At 16, she was an imperial concubine in the Forbidden City. Soon, in a desperate bid to open China to the outside world, she seized power for herself. Now, a new book claims Cixi, who ruled China as the empress dowager for much of the second half of the 19th century, was the real instigator of China’s modern power—more than Mao or Deng Xiaoping or anyone else.
The Empress Dowager Cixi’s “Fragrance of the Orchids,” from 1902, an ink painting on silk.
In Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (Alfred A. Knopf, $30), Jung Chang seeks to rehabilitate Cixi, once denigrated in the West as a “She Dragon” and the “Old Buddha,” presumed to have usurped the throne then presided over its disintegration. Chang is no stranger to controversy, having chronicled the brutality of the Cultural Revolution in her acclaimed memoir, Wild Swans, and pulled the Great Leader down from whatever heights he may still have occupied in 2005 with Mao: The Unknown Story, portraying him as a tyrannical and murderous power-seeker, devoid of idealism.
“Good Fortune and Longevity,” painted by the Empress Dowager Cixi in 1902, just a year after the Boxer Rebellion.
Chang details how Cixi, with great foresight and hard-won authority, guided China toward what has become known as “self-strengthening,” a policy of engaging other countries from a position of power and only when it serves to strengthen China—in essence, the country’s current and rather effective dynamic. She didn’t come to this philosophy quickly, however. Early on, she was forced to rule from behind a screen and through male heirs, owing to her gender. And then a fateful miscalculation led her to align with the frightfully anti-foreign Boxers during the Western intrusions around 1900, resulting in reprisal and foreign occupation. From then on, she initiated the long-standing policy of reforming internally when advantageous rather than resisting change. Post-Boxer Rebellion, she even posed for Western-style publicity photographs to counter her cruel isolationist reputation, giving them to Theodore Roosevelt and other visitors.
Incredibly, she was also an accomplished artist—and two of her works are in the collection. There isn’t much information about them, except that they were painted about six years before her death in 1908. She painted flowers almost exclusively; she had the Summer Palace continuously stocked with fresh blooms. A Renaissance woman, it seems, who truly began a renaissance.