How Cixi Became the Empress Dowager

Discussing China's Longest Female Ruler with Lauren Schill of the Well Behaved Women Podcast

This is a transcript of the first part of my discussion with Lauren Schill about the Empress Dowager Cixi.

“After three episodes about Japan, we're now returning to China and the Empress Dowager Cixi.

Today I'm joined by Lauren Schill, host of the Well Behaved Women podcast.

I wanted to include more history of Chinese women in this podcast. Since Lauren hosts a show about unique women in history, I'm delighted to welcome Lauren to talk with me about Cixi.

Lauren has already done an episode on the Well Behaved Women podcast about Ching Shih, a Chinese pirate from the early 19th century.

That was before the Opium War, and I haven't covered that early period in this podcast. So, if that interests you, please check out Lauren's podcast.

Our topic today is Empress Dowager Cixi.

I remember learning about her while eating steamed buns in a restaurant in Tianjin. I think that was during my first trip to China.

My host for telling me that the restaurant featured items that she had enjoyed more than 100 years earlier. I think they were delivered to her palace.

Well, the Empress Dowager is quite a figure. While she had a good appetite and enjoyed luxuries, we're talking about her today because she ruled China for decades.

I believe she was China's longest ruling female. Only one woman was emperor in her own right in China. That was Empress Wu Zetian from 690 to 705 of the Common Era during the Second Zhou Dynasty.

Empress Dowager Cixi was never Emperor, but she did wield power. What can you tell us about her?

Lauren: Goodness, so many things.

First, thank you for having me on. I have had so much fun researching about her and learning about this really cool woman. I wanted to start with a quote because it really encompasses everything that we're really going to talk about.

It says: “Too much mystery surrounds the Forbidden City for us to write of its inmates with assured authority. Even when the facts are known, there are two or three versions, each giving a different rendering of what occurred. This vagueness is like the nebulous parts of a Chinese painting. It has a charm that it might be a mistake to dispel. Nor is it certain that the historian could he lift the veil, would discover the truth.”

That's from Daniele Vare. He was an Italian diplomat, and he wrote a 1936 biography of Cixi called The Last Empress.

The things that we're going to talk about tonight, there's many different versions though. If we get a couple of things wrong or at least if I get a couple of things wrong, my apologies in advance. And I know I'm going to mispronounce some of these names, so I will rely on your help with that.

Paul: Just to be sure, I am not Chinese. I try my best to get the names right. I mess them up too. Her name is a bit challenging to pronounce in English it's spelled Cixi, which is not something that English speakers come across too often. I understand it's pronounced Tse-shee.

Lauren: Well, when I was first researching it, one of the websites told me it was Sichi. That was kind of what my brain went with. So, Cixi rolls off the tongue a lot easier.

This awesome lady was born in Beijing to a duke who served in the Manchu military. She was one of three children.

She had a sister named Wanzhen and a brother, Guixiang. At some point her father died, presumably, I want to say from military service, and she lived with her widowed mother until the age of 16 when she and 60 other women participated in a selection of wives for the Xianfeng Emperor.

It was fairly common for older emperors to have multiple wives and even more sexual partners in order to ensure a male heir to the throne. Most of the women were turned away, but Cixi was chosen as a concubine. But she was a lower level concubine for three years at a 6th level called Noble Lady Lin.

In 1854, at age 19, she moved up the ranks to the fifth level. The next year she got pregnant, so that moved her up again. And then when she had a baby boy, she moved up even higher in the ranks until she was right behind the Empress Cian in order of ladies.

She got to that point because she ended up having the only son that Xianfeng Emperor ever had.

Paul: I think the only one who survived. There might have been another one who didn't. Basically, his heir.

Lauren: Yes, I want to say his name is Zaichun. He was the heir to the throne and that made the mom important.

Unlike most of her fellow consorts, she could read and write Chinese. So, when her husband, who was in his late twenties and already started showing signs of dementia and other different ailments, she would read his letters. She would take notes and write instructions according to Xianfeng Emperor's commands, which allowed her to keep up with the goings on in the nation at that point and made her very, very politically educated.

Let's talk about the Opium Wars, how that affected China, what was going on in the country and how did that affect their morale.

Paul: Thanks, Lauren. I really appreciate you introducing the future Dowager Empress and her family. I think that there's something very interesting about the Opium Wars and her family.

You mentioned her father. Her family had served emperors in the Qing Dynasty for generations.

Listeners of this podcast will recall, the Daoguang Emperor had to pay large indemnity to the British following the First Opium War. He was miserly and he was short of funds and he had cut back on state expenses, he cut back on gifts and banquets and his concubines were selling embroidery on the market through eunuchs to make up for cutbacks in their allowances.

He audited state funds and found that 9 million taels of silver were missing. He looked back over the last 44 years to every senior keeper and inspectors of the silver reserve and demanded that any of them from the last 44 years had to contribute to these losses, whether or not they had profited them properly.

Cixi's great grandfather was fined by the Daoguang Emperor as part of this, and he was fined 43,200 taels of silver. He was dead.

So that fell on her grandfather, even though he had never worked for the state coffers. And after three years, he had only been able to come up with 1800 tales. So, he was imprisoned until the rest was paid.

So, it sounds like Britain's debtor presence at the time.

Cixi's father therefore had to raise funds to get his father out of jail. And Cixi did her bit at age eleven by doing sewing jobs. She was the eldest of five children and her father told her about these family problems. He confided in her and she gave practical advice what family items to sell, which to pawn, who to approach for loans. So, then his father was able to raise 60% of what was owed and grandfather was released from prison. Cixi's father praised her and said, “this daughter of mine is really more like a son.” Cixi's father, back in the good graces of the Daoguang Emperor, was appointed as a tax collector in Mongolia. That was around the time that the Daoguang Emperor died.

So, his eldest surviving son became the Xianfeng Emperor and he was 19 years old. And that's who Cixi was concubined to.

So, the First Opium War was really rough financially on the country and it had a direct impact on families like Cixi's and the Emperor had to find a silver to pay off the British one way or another. Now. Later, there was the Second Opium War.

You explained how she became a concubine to the Xianfeng Emperor, who became Emperor at 19 years old. He was selected by his father not only because he was the fourth eldest son and older than the 6th eldest son, but also because the man who became the Xianfeng Emperor was more anti foreigner than his younger brother.

Lauren: He's very nationalist.

Paul: Yeah. Xianfeng Emperor was more nationalist and that may have been the reason why the Second Opium War happened.

His father selected him because he wanted someone who was hostile to the foreigners, who was going to resist them. He thought Prince Gong would be too weak to accommodating to the foreigners.

And an example of how this played out is that, as I've mentioned in episode on the on the Second Opium War and the Treaties and Concession episode, in 1858 there was the Concessions of Tianjin that would have ended the Second Opium War in 1858.

But then the Emperor and his officials backtracked on that. They weren't going to honor it.

The British tried to do some more gunboat diplomacy. Chinese officials then mistreated the British who were landing and put them in prison and abused them and stuck literally crap in their mouths and other things like that.

And then when the British and the French were able to push towards Beijing. Then the Xianfeng Emperor fled Beijing. He fled the Forbidden City with certainly the Empress and certainly Cixi and their son. And they went north to Chengde, to the Imperial Hunting Lodge. And that's where they were at the end of the Second Opium War, when the British and French came into Beijing. And in retaliation for this mistreatment of their representatives, did the despicable act of burning down the Imperial Summer Palace, this UNESCO rated heritage site.

They looted it, they burned it. It was horrific. The Emperor ordered his younger half brother, Prince Gong, to remain in Beijing and negotiate.

Prince Gong ended the war very quickly. He agreed to all of the invaders’ demands, and that included 8 million taels of silver each. And he wasn't insistent that the foreigners had to kowtow to him. He was willing to meet them in person, sign the treaties in person, not be a stickler for formalities. And the Second Opium War ended.

That was Prince Gong. Obviously, the Emperor was much more anti Westerner. He never returned to Beijing, even though the foreigners had left.

There were now ambassadors, representatives of the west and Beijing. And that seems to have been, I'll say, a mental block for him, where he stayed in the Lodge even through winter, even though it hadn't really been lived in for over a winter in a long time.

It wasn't really suitable. He got a cold, he got sick, and he died at age 30,11 months after arriving at the Lodge, and he never left. So, he died in August 1861.

Cixi's son with him was five years old, and he appointed eight men to form a Board of Regents to govern China during his son's childhood. And those were the people who had lost the Opium War.

Lauren: Not only did he bring in those eight Regents, he also brought in Empress Dowager Cian and Cixi into his deathbed. And he gave each of them a steel stamp that symbolized that in order to raise his son together, they needed to work as a team to be able to do all of these things in tandem. Both of these people need to be thought of as important, because both of these people are going to bring up my son. That's going to be the leader.

Paul: That's one way of looking at history. In your intro, you hinted that there's different versions. So, this is one version of history that's out there, that the Emperor had given these two seals to the two ladies of his life and wanted them to have an ongoing role.

Lauren: Well, and there's even debate about whether those seals actually meant anything or whether it was just meant to appease them. Because he knew that she wanted to be someone, and he had already trusted her in other politics. Just a little bit of show to kind of comfort her on his deathbed. Stories differ for sure.

He's got two women and eight men in charge, and there's this cohort of widows and co mothers to this Tongzhi Emperor and then this eight Regents that are made up of his brothers and high-ranking politicians and all of that.

Paul: So, I'm not sure if that's truly how it happened. So, that's one way of looking at it.

Another possible way of looking at it is that he did not expect women to have power. After he left, he appointed eight men as Regents and as a prelude to the coup, Cixi came up with this idea.

It came after the Emperor's death, it came after the Emperor's Will. It only mentioned the eight Regents.

And I think the first step of the coup was her setting the stage by saying that she and the Empress had these two seals and that because there was no vermilion ink, there was no Emperor's ink. There was no sign of the Emperor on any of the edicts. That these seals needed to be used to authenticate to legalize any edicts coming from the Regents.

One of the Dowager Empresses would seal the beginning of the document, and another one would seal the end of the document. And at that point, that's all it was. They weren't changing anything. They weren't having any role whatsoever. They didn't say a peep.

They just affixed these stamps. So, the regents didn't object.

But it laid the stage beautifully, because now any document had to go through the hands of these two women, which was really important when we get to the next stage.

Lauren: So, because these two women, when they got widowed, were elevated in their titles to Co-Empresses Dowager and had become friends over the years. They became known as the East Empress Dowager and the West Empress Dowager. Owing to the areas of the province in which they resided.

They got along. Cixi really knew more about affairs of state, and Cian actually trusted her judgment. To be able to go to court and talk to these people.

Chinese burials had to be timed according to the stars for astrological reasons. And there was some time between Xianfeng's death and his funeral.

During that wait, Cixi wasted no time in allying herself with powerful political players in court. She made friends with all the important people, plus two of the late brothers, including Prince Gong, also Prince Chun, who had political aspirations of their own.

They were the brothers. They wanted to get up there. Cixi focused on gaining the support of all these people, who, for one reason or another, were not actually in the good graces of the eight regents that Xianfeng emperor had appointed.

Cixi suggested to Cian that they could rule as co-empresses. Cian was into it. Cixi had no taste for life in court. She was like, you do that. I don't want to be there. Cixi let her run that world, ensuring that there were even more connections.

Do you know about the eight regents? Do you want to tell a little bit about who they were in the world before I get to the good part?

Paul: The eight regents were grand councillors, senior officials under the previous emperor. A lot of them were Mongolian.

As I mentioned before in this podcast, the Qing dynasty was ruled by ethnic Manchus, which is a minority group from Manchuria area. And there were also Mongols, and it seems as if Manchu and Mongols were tightly allied in the Qing dynasty. You would often see Manchu and Mongolian officials near the top of the empire.

Okay, this will come into play later, because Cixi's son picks the woman he wants to marry, and her family are some of these eight who are about to be removed from office.

Lauren: We will definitely get to that. These eight regents, they weren't really happy with what Cixi was doing, her antics. She was talking a little too much for a widow.

That was actually one of the reasons Cian didn't go to court. She was frustrated with how one of the leaders, Sushun, about how he treated Cixi, and he reminded her in no uncertain terms that she needed to stay out of the big boys playground. Go back to her palace, shut her mouth.

I guess there was a letter that actually came at one point telling her to, quote, listen to politics behind the curtains.

So, when this funeral finally happened, she... I love this.

She struck with fabulous precision. She timed it absolutely perfectly. Sushun was Xianfeng's funeral procession. Like, he helped guide that through these areas to get back to the Forbidden City. And while that slow thing was happening, Cixi and her child emperor scurried over to Beijing and got there before everyone else.

And it gave her and Prince Gong and Prince Chun time to delegitimize all of these regents. Through all of these different types of paperwork, they literally rewrote history, saying it was the fault of these incompetent men that Xianfeng had left Beijing in the first place, which was horrible idea.

They said the regents failed to negotiate with the, quote, barbarians, and obviously, these things weren't what actually happened. That was how they played it.

By the time all of these regents showed up, they were able to strike. Say, “you guys are all traitors, and we need to get rid of you.”

So, the only way to deal with all this treachery was death.

As a kindness, they only executed three of their eight regents.

But at that time, treachery was one of the worst kinds of crime. So, it earned a punishment called lingchi, which translates to slow slicing, or literally death by a thousand cuts. Humiliating, painful death. The public humiliation of it all. You're tied to this post in a public area. You're sliced slowly and repeatedly, which means that you're going to die incredibly slowly and painfully.

And then, according to Confucian principles of filial piety, cutting the body was a sin. And so, after death, one couldn't be made whole again by all of these thousand cuts.

She didn't want that, though, Cixi thought that she would give them a kinder death. Sushun just got beheaded. They just chopped his head off, and then we're done with it. But the other two were given white silk scarves with which to hang themselves.

What's going on with white silk scarves?

Paul: I find this interesting. The short answer is, by giving them white silk scarves, she communicated that she wanted them to hang themselves. They were given the option of committing honorable suicide rather than being taken out for public execution in a dishonorable way.

I think it's interesting because silk scarves had also been used by women in Chinese history, wives, concubines and so on, to commit suicide after their husbands had died.

Lauren: Okay

Paul: There are Concubines in history who had been given this silk scarf in order to follow their husband to the grave after their husband died.

I think it's interesting that she chose that rather than giving them, say, poison to take.

But I guess the risk with giving someone poison is maybe they could give it to someone who would put it in her food, and then she would be the one to take poison.

So, I'm not saying that there was that little bit of comeback by using a silk scarf rather than poison, but I think the idea was to give them the choice to take their own life rather than to be beheaded.

And then, of course, the other five regents, they were just given lesser punishments. They were simply dismissed. One was sent to the frontier.

I did want to add just a little bit more about the coup, because I think there's an element that she brought in that was very clever.

She deliberately confronted Sushun with the baby emperor in her arms. So, when he got mad at her and told her to “stay in your lane, you stay in your place”, the baby started crying.

She was able to then go to Prince Gong and Prince Chun and say that the regents had disrespected the emperor, made him cry. And that was quite a crime.

Emperors were revered in China. You had to kowtow. You couldn't sit in their presence, all sorts of formalities. So, to yell at the Emperor to make them cry. That was something that she used to her advantage, but ultimately that was serious.

But it wasn't quite enough for treason when there was actually a bit of a hearing about this. In order to get Sushun and the others really found guilty of treason, they needed some evidence, and there wasn't any.

Cixi said, well, you can count on me and the Empress for the evidence. We say that they committed treason. And that was all it took, their word that finished off the coup.

Lauren: Just to briefly go back to the white silk scarves, I wonder if there was an element of emasculating them a little bit further, because especially if the silk scarf is something that concubines use, men don't use that. And good people don't have to hang themselves. Performative punishment.

Paul: Gender roles get into everything about this.

Lauren: She was very shrewd, very aware. Having the baby Emperor in her arms. She knew how to make sure every situation went exactly how she wanted it to go, which I think honestly is pretty cool. I think that's pretty awesome.

Paul: And the British saw what happened and saw that this coup d’état had happened without a shot being fired and without a word of protest from anyone outside of the Forbidden City, and were quite respectful.

They thought this was quite an accomplishment, very clean, and it showed good skill.

Lauren: You mentioned earlier about how her son will eventually marry someone whose family was affected in this trial, in this coup.

One of the other parts of it was that there was the order of the day would also dictate that the family members of those traitors would also be killed. And that was something that she was willing to like. I'm going to bless you with this thing. I'm not going to do that.

I should, but I'm not going to. She will do this throughout her life. Smack you real hard, and then she'll kind of pull back a little bit and go, it's okay, I'm not going to kill you, but you're on thin ice.

There are lots of examples of that where she showed her teeth, made you fear God, and then showed a graceful and gracious side.

Yes, very much so. This dynasty didn't have female rulers. She covered every aspect of leadership standards at that time, and she really became an official regent for her son. She was the only known female regent in that time.

Paul:  I think she found a precedent of some Empress dowager who had been a regent to an infant emperor in history. I think they found in a few centuries earlier. They probably scoured among the thousands for some precedent.

Lauren: Yeah, just hanging by a little thread. I love it.

The coup has just happened, and now she and Cian are in charge, and they send out decrees stating as much.

They declare themselves as the two sole decision makers, quote, unquote, without interference. And that anything they said went, including changing the name of the tiny emperor boy from Zaichun.

Paul: Who is crowned as the Tongzhi emperor.

Lauren: They changed his name in this decree to Tongzhi, and it was a hint of what was to come.

So they had to deal with all of this grand council. So, they really weren't the two sole decision makers. They had to answer to a lot more people. But at the end of the day, what they said went. Grand council run by one of the princes that she had worked with. Thing that was coming into the state of China was going to the empress's dowager and then going back to the grand council and then going back again to the empresses dowager. There was this funnel of information according to their command.

Paul: Yeah, the emperor system in China was personal autocratic rule, where everything was done in the name of the emperor. And so much flowed through the emperor. Appointments were by the emperor, reports were to the emperor, policy came from the emperor.

So, when the emperor is a baby, that's why the regency is needed.

And my understanding is that the two dowager empresses split up duties where Cixi focused on policy and big picture items and Cian, dowager empress Zhen, the former empress, she handled appointments, routine correspondence, and she was involved until her death, I think, in 1881.

They worked well as a pair, but she didn't have the same need for power or desire for power or ability as Cixi had. But she was pretty good with people, and she worked quite harmoniously with a lot of people, and no one ever said a bad word about her. So, that was really important.

Lauren: I think historically, she's also known for her familial relations, Cixi was able to deal with a lot of everyone's related to everyone else in some way, shape, or form. And especially when things are going down through family lines, it's important. Cixi came in as choice for a concubine for Xianfeng. She helps kind of facilitate those types of things because she has all these connections with all these families.

She's already got that relationship from having been the empress.

Paul: My understanding is one of the reasons she was selected for empress, why she was put as number one of all the women that were selected for the last emperor is because she was peacemaker. She was able to keep harmony among all of these women. She had a diplomat's ability.

Lauren: So, it was really one fed the other. Very cool.

Officially, their jobs are to apply their seals to documents, but they really rule behind the curtains as this Tongzhi emperor is growing up.

Now the fun starts in 1861. They're dealing with the fallout of these opium wars. There's a civil war on the southern side, and there's another civil war on the northern side. Maybe you can speak to that.

Paul: They come to power as regents for this young emperor during the time of rebellions. Let's be clear, they didn't cause them. This is already happening.

Lauren: Are these multiple factions of China that are kind of rebelling against each other? And is this all specifically a fallout from the ruin that was the country after the Opium Wars?

My understanding is the country was not very strong at the point where those ended, and there was a lot of discord and dissonance between groups.

Paul: The Taiping Rebellion started when their late husband was Emperor and continued through his entire reign. He issued a formal proclamation to apologize to the nation for how badly things were going.

Lauren: Wow.

Paul: And his reign ended with the Second Opium War. So, he was Emperor during roughly a ten-year period that was terrible for China: 1850 to 1860.

He came to the throne just when the Taiping Rebellion was starting, before they had had their march to Nanjing and established a capital on the Yangtze.

And you mentioned earlier in the introduction that Cixi's father had died when she was a teenager.

Well, he died in 1852 when he was in charge...

Lauren: I said she might have died. He might have died when she was a teenager.

Paul: Of course, she became a concubine when she was a teenager. Her father's last position was governor of Anhui province and stationed in Wuhu City. That's on the Yangtse River, just upriver from Nanjing. That became a battleground during the Taiping Rebellion.

Cixi's father fled when the city was attacked and then fell ill and died in summer 1853, the year the rebels took Nanjing.

When Cixi and Cian, as Dowagers Empress, assumed the rule, the Taiping Rebellion has been going for ten years, and there's, as you said, other rebellions. There's the Nian Rebellion more in the north, there are Muslim rebellions in the northwest, like in Xinjiang area. There were a ton of rebellions happening, economic problems, and I don't think we can go into all of that.

What's interesting now is that this is when the Taiping Rebellion starts to turn around and improve for China.

Step by step, things start to get better on that front.

Lauren: Is this when the self strengthening movement is happening, or does that come later?

Paul: I think it's a general policy of Cixi to make China strong.

Lauren: The whole nation was weakened from all of these different battles. So, I could imagine the desire to actually grow her homeland back to something that they can be proud of again and be able to face off in international relations because they just got their butts kicked for a lot of years before that.

Paul: One of the ways that Cixi definitely helped with the Taiping Rebellion is that she mended fences with the Western powers before everything they'd asked for had always been rejected, and she started allowing exchanges, discussions with foreigners, mending relations.

One of the ways that that helped was that she allowed the Ever Victorious Army to fight the Taiping. That was a mix of Chinese and foreign soldiers that were quite active on the Yangtze River, especially close to Shanghai.

And Charles Gordon was a foreign officer on that, but he also formally reported to Earl Li, who was Li Hongzhang, a Han Chinese official. And this was important because you can't just have a foreign army running around the country. There has to be control. So, by having Earl Li above Charles Gordon, it meant that there was still a Chinese person in charge. And there was tension between them because at one point, Charles Gordon got some Taiping rebels to surrender and promised them that their lives would be spared and Earl Li overruled that.

And they had a Red Wedding type banquet where they were wined and dined and then nine of them were killed at the end of the banquet.

And Charles Gordon was just furious about this because he had given his word as a British officer that their lives would be saved and then they were killed by Earl Li.

Lauren: Wow. That's crazy. I didn't know about that. That's awesome.

Paul: This is brilliant for movies, for TV shows, and it happened.

Lauren: I love studying history, mostly because the stories that actually happened are weirder and crazier than the things that they make movies in a lot of cases.

Paul: During their first four years, the Taiping rebellion wound down and there was a lot of other opening up that happened during their early years.

So, this self strengthening movement, this Make China Strong, one of the issues was that they needed silver.

There was basically no silver when they came to power. The army needed silver. And there were indemnities imposed on China after the Second Opium War. And one of Cixi's brilliant acts is that she appointed a foreigner, Robert Hart, to be Inspector General of the Chinese Maritime Customs.

Before that, custom duties had been a traditional appointment. Someone had the role, would have paid a certain amount of money onto the state and would have kept the rest of the customs duties for himself.

But instead, Robert Hart saw it as a bureaucratic exercise. How are we going to have all the data? Which ships are coming in? What duties have to be collected?

He got paid his salary, he didn't keep any of the custom duties and there was enough money coming through there that that paid off the indemnities to the British and the French.

By 1863, there were 6800 cargo ships visiting Shanghai in a year. And that was seven times more than under her late husband. A sevenfold increase in trade in Shanghai in a few years.

In Hart's first five years in charge of the custom systems, custom duties were 32 million taels. Well, that was way more than the silver that Britain and France had imposed at the end of the Second Opium War.

Now, there was this good revenue source that was coming in from trade with the Westerners through Shanghai and the other ports that was helping to pay for modernization.

Lauren: Yeah, she seems to get really into all of these movements towards building up factories and modernizing railroads and arsenals, trying to make sure that all these communities can grow and come to the future and catch up with the people that they had been warring against in terms of technology.

Paul: But she was still facing resistance. There was still the Ground Council, there were still these men who had important roles. And the country had been pretty close to foreigners for a long time. There was resistance.

When telegraphs were installed for the first time, local people were tearing them down.

Lauren: When she became regent, it seemed like there was a lot of corruption happening. There was a lot of government positions where people, they were there. It was a title. They really didn't do much. And she really got her feet wet getting into reviewing all of those positions.

1861, when all of this is happening, the coup is happening. It was also the year of official examinations. And Cixi actually used that opportunity to do all of these reviews herself and started looking at who was running what departments. And that's how we ended up getting new appointments that were able to bring money in. But let's talk a little bit about on that.

Paul: Cixi, for example, did place a conservative in an important role as grand tutor to the Emperor, was in charge of his education. So that was a way to make sure that the conservatives were happy that the next emperor was being trained in the Confucian Classics.

She would sometimes add a little lesson to her son when she was observing. And one of the lessons that was recorded is that she told her son, “select good people and then don't begrudge them expenses.” That's getting to the point that you're saying there. Cixi viewed appointing the right people as important.

And I think when we hear about Earl Li, who's already been mentioned, is interacting with Charles Gordon, he's going to play a very important role in foreign policy under her, and history looks back pretty favorably at him.

And then there's also General Zeng, who helped defeat the Taiping with the provincial army. And he was a Han Chinese person that she appointed.

So those are two Han Chinese appointees that she made who helped end the Taiping Rebellion and improve relations with Westerners.

Lauren: Let's get into that. Let's talk about the Hans versus the Manchus and how one group had historically held a lot of these offices. And when Cixi actually started bringing these Hans in and appointing them to these top-level positions, it really kicked up a fuss. But why?

Paul: All of the women who the Emperor could be with, they could only be Mongolian or Manchu. So, one of the reasons why Cixi became concubine is because she had a Manchu background. She didn't speak Manchu. She read and spoke Chinese. She did not know the Manchu language because the Qing Dynasty had already been in power for centuries. They had lost their Manchu roots and had been sino-cized. They had become more Chinese.

Lauren: They were running all of these appointments.  Was it because they were allies with the Chinese so early?

Paul: I'm not sure how to answer that. There's a tendency in Chinese history that when an outside military power, what the Chinese would call a barbarian group, comes over and takes over power, whether it's the Mongolians under Kublai Khan or whether it's the Qing who were Manchu people. It doesn't take too long before they start becoming more Chinese.

They don't continue to rule from horseback for 200 years. They get settled in the capital with officials, with official examinations, with Confucian values which work for them. Because Confucian values talk about filial piety, which means loyalty upwards.

You are loyal to the Emperor like you are loyal to your father, and the Emperor has to be benevolent and look after you because you're his children. And that worked as a power structure.

But just like the Empress and the Concubines could only be Mongolian or Manchu. And if you were a Han Chinese woman, the most you could be was a prostitute to the Emperor. You could not be a concubine.

And you're right to point out that two people we've talked about, Governor Zeng and Earl Li, were Han officials at the highest level in her government.

Cixi was not restricting herself on talent. She was open to whoever she saw. And she appointed Westerners too. Her first ambassador was American.

Lauren: She's already non-traditional in that she is pretty much running the country now. She is already non-traditional in that she had a bunch of people killed to get to that point.

She has decided to make all of these things, and it really is interesting to see that she saw power and capability in these other people. She saw that in them and brought them in, and it didn't matter where they were from, because she knew that they could get the job done. And I wonder if it's like a shared, I know how you function. I know that you're here to make good decisions early. Wasn't it after his appointment that things started to kind of change for that rebellion?

Paul: I agree. Things got better in the Taiping Rebellion, and it was defeated. I just want to point out something. We're talking about the longest ruling woman in Chinese history. One person was killed and two committed suicide in the most populous country in the world. She managed to push aside the patriarchy with three deaths, two by their own hand.

Lauren: That's pretty crazy.

It would have been interesting to have a conversation with her, like, maybe you could actually get some explanation of, oh, I get it. I understand why these people would do that.

But she sure knew how to remind them that she was in a position of power at any given opportunity. Which was great.

Paul: Her officials did fear her. They feared her temper. They feared her eyes that they said could see right through. Cixi was observant, but she was able to take control when she wanted to and then be very nice thereafter.

And they were like, “okay, yes, please don't kill me. I will do my best. Thank you.”

Lauren: Well, and with killing, when she was doing all of these kind of reviews of job placements and people that were in these positions, she actually ended up having two people executed as an example, like, I really do I run this as she is kind of growing all of these things.

She gets a Foreign Affairs Ministry going. She restores these armies, and she really kind of opens up from what, Xianfeng, he was very nationalist, but she really opens up the country from being closed in to, we are going to open up these foreign language schools over here, and we're going to let people learn these foreign languages. We can send our young boys to different countries. There were a lot of them that came to the US. To do training and learn and go to school here for a while.

She really was leaning into this period of international growth with the attempt to stabilize her country.

And so, following all these rebellions and all these wars and just this really devastating period in history, she brings the country to a period of peace where they can actually be left alone for a little while to recover and to stabilize and to grow the self strengthening movement we mentioned before. It's really this idea of we need to beef up ourselves, and if we can beef up ourselves, we can do better with and against other people. And she really, really leaned hard into that. And I want to say she did that for, like that was a good decade, at least, of peace.

Paul: Yeah. The 1860s became, certainly by the end, a decade of peace. It started bad for China, and it ended better.

But there was resistance. She was being resisted.

When she sent students to Europe to learn from a college. No one was volunteering to be the chaperone. No one was volunteering among the officials to go. The best she could find was a 63-year-old clerk to go because no other official was interested. But he had read about the west, and he didn't believe all these rumors that, I don't know, they were going to be eaten or killed if they went abroad or whatever. The fears were about barbarians.

There was a ton of inertia to get past to modernize China. It faced a lot of resistance. And unfortunately, as the decade ended, her term was ending because her son was approaching 16, he was approaching maturity.

And Prince Chun, who was on the Ground Council and was one of the brothers of the late Emperor, kept on reminding Cixi, your late husband wanted revenge on the foreigners. We need to get revenge on the foreigners for what they did to us in the Second Opium War.

And it turns out that he was behind the scenes, instigating the Tianjin riots, which were anti Westerner, anti missionary riots in Tianjin.

And then there were similar riots that happened around the same time in other cities. And it was one of his guys who carried it out.

Lauren: Sneaky. Sneaky.

Paul: The person who was working with Prince Chan was Chen Guorui (Big Chief Chen). And he had spread rumors, were slanderous against the missionaries, eating babies, that sort of thing. He had made blacksmiths make weapons, had had men out beating gongs to call out the crowds on the day of the riots and had really instigated it.

Commissioner Chonghou of Tianjin had a pontoon bridge dismantled, but Chen had it reassembled. So there was a lot of things going on.

When Marquis Zeng investigated after the rebellion, he found all of this. And this was really tricky for Cixi to deal with because one of her grand councillors was creating this anti foreigner rebellion.

And one month after the riot, her mother died. And in Nanjing, Viceroy Ma Xinyi had exposed rumor mongers, spreading false rumors against missionaries down there, and he had been assassinated. So it was a dangerous time.

Lauren: Well, and not only that, but his brother Gong, who has already kind of shown himself to be friendly to foreigners and wanting to foster international relations and cooperation between countries, that's two very, very different views.

And this whole time, both of them are in with their top levels of government, but they also still have Tongzhi Emperor's ears. He's still listening to his family members. He's listening to both his mothers. He's listening to his uncles, his tutors. All of these people are giving him different pieces of advice. And so, to have very warring opinions on how to deal with international relations. But this guy seems like he did a lot of scheming. And so it makes sense that when we get into remind me how to pronounce it again.

Paul: Tongzhi. Before we get to Tongzhi, I think it's important to say, just before this Tianjin riot, Prince Chun had also done something else that struck at the heart of Cixi.

Cixi had done something that was quite revolutionary. She had allowed some eunuchs to leave the Forbidden City. She had sent them on a tour to the Grand Canal and down towards Suzhou and Nanjing and the conservatives, the Grand Council, were aghast. This was unprecedented. Eunuchs leaving the Forbidden City. They could only do it with permission. They had permission from Cixi, but they were still executed. And this really devastated Cixi because she had said, I think this was a power struggle where you've got Prince Chun, who is killing people who are close to Cixi, starting these riots and rebellions totally undermining what she stood for.

This is as her son is approaching the age of maturity, and the clock is winding down on her time as ruler behind this silk screen. And I don't think she could accomplish everything with modernization that she wanted to. She was not getting support from the Grand Council.

Lauren: No.  One of the people that was on the Grand Council was Prince Gong. In his time in the government, as these things had started calming down, they were able to work on building things internally and focus on this period of peace. He's been a commander here, he's been an officer here. He's had this position in the government and that position in a council, and he's kind of gained all these titles and all of this status. So, there was a point at which she was really actually worried that her brother-in-law was going to make a move for her position before her son came of age.

Paul: I think this might be a good spot to end this first episode.

Talking with Lauren Shill of Well Behaved Women about Dowager Empress Cixi.

We’re reaching the point in the story where her son is about to become married, reach maturity, and take the throne in his own name.

We'll wrap up this episode here, but please be sure to follow this podcast so that you can hear the conclusion as we continue this wonderful discussion about the Dowager Empress Cixi.

Thank you, Lauren, for being here with me, and I really look forward to continuing this conversation with you.

Lauren: Of course. Thanks for having me. Have a good night.”