forests of Rehe Province. Among the imperial retinue was a twenty-four-year-old Manchu noblewoman of the Yehe Nara clan, known then as Noble Consort Yi. Behind them, the British and French armies plundered and burned the Old Summer Palace, reducing the legendary gardens of the emperors to ash. In exile at the Chengde Mountain Resort, her husband, the Xianfeng Emperor, fell into a deep depression, seeking escape in alcohol and drugs as his health rapidly deteriorated. He died the following summer, leaving a fractured empire and a five-year-old heir, Zaichun. Before his death, the emperor had appointed eight of his most prestigious ministers to govern as a regency council, hoping to shut out the women of the palace. They had drastically underestimated the young mother of the new emperor. Armed with a rare ability among Manchu court women—she could read and write Chinese, having spent years assisting her ailing husband with state documents—she was already a seasoned political strategist.

The transformation of this young concubine into Empress Dowager Cixi, the de facto ruler who would steer China for nearly half a century, began with a swift, calculated stroke of treason. Returning to Beijing ahead of the main funeral procession in the autumn of 1861, Cixi orchestrated the Xinyou Coup. She allied herself with Empress Dowager Ci’an, the late emperor’s principal widow, and two of her late husband's ambitious brothers, Princes Gong and Chun. Together, they accused the eight designated regents of incompetent diplomacy during the foreign invasion. Cixi moved with surgical precision. Rather than invoking the traditional, bloody purge of entire family lines, she chose a path of calculated restraint to signal her moral authority. She ordered the leader of the regents, Sushun, to be beheaded, while allowing two others to hang themselves with strips of white silk. Having swept the board, Cixi shattered centuries of Qing patriarchal tradition. At the age of twenty-six, she took her place in the Hall of Mental Cultivation, seated physically behind a yellow silk screen, "ruling from behind the curtains" while her young son sat on the Dragon Throne as the Tongzhi Emperor.

To secure her grip on power, Cixi established a delicate bureaucratic choreography. State documents were forwarded to the two empresses dowager, referred to Prince Gong and the Grand Council for debate, and then returned to the women behind the curtain for final approval. Though she ruled alongside the quieter Ci’an, Cixi was the driving political force. She stabilized a dynasty on the brink of collapse by overseeing the Tongzhi Restoration, an era that sought to revitalize the empire through a dual strategy of conservative Confucian revivalism and selective, defensive modernization. Cixi rejected Western political philosophy and institutional structures, yet she pragmatically supported the adoption of Western technology, military machinery, and science. Under her stewardship, the Qing court established the Beiyang Army, sponsored modern factories, and founded what would eventually become Peking University.