Empress Dowager Cixi
The teenage concubine who ruled China from behind the throne for nearly half a century, presiding over the Qing dynasty's terminal decline.
She entered the Forbidden City around 1852 as a low-ranking concubine, one of dozens, and for almost the next half century she ran China from behind a silk screen. Cixi's leverage was biological: in 1856 she bore the Xianfeng Emperor his only surviving son. When Xianfeng died in 1861, that boy became the Tongzhi Emperor, and his mother was suddenly indispensable. Within weeks she had joined a coup that arrested the eight regents her husband had appointed, forced three of them to die, and made herself co-regent. She was twenty-five.
Ruling from behind the throne
Custom barred a woman from sitting on the Dragon Throne, so Cixi governed from behind it, literally, seated behind a screen while male officials addressed the child emperor in front. When the Tongzhi Emperor died childless in 1875, she broke the rules of succession to install her three-year-old nephew as the Guangxu Emperor, buying herself another long regency. Her grip survived every attempt to pry it loose. In 1898, when the adult Guangxu backed a sweeping reform program known as the Hundred Days, Cixi and her allies seized him, placed him under palace arrest on an island in the middle of a lake, and canceled his edicts.
The ledger historians still argue over
For most of the twentieth century, Cixi was cast as the villain of China's decline: a corrupt, superstitious reactionary who strangled reform and, in the traditional charge, diverted funds meant for the modern Beiyang navy into rebuilding the Summer Palace, complete with a two-story marble pleasure boat that could never float. In 1900 she threw imperial weight behind the Boxers, anti-foreign militants who besieged the foreign legations in Beijing; an eight-nation army crushed them and sacked the capital, and she fled disguised as a peasant. Yet revisionist historians, most prominently Jung Chang, argue she was a pragmatist trapped in an impossible position, who after 1901 authorized the very reforms she had once blocked: abolishing the ancient civil-service examinations, building railways and schools, even drafting a constitution. Both portraits are of the same woman.
One day apart
The end was almost theatrical. On 14 November 1908 the Guangxu Emperor died at thirty-seven; forensic tests published in 2008 found lethal levels of arsenic in his remains, strong evidence he was poisoned. Cixi died the very next day, having already chosen the successor: her great-nephew Puyi, a toddler of two. She had spent forty-seven years making sure that whoever sat on the throne, she stood behind it, and her last act of control was to pick a child who could not rule at all. Within three years the dynasty she had guarded was gone, and China had no emperor for the first time in two thousand years.