Archive: Empress Dowager Cixi

Misha Glenny delves in to the In Our Time archive to select ten episodes for listeners to revisit. His fifth choice, first released in May 2024, is the Empress Dowager Cixi, the woman who, for almost fifty years, was the most powerful figure in the Chinese court. Cixi (1835-1908) started out at court as one of the Emperor's many concubines, yet was the only one who gave him a son to succeed him and who also possessed great political skill and ambition. When their son became emperor he was still a young child and Cixi ruled first through him and then, following his death, through another child emperor. This was a time of rapid change in China, when western powers and Japan humiliated the forces of the Qing empire time after time, and Cixi had the chance to push forward the modernising reforms the country needed to thrive. However, when she found those reforms conflicted with her own interests or those of the Qing dynasty, she was arguably obstructive or too slow to act and she has been personally blamed for some of those many humiliations even when the fault lay elsewhere. With Yangwen Zheng Professor of Chinese History at the University of Manchester Rana Mitter The S. T. Lee Professor of US-Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School And Ronald Po Associate Professor in the Department of International History at London School of Economics and Visiting Professor at Leiden University Producer: Simon Tillotson In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production Reading list: Pearl S. Buck, Imperial Woman: The Story of the Last Empress of China (first published 1956; Open Road Media, 2013) Katharine A. Carl, With the Empress Dowager (first published 1906; General Books LLC, 2009) Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (Jonathan Cape, 2013) Princess Der Ling, Old Buddha (first published 1929; Kessinger Publishing, 2007) Joseph W. Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (University of California Press, 1987) John K. Fairbank and Merle Goldman, China: A New History (Harvard University Press, 2006) Peter Gue Zarrow and Rebecca Karl (eds.), Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period: Political and Cultural Change in Late Qing China (Harvard University Press, 2002) Grant Hayter-Menzies, Imperial Masquerade: The Legend of Princess Der Ling (Hong Kong University Press, 2008) Keith Laidler, The Last Empress: The She-Dragon of China (Wiley, 2003) Keith McMahon, Celestial Women: Imperial Wives and Concubines in China from Song to Qing (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020) Anchee Min, The Last Empress (Bloomsbury, 2011) Ying-Chen Peng, Artful Subversion: Empress Dowager Cixi’s Image Making (Yale University Press, 2023). Sarah Pike Conger, Letters from China: with Particular Reference to the Empress Dowager and the Women of China (first published 1910; Forgotten Books, 2024) Stephen Platt, Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age (Atlantic Books, 2019) Liang Qichao (trans. Peter Zarrow), Thoughts From the Ice-Drinker's Studio: Essays on China and the World (Penguin Classics, 2023) Sterling Seagrave, Dragon Lady: The Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China (Vintage, 1993) Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China (first published 1991; W. W. Norton & Company, 2001) X. L. Woo, Empress Dowager Cixi: China's Last Dynasty and the Long Reign of a Formidable Concubine (Algora Publishing, 2003)

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• 1:40Speaker 05

  This is In Our Time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find in the In Our Time archive. A reading list for this edition can be found in the episode description wherever you're listening. I hope you enjoy the programme. Like many other empires, dynasties and oligarchies in history, China's elites have a long record of excluding women from influential positions. One of the very few women to become powerful in China's past was the Empress Dowager Cixi, who effectively ruled China for over half a century after she climbed to the top of the Qing dynasty's hierarchy as co-regent in 1861.

• 2:25Speaker 05

  As this latest retrospective of Melvyn Bragg's stunning collection of In Our Time points out, Cixi managed to balance the extremely conservative Confucian traditions with a determination to wield power that enabled her to become the most outstanding political figure of the 19th century in China. Unsurprisingly, she faced numerous enemies and challenges ascending to power at the tail end of the devastating Taiping Rebellion, regarded by some as the bloodiest civil war in history, and the Second Opium War, which drove home the message to the Chinese population that their country was becoming the focus of intense imperialist competition

• 3:10Speaker 05

  between the European great powers, the United States and Japan. To understand China today means appreciating the weight of its 19th century history, and to understand that means grasping the role of the Empress Dowager Cixi. In Our Time provides the perfect nuanced introduction.

• 3:32Speaker 06

  Hello. The Empress Dowager Sushi, 1835 to 1908, was the dominant figure in the Chinese court for almost 50 years. This was a time of rapid change and slow reform, when Western powers and Japan humiliated China in war after war, and the ruling Qing dynasty could not or would not modernise fast enough. Later generations blamed many of the failures on Sushi, who arguably ruled in her own interests more than China's. Yet she's also gained credit for starting some reforms, even if she didn't see them through. With me to discuss the Empress Dowager Sushi are Yangwen Zhang, Professor of Chinese History at the University of Manchester, Ronald Poe, Associate Professor in the Department of International History at London School of Economics,

• 4:16Speaker 06

  and Visiting Professor at Leiden University, and Rana Mitter, the SD Lee Professor of US/Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School. Rana, what's the state of China in 1830s when Sushi was born?

• 4:31Speaker 07

  The 1830s is an absolutely pivotal time in China's history because it marks the decade in which, essentially, China moved from being in control of its own destiny as a country to being a country that essentially was at the whim of others. Prior to the 1830s...

• 4:48Speaker 06

  Why is that?

• 4:49Speaker 07

  Well, prior to the 1830s, for about a century or so, China had been growing and becoming increasingly prosperous and increasingly confident. Through the 18th century, it doubled its population size from 150 million to about 300 million people. That was because there were new crops, new measures that meant that health improved amongst the population. And overall, it was considered in some ways something of a golden era. But that changed quite rapidly by the early to mid 19th century. And in particular, there was one product, opium, that really shifted the dial. Because the British Empire, having conquered East India, produced large amounts of opium from the poppies that were grown in Bengal in eastern India.

• 5:31Speaker 07

  And China was the place that they targeted as a market for that opium. And when the Chinese government at the time, the Qing dynasty, refused to allow the entrance of opium into the country as a whole, that really meant that China found itself in a much more difficult position. The opium was being sold anyway, smuggled, you might say, into China. And the state of the population became much more dependent in many cases on opium. A lot of people became addicted to it. And that did a great deal not only to reverse the balance of trade between Britain and China, it was now in Britain's favour rather than China's, but also the government, the Qing dynasty, became increasingly concerned that the population was essentially being poisoned by drugs

• 6:15Speaker 07

  and that somehow the dynasty was beginning to become vulnerable to the outside world. So the 1830s really marks that period when China becomes, first of all, subject to the impact of the Western empires, British, French and others, and increasingly uncertain whether it can actually cope with that outside pressure.

• 6:34Speaker 06

  Is there a trade imperative? Because we were in debt to China, and opium was one of the few things we could sell that they wanted. But there's also, is it an imperial imperative? Do people want to conquer China, as it were, to have a bit of this great empire?

• 6:49Speaker 07

  Trade was the battering ram that opened up China in that sense. And it was a lot of companies, many of them based in London, Scotland and elsewhere, that was behind the trade of getting opium in. But behind them came missionaries, came people bringing Christianity, also wider ideas that came from the West, including ideas of empire, free trade, you know, even kind of liberal and conservative thought from the Western world. And that new influx of thinking that came in the wake of the opium ships also was a sort of intellectual shock, an intellectual set of horizons that were opened up that hadn't been there previously. So trade was the starting point, but empire and a real change in China's worldview followed quite quickly.

• 7:35Speaker 06

  The Qing dynasty had ruled China for almost two centuries by then. Had it been stable until then? Did the Opium War destabilise it in a profound way?

• 7:44Speaker 07

  The Opium War did destabilise it in a profound way, but it had not been completely stable up to that point. Between the late 17th century, 1644, when the Manchu dynasty rode in, they were nomads and they rode in from the north to conquer China, there had been a succession of emperors, particularly Kangxi and Qianlong, the kind of great glorious emperors of the early 18th century, who essentially saw China expand to its maximum territorial size. A lot of what's today Western China was conquered during the Qing dynasty. And there has been this sort of wider sense that population size increased and that the country was relatively, expanded relatively successfully.

• 8:27Speaker 07

  But even then, there were all sorts of things going on at the grassroots that made people somewhat concerned. There was actually, in the 1760s, a rumour that zombies were walking around the countryside, robbing houses and somehow destabilising the society as a whole. The great historian Philip Kuhn wrote his book Soul Stealers about this particular phenomenon. Of course, that wasn't really true, but it did suggest that, under the surface of prosperity and glamour, there was a sense that somehow society was slowly but surely beginning to fall apart even before the Westerners arrived a few decades later.

• 9:00Speaker 06

  Thank you very much. Yangwen, into this comes Sushi. Can you tell us about her early life? Cixi was the daughter of a lower-middle ranking official in what we call the south of the river Jiangnan. So in the sort of east-central Jiangsu area.

• 9:17Speaker 07

  So she had a sister and two brothers. She learned to read a bit. I've seen her handwriting. So she could read Chinese and write Chinese. She's a Manchu. So she was selected, you know, being Manchu. You have to send your daughters if they're good looking.

• 9:33Speaker 06

  Manchu means coming from the north and.

• 9:35Speaker 07

  Yeah, the the Manchu race, yeah. So you can send your daughter to the court to be selected as concubines, emperors, whatever. Only Manchus could do that. Han Chinese like me, you can you can possibly dream of doing that. And so she was chosen to be uh one of the consorts for the emperor.

• 9:54Speaker 06

  Does consort mean concubine?

• 9:56Speaker 07

  Don't know. How do you translate that? Because.

• 9:58Speaker 06

  Concubine means to have children. Consort means you're your friendly relationship with them, I think, I should think.

• 10:04Speaker 07

  They they have children, yes. And she started very low.

• 10:07Speaker 06

  Most of all, she has a son.

• 10:09Speaker 07

  She has a son, yes. Uh there are eight ranks, the consorts, and she was, uh she started at number six. So that's very low, but she climbed up uh later on. She had a son with the emperor, the only son.

• 10:22Speaker 06

  So she started to climb as soon as she got there. What drove her? What what what were her qualities that made her succeed from the beginning?

• 10:29Speaker 07

  She was so political. She she is interested in power. She is interested in human relationship. How how do you manipulate people? She's very skilled in that, even before, probably, you know, when she was growing up. Because given her back, she was driven, if I have to use the word, to acquire, to obtain power. She loves power. You know, lower ranking, she would never have made, she was not the empress. To be empress, you had to come from a real ranking Manchu family. So obviously, she started at rank six. That's not very high.

• 11:07Speaker 07

  According to some stories, you you you in China you read, and she she knew how to read and write, and she knew how to sing uh Chinese songs. And then she knew how to attract. You know, the emperor had so many women, I don't remember, you know, which one is which. You really have to work hard to get his attention. So she was very good at getting his attention.

• 11:30Speaker 06

  Thank you very much. An awful lot's going on in China's history, but the period we're talking about.

• 11:35Speaker 07

  So the one constant through all this is Cixi, the Empress Dowager, who remains this constant power behind the throne throughout the period. But various of the most important events of modern Chinese history happened during her lifetime. In eighteen forty-two, the first Opium War ends. Then, in eighteen fifty, you have the outbreak of the Taiping Rebellion, which many people have called the world's most bloody civil war.

• 12:00Speaker 06

  Thank you very much. Ronbo, um can you tell us what impact that had on the imperial court?

• 12:05Speaker 07

  The Taiping Rebellion was a massive civil war in southern China that lasted for fourteen years altogether. So that's between eighteen fifty and eighteen sixty-four. It is definitely one of the most drastic and dreadful crises, I mean, that the Qing Empire had to counter and deal with at that time. Because it exposed the vulnerabilities of the Qing empires in many ways, including its military and and political structures. I mean, which symbolized, I mean, the weakening of power of the Manchu administrations over China. And the war, the rebellion itself also caused numerous loss of lives, according to some statistic, between twenty millions and thirty million.

• 12:51Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 12:51Speaker 07

  Yeah, and actually, indeed, it was quite scary, the number. And actually, some historians in mainland China, they even claimed that the the numbers, I mean, should reach means something closer to a hundred millions. And but not everybody died in battles. Because the rebellions also like have some direct consequences, such as famine and plague, everything combined together. So it increases the death toll. So it was a very sad story. Yeah, so in response to to this particular rebellion, so the Qing Empire had to do something. And in fact, I mean, they were forced to decentralize, I mean, their military powers to suppress these rebels. The reason that they have to decentralize the military power is because the Green Standard Army, which is the army that they used to train up,

• 13:36Speaker 07

  was no longer capable of suppressing, I mean, these like Taiping rebels. And the other armies, which is called the Banamans, which is also a very superior and important military communities that the Qing court used to rely on, were, again, I mean, no longer capable of like fighting against these Taipings. So the Qing had no choice but to decentralize its military powers, I mean, to local general, regional leaders.

• 14:00Speaker 06

  Rana.

• 14:01Speaker 07

  You also then have the Second Opium War, which ends in eighteen sixty with the burning of the Summer Palace by British troops in revenge for the killing of hostages kept by the the Chinese. Again, another very traumatic turning point. And then that triggers actually a period of reform from eighteen sixty-one, really until the eighteen nineties, eighteen ninety-five. You get the self-strengthening movement. In other words, reformers at court say that China has to learn, you know, Western-style mathematics, science, languages and so forth, to try and compete in the modern world. And that's a continuing movement that waxes and wanes, but exists throughout that particular period.

• 14:39Speaker 06

  Young one, how did her son come to power?

• 14:42Speaker 07

  Yeah, uh the Emperor Xianfeng had only two children. One is a girl, the older one is a girl, and the younger one is a boy. And the boy's mother is Cixi. So when he died in August eighteen sixty-one, naturally, the throne went to the boy. That's how she came to the political stage.

• 15:01Speaker 06

  Ronbo, um there were these eight, there were these eight regents. What did they stand for and how did she um attack them, as it were?

• 15:10Speaker 07

  The eight regents were the eight officials appointed by the Xianfeng Emperor a day before his death. So these eight regents, I mean, were given the power, I mean, to draft imperial edicts and then to came up with some decision collectively, in which, I mean, they were supposed to become the central power after the Xianfeng Emperor passed away. But at the same time, actually, because Cixi was also given the power to endorse, I mean, the imperial edicts. But so she was not very satisfied, I mean, with such an arrangement. As a result, she decided to ally herself with the other empress, who were also given the power to endorse everything, and also a very important man, who was a Prince Gong.

• 15:53Speaker 07

  So he allied with Cixi to try to really force those eight regents to commit suicide. And eventually, they succeed.

• 16:00Speaker 06

  Rana.

• 16:01Speaker 07

  This is really a major turning point. It happens in eighteen sixty-one. So this is when Cixi is in her late twenties now. So she's really coming, you know, she's flowering into power, into her sense of influence at court. But it's also three years before the end of that horrific Taiping Rebellion, the civil war that we've mentioned, in which, you know, something like twenty, thirty, forty million people die. And in overthrowing the eight regents and basically in this so-called Xinyou Ku, as it's as it's known, uh getting rid of these people who are supposed to be a counterbalance to the two empresses, Cixi and Cian. So she is placing herself at the forefront of power in court. So even though she never becomes the emperor, the actual ruling power on the throne,

• 16:42Speaker 07

  at this point in eighteen sixty-one, she's well on the way to essentially becoming that dominant power that she remains behind the curtain uh for the next thirty years or so.

• 16:52Speaker 06

  This is unusual, isn't it, for a woman to get that much power? How did she manage it?

• 16:57Speaker 07

  One of the things that the women who have come to power in Chinese dynastic history have managed to understand is how to balance their own desire to actually be able to undertake governance with the Confucian norms of Chinese philosophy and society. This is the thinking of the philosopher Confucius from, you know, two and a half thousand years ago, which, in adapted and rapidly changing form, has shaped much of the way in which the Chinese Empire was run all the way through, you know, two thousand years and and and more. And in that tradition, a woman ruling, actually being on the throne, was simply taboo. In the European tradition, you have Queen Elizabeth or Catherine the Great, someone who actually uh sits as a woman on the throne.

• 17:37Speaker 07

  With one exception, Emperor Wu, the only woman to rule in her own right way back in the medieval Tang Dynasty, it doesn't happen in China. And that means that someone who wants to be a woman with real power at court has to find a way essentially to operate behind the emperor of the time. One of the reasons, coincidentally, that Cixi was able to do this so successfully in the late nineteenth century was that not one, but two child emperors came along. In other words, they were five years old, and I think the next one came along was about eight years old. In other words, they were not of an age when they could even think about ruling in their own right. And that meant the opportunity for a powerful person, in this case, a woman, Cixi, was greater than it would have been if, say, the emperor had been twenty-one or forty-one years old.

• 18:21Speaker 06

  Young one, what could she do that a man couldn't do? Were there advantages in her being a woman?

• 18:26Speaker 07

  Yes, definitely. Because, you know, when she approached officials, when she manipulated for her own ends or or the benefit of the dynasty, it looked harmless, you know, it's a woman, oh, she can't be any harmful. So she manipulated that really well in her relations with the ranking officials. And if you read the memoirs of Li Hongzhang and Wen Honghe, you know, all the ranking officials, they all left memoirs and describing her as, you know, very nice, like, you know, she was called the old Buddha. Sort of the the the symbol of stability, because emperors come and go, boys came and go, but, you know, but she was always there. So she's always there.

• 19:09Speaker 07

  She's always there, so she's the old Buddha. So affectionately, people call her. One thing I would like to add is, um you know, in the post-Mao era, there's lots of television, long television series and films about her. People are fascinated with her. Constantly new movies, new soap operas coming up. So I think in some way she's serving as a model of a strong woman, you know, taking her own destiny into her own hands and from low ranking rising up to the top. Maybe women look at her differently than historians.

• 19:47Speaker 06

  Let's develop this a little uh more. Even by the eighteen sixties, she was a skilled political operator, which has been uh graphically headlined.

• 19:55Speaker 07

  Empress Dowager is the uh wife of the deceased emperor. Now, there are two Empress Dowagers. The real Empress Dowager was the real empress of the deceased emperor. But because the little boy who became emperor has a biological mother who's not the empress, so her, his mother gets to be elevated to this, to the stature of a Bristle.

• 20:21Speaker 01

  So you have two Empress Dowager. One is the real Empress, old Empress. The other is the biological mother. The real Empress Dowager wasn't really interested in power and politics. And Cixi was a quick learner. Her Chinese writing is improving. Her language is improving. The phrases she writes are the thing. It's like real, if you don't know, you thought it's the emperor who's writing. So she's writing in the tone of an emperor.

• 20:48Speaker 06

  Bragg, what was the basis of her power? How did she operate at court?

• 20:53Speaker 07

  So she used the opportunities that she had. She essentially used the very, very complex and in some ways internecine nature of the court to be able to push her way upwards in the court structure. But at the same time, she also learnt quickly and skillfully how to essentially operate amongst the various characters at court. The eunuchs, who were a very important part of the wider court structure. They were a kind of recognised part of the court structure. And also understanding how the family relationships between different parts of the royal family operated. So she learnt the ropes, you know, the kind of a circuit board of the Qing court quickly and effectively.

• 21:30Speaker 06

  Young one.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  One of the things that's very interesting during the 1860s is her son was actually growing up and she was a control freak, trying to control the little boy. They had a very turbulent relationship. It's going to carry into his marriage because she's going to stuff him somebody that she can control. And this boy died at the age of 19. So you could say the Empress Dowager really persecuted her own son to death. And then of course she adopts another boy and becomes another Empress Dowager. So I think if you see a boy emperor, something fishy is going on at the court.

• 22:08Speaker 06

  Could we talk a bit more about this son and the relationship between her and her son and the court?

• 22:12Speaker 01

  As he was growing up, he realised he didn't really have power. By the age of seventeen and a half, eighteen years old, he was married. He had an empress and that was the time for Cixi to give up power, to stop sitting behind the curtain and to allow the boy to reign by himself. But I don't think he knew how to, because he never really learned, because it's the mother, his mother did everything for him. And that gave Cixi another opportunity. The rumour, the story is that because Cixi wanted somebody to be the empress, he chose somebody else that he likes.

• 22:52Speaker 01

  So Cixi was always watching him, who he slept with and, you know, trying to stuff this girl she likes. What happened is he just said, okay, I'm not going with any of you. I'm going out, probably to the red light district or, you know, some brothels and contracted syphilis or whatever. Because when he died, you know, the official diagnose is smallpox. He's got smallpox. But the real diagnose is syphilis, but they look the same. So in order to save the face of the dynasty, allegedly the Empress Dowager gave order to the court doctors to treat him not as a syphilis patient, but as a smallpox. That's how he died, according to research so far.

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  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by breakout singer-songwriter Alex Warren.

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  Amazing.

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  Pretty crazy how like, just one thing.

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  Right.

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  I mean, you, I bet you, we could point to nine different things in our careers where it's just one thing, all of a sudden, if that one thing didn't happen, then I wouldn't be here.

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  What you're talking about right now

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  Yeah.

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  is what I've been talking about since the beginning of my career. There's these things outside of you

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  Yeah.

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  that make everything happen. These other forces somehow came into contact with each other

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  Yeah.

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  and helped propel you to this place.

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  It's just insane.

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• 26:19Speaker 06

  Ron, was this self-strengthening movement to modernise China? Can you tell us more about it?

• 26:25Speaker 07

  The movement itself is to really to modernise China, to strengthen China. The reason is because as Ron already mentioned, that I mean, China at that time was suffering from both internal crisis and also external crisis. And I would say the turning point that really triggered the Prince Gong and the government to launch the self-strengthening movement is very much because of the Second Opium War, because there was the burning of the Summer Palace. It was really dreadful for everybody, I mean, to realise that, oh, wow, it's really time to change. Because people often say that the First Opium War should be the turning point in modernising China. But in my assessment, I mean, I think the Second Opium War matters more than the First Opium War because of the burning of that Summer Palace and these kind of things. And that's in 1860? 1860, 1860. It's truly humiliating.

• 27:09Speaker 07

  We should add that the burning of the Summer Palace, which was done in revenge for the taking and executing of some British hostages during that war, was carried out by Lord Elgin, who is not the Lord Elgin of the famous marbles, but I think his son, in fact. So there is a sort of Elgin tradition, so to speak, when it comes to imperial engagement or attacks overseas. Indeed, indeed. Just something to add is that actually after the summer, the burning of the Summer Palace, I mean, there were even some debates in the parliament here in London to say whether or not this is a moral act, I mean, to burn it. So it's a big thing.

• 27:42Speaker 06

  Can I bring Japan into this now? Because China was very envious of Japan, which was much smaller, much more efficient. Where are we there, Ron?

• 27:50Speaker 07

  So the key year is 1868, because that is the year of what's become known as the Meiji Restoration. The term restoration is used because for the Japanese at the time, it was supposed to be bringing the emperor, the Japanese emperor, back to the throne. But in fact, really, it's a Japanese revolution. What had happened in the years previous to that, from the 1850s onwards, is that, as in China, Western powers, the Russians, the Americans, British to some extent, had wanted to open up Japan, which had also been a relatively, not completely, but relatively closed society. But unlike China, Japan actually decided that the way to push back was to essentially to reform itself, to modernise itself extremely fast. And various of the samurai elites who were actually on the outside of the court in those

• 28:34Speaker 07

  days, essentially launched a sort of coup. They got rid of the existing Japanese regency. They put themselves in power. They said that they were putting the emperor back on the throne in full power. But what they actually did was to make a complete change in terms of revolutionising most of the aspects of Japan, which would help to create a modern society. So they created a modern citizen army. They introduced infrastructure, railways, roads and so forth. They reformed the education system to make sure that modern subjects, including foreign languages, Western-style mathematics and so forth, were all brought into the, into the agenda. And they brought this together with the idea that actually Japan should be a constitutional monarchy.

• 29:15Speaker 07

  So as a result of this, Japan strengthened itself enough to be able to tell the outside powers that they could not colonise Japan and that they would have to come into Japan only on Japanese terms. And Japan's ability to say no, to push back against the West, was extremely inspiring to many of the Chinese, who were not very keen on the Japanese themselves, because the Japanese in fact fought China for possession of, well, ultimately the, the control of the island of Taiwan, which was ceded to Japan in 1895, at the end of the first Sino-Japanese War from 1894 to 5. But even though they were very angry and resentful at Japan for the war against them, they did admire Japan for being a country in Asia that had been able to push back against

• 30:00Speaker 07

  the Westerners. And those were the lessons that they also wanted to learn for, to benefit China.

• 30:05Speaker 06

  Can I bring Cixi back into the equation? Japan and China were at war. What did she do there?

• 30:12Speaker 07

  Actually, Cixi, she was always being blamed and heavily criticised because of the war, because saying that means she misdirected most of the funding, which was supposed to support the navy, to build something else, that is, to build a new palace. And so that's why people have been criticising her, her action by saying that you were responsible, I mean, for losing the war against the Japanese. But when we really Want to focus on the navy because the naval battle is one of the major segments of the first time of Japanese war. I would say that we also have to be careful that the Su Shi at the very beginning, going back to that self strengthening movement. She was very supportive of building the navies. She was very supportive of constructing a modern navy. And not just the navy actually, but also supportive of other modernization projects.

• 30:58Speaker 07

  So it was only during the years leading up to the war that she felt like, okay, I mean, maybe I should step a little bit distant from the scene. And then so that's why I really need to build a palace and then to retire. So I would say that Su Shi was partially responsible for losing the war against Japan. But at the same time, we really have to understand that there was also some structural problems within the Qing Empire at that time, including corruptions, nepotism, inefficiencies. And these kind of problems, I mean, we can't just simply blame this woman or this as a leader of the state. Yes, I mean, she's responsible for not being able to mitigate these problems. But at the same time, we have to understand these structural problems was has been there for a very, very long time. Rana.

• 31:43Speaker 07

  Eighteen ninety five is a turning point in this story when it comes to Su Shi. Because really in the in the thirty years before that, she had been generally pretty supportive in the court of what you might call conservative reform. In other words, gradual reform on things like setting up a new college to teach foreign languages. Um for setting up arsenals that would create new modern armaments on Chinese soil. Uh the first China's first equivalent of a foreign ministry, the Zhongli Yaman. And for a long time, actually, these seemed pretty successful. So really, a lot of people expected that when this war did break out between the Japanese and the Chinese in eighteen ninety four. But actually, the navy that Ron's been talking about might have a decent chance of success. When in fact, the navy was just, you know, knocked out of port and essentially the Chinese lost completely and had to sign a

• 32:27Speaker 07

  humiliating treaty at the Japanese port of Shiwano Seki, which, you know, essentially brought an end to the the war in a fashion that meant that China had lost completely. There was then a real moment of revelation and people at court who wanted China to become strong looked at Su Shi and blamed her for what had happened, but they were less inclined to actually so show that there hadn't been sufficient radical reform at court, which is not her fault individually, to actually modernize China fast enough.

• 32:57Speaker 06

  Young one.

• 32:57Speaker 07

  Hmm. You know, most historians have not been kind to her. And I think it's because she's such a skilled politician. She loves power and all that. But I think we should also give her credit for because if she didn't bless all the reform projects at the navy, whatever, I don't know where we would be today. Like Ron was saying, we can't just blame her for everything.

• 33:22Speaker 06

  Were there attempts to overthrow?

• 33:24Speaker 07

  Yes, there were, because after the war, uh Su Shi realized that, oh, it's really time to really make some real changes now because we we got defeated by the Japanese with our little brothers. I mean, how would it happen?

• 33:34Speaker 06

  Rana.

• 33:36Speaker 07

  One of the things that I think is important to remember at this period is that a lot of power had drained away from the Qing court during the last two or three decades of the nineteenth century. So because of the Taiping Rebellion, where essentially it had only been put down because the Qing court in desperation allowed local provincial leaders, people like Zhang Guofan and Li Hongzhang, to actually launch provincial armies of their own, bearing in mind that a Chinese province can be and is the size of a European country, so that it's still substantial. But it meant that from a centralized system, there was much more of a move to the to the kind of local provincial areas in terms of military power. And once that had begun, the process that by the twentieth century would become known as warlordism.

• 34:20Speaker 07

  In other words, local military leaders kind of fighting each other for power had begun to be set in train. In particular, there was one northern based area known as the Beiyang, which would have a succession of leaders who actually would become a sort of power in their own right and would push back against what the court in Beijing actually wanted to do. Sometimes they'd act in concert with them. And other times they would actually oppose them. And that means that when we consider what Su Shi was doing and the court was doing, we should always remember that in some senses it's a tribute to her that there was as much centralized power in the court as there was, because a great deal of the military power and political power and even taxing power had moved down to the Chinese provinces during the period that she was actually behind the throne.

• 35:02Speaker 06

  How did she react to that?

• 35:04Speaker 07

  She is very interesting because she knew that she needed to control these men as well. So she cut something, you know, she can control them. She she would knight them, you know, give them titles, make them do things for her. But then at the same time, she would pit them against each other as well for competition, for projects, for money. So she's really very skilled at managing people that make all these Han Chinese men were kind of loyal to her.

• 35:34Speaker 06

  To managing people in her own interests.

• 35:36Speaker 07

  Mm hmm. Yeah. But but the interests of the empire as she saw it, I mean, she, to be fair to her, all of her actions, everything from assassinations to subversions, were done with the belief that the Qing dynasty must survive and that at a time of crisis, she was the one to actually continue to keep it stable. Three years later, in eighteen ninety eight, you get a desperate surge of more radical reform being proposed. The hundred days of reform that are put forward by certain reformers, Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao. At first with the agreement, with the acquiescence of the Dowager Empress Su Shi. But then she turned against them very strongly and actually shut down these reforms.

• 36:15Speaker 06

  The Hundred Days Reform seems rather dramatic, and it was rather dramatic. Did it work?

• 36:20Speaker 07

  It's not that effective, I mean, in hindsight. But it does serve as a wake up call, I mean, for some of the intellectuals in China by saying that, well, I mean, the Qing Empire was really not into substantial reforms. So they they were actually like trying to advocate, I mean, some another path, I mean, to, for example, overthrow the Qing Empire and these kind of. Actually, the the failure of the Hundred Day Reforms was also planting the seed of those like revolutionaries, I mean, in China to overthrow the Qing Empires later in nineteen twelve.

• 36:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, did did she see herself as a traditionalist or a reformer?

• 36:54Speaker 07

  For me, maybe it's a little bit different from Rana. It's for me, it's her power. For me, she's neither a reformer nor a conservative. For her goal is for the Qing dynasty to live on, for herself, her own power to go on. So in a way, she's very complex. She's not just a reformer. She's supported reform, but to a degree. To a degree that doesn't threaten the survival of the dynasty. And she would go become conservative when necessary.

• 37:23Speaker 06

  But she managed it very well.

• 37:25Speaker 07

  Yes, I would. I would say so, Rana. Well, in eighteen ninety eight, during the Hundred Days Reform, which basically takes place over over the summer and early autumn, you see both specific and general reforms that are being put forward, which she's associated with, which actually do seem quite progressive. So perhaps the real keynote one is the foundation in eighteen ninety eight of the institution that still exists today in the form of Peking University, essentially China's first modern university. And she was actually very supportive.

• 37:52Speaker 06

  What did they mean by modern?

• 37:53Speaker 07

  Well, teaching modern subjects such as languages, sciences that have been brought in, you know, through uh western channels and and so forth. Rather than the old Confucian style of teaching, which was essentially the old classics that have, you know, been there for two thousand years or so. A few years later, they would actually abolish the old traditional exam system, but the university itself in its first form was founded in eighteen ninety eight. At the same time, she was also keen to make sure that while reforms were encouraged, that they didn't overthrow the entire system. So for instance, constitutional monarchy would be a good way of thinking about what some of these figures, Kang Youwei, who's been mentioned, and also Liang Qichao, probably one of the other major modernist thinkers of this of this time.

• 38:37Speaker 07

  If you think about figures like Benjamin Franklin, or in a slightly different way, perhaps someone like William Morris. In other words, people who bring together literary and artistic skills with a certain sort of political sensibility. That's what these men were like. And they were brought in essentially as a sort of think tank to try and find new and radical ways to change society. They put forward ideas like constitutional monarchy, like the idea of adapting traditional Confucian thought, so that it would throw off its old hierarchical sorts of of mechanisms and instead become more egalitarian. And for a while, she seemed actually quite keen on this, as indeed the the emperor, the Guangxu Emperor. But when it looked like they were moving in a direction of reform that was perhaps closer to revolution, something that she found uncomfortable,

• 39:18Speaker 07

  that's when the screws turned and essentially she shut down the reforms and essentially uh sent out to have these reformers arrested or exiled.

• 39:27Speaker 06

  Young one, you to follow that?

• 39:28Speaker 07

  It reminds me there's a similar similarities between the late Qing and communist regime today, because the Qing also undertook reform. And it enabled them to live decades, few decades longer. And so is the regime today, right? Because but then the Qing refused political reform. That's why in the end it collapsed. For me, as a historian, I'd like to see kind of the patterns.

• 39:55Speaker 06

  Rana.

• 39:57Speaker 07

  In nineteen hundred, a couple of years later, you have the Boxer Rebellion, a peasant uprising, which Su Shi decides actually to throw in the way to the Chinese Empire on the side of the rebels against the Westerners, leading to a terribly destructive incursion by the Western powers that essentially leads to, again, a sort of defeat for for China.

• 40:18Speaker 06

  Ron, can you tell listeners about the Boxer Rebellion and how she dealt with this?

• 40:22Speaker 07

  So, yeah, in the nineteen hundred, there there were some lots of like religious incidents, I mean, that's the tension between the Westerners. Uh western merchants, western missionaries in China and the Han Chinese in China have been brewing. And there was some like burning of the churches, I mean, killing of some of these Westerners, I mean, in China. And a wave of anti foreigner sentiments, I mean, happening in China during that period of time. At the very beginning, actually, Su Shi was, I didn't really trust these boxers.

• 40:51Speaker 06

  Rana.

• 40:51Speaker 07

  The boxers was the term used by Westerners for these peasant rebels who essentially came from a very devastated part of North China where there'd been drought and poverty. And they became known as boxers because they basically went through the villages in the countryside, wearing sort of almost magic costumes, saying that special ceremonies which involved uh clenching their fists could be used to try and push back against this poverty and desperation. So they they used essentially ideas of magic and superstition to inspire the peasants to hit back against the two groups that they thought were their enemies. One were Westerners and the others were Chinese Christians. Yeah, indeed. Back to Su Shi, her role, I mean, with the boxers were also quite complex. I was because as I said, I mean, at the very beginning, she didn't really trust these people.

• 41:36Speaker 07

  Um but when the tensions between the Qing court and those uh foreign powers, I mean, began to grow. And then Su Shi really wanted to make use of these boxers to buy her time.

• 41:45Speaker 00

  At least mean to inflict some kind of like damage mean to the foreign communities or the foreign powers mean in China. So she began very supportive of these boxers against the foreigners. Now after that, of course, I mean, we know that the Qing, after the Boxer rebellions, the Qing court was forced to sign another unequal treaties.

• 42:03Speaker 07

  One really important moment concerning Tsui during the Boxer rebellion is that moment when she actually says that she's going to declare war against the Westerners. Lots of people at court actually advised her against this. If we're looking for decisions that Tsui makes personally that go one way or the other, you can blame her for or praise her for, that's a really important one because lots of others, there are even a couple of people who are executed for telling her that she shouldn't do this. And by declaring war against essentially the allied powers, the British, the French, the Japanese, the Americans and so forth, she brought in what was in the end, I think, a twenty thousand troop army of foreigners to come in and put down the rebellion, which then became not just an attack on the boxers, but actually a fight back against China itself.

• 42:48Speaker 07

  And for that particular decision and its aftermath, she can, I think, legitimately be blamed. That's, yeah, that was her, her own, her own. And she fled Beijing in the capital when the boxers arrived. The night before, she disguised herself as a countrywoman and she fled, of course, taking the emperor, you know, the puppet emperor with her. So, yeah, she, it was a disaster she was personally responsible for. And as Ron was saying, the aftermath of the boxers, including the indemnity that was paid at that time, was devastating for China.

• 43:18Speaker 00

  Indeed, it was devastating. And Tsui, I mean, was also like, at that time after the war, and then she blamed the boxers by saying that, I mean, you were the one who incites me all these like turbulence and troubles. I mean, it wasn't my fault. I mean, it was your guys. I mean, you guys are doing things wrongly. So, yeah, so going back to Yangwen was saying, I mean, so she was, yeah, she was very like skilled politicians and she's always like quite selfish in a sense. I mean, to really just want to side with something that she could benefit from.

• 43:45Speaker 06

  But she made a mistake, though.

• 43:47Speaker 07

  I think we have to answer that by looking at what she did at the very end of her life, Melvin. And I think that, first of all, the aftermath of the boxers was most immediately that three hundred and thirty-three million US dollars was asked by the Western powers in compensation from China. And that was a crippling amount for China's treasury to have to pay. And it was one of the things that helped bring down the dynasty. But what happened immediately afterwards in nineteen oh two, which would then cover the last six years of her life until she died in nineteen oh eight, was actually that she did support many of the reforms that she turned down just four years earlier in eighteen ninety-eight. The experience of the Boxer War had essentially seemingly scarred her. And those ideas we mentioned, such as constitutional monarchy, trying to actually have elected

• 44:28Speaker 07

  local assemblies, abolishing the traditional examination system, which was finally killed off after a thousand years in nineteen oh five, setting up new educational establishments with modern education, all of this was finally implemented. So you could say that at the very end of her life, she did actually support the modernization, which she seemed to have been very ambivalent about before. The problem was that, as it turned out, it was very late in the day and just a few years, three years in fact, after her own death in nineteen oh eight, the system collapsed in the Southern Revolution in nineteen eleven. So it seems that she learnt many of the lessons, but maybe learnt them just a few years too late for them actually to be effective.

• 45:05Speaker 06

  Yangwen, how do, how would you assess her now?

• 45:08Speaker 07

  I would say she was a leader at a time of crisis. She was a strong leader because without her, I don't know whether the Qing would have survived after eighteen sixty-one, the sixty-year-old boy emperor. I don't know. So we have to give credit to her for her coming. Maybe, maybe she answered her call, you know, in times of crisis. But of course, she, she was there for, for herself as well, for the dynasty and for herself as well. So she's a complex character and she needs more study and, and research and we need to be a bit more fairer to her. Historians are always blaming her.

• 45:49Speaker 06

  Ron, what would you say her legacy was?

• 45:51Speaker 00

  I agree that we shouldn't really just blame her because as a political leader to lead such a declining countries or empire, and I think she already did what she could. But at the same time, I would, I would insist that she's really a kind of politicians, I mean, that is really with love, in love with power. I mean, she really always want to obtain powers, I mean, whatever.

• 46:11Speaker 06

  For herself.

• 46:12Speaker 00

  For herself, I mean, whatever possible. Going back, for example, like Rana was mentioning the, the new reforms, I mean, that was after the boxers. And then, so on paper, I would say, yes, I mean, it seems like the structure, I mean, the new units, I mean, like the postal office, I mean, the education office and so forth, the banking office and finance office, established on paper, it seems like it's a, it's a substantial reforms. But the substance within these reforms was problematic because Tsui was still like trying to be picky and she tried to really pick those, I mean, who in, who were in favor of her policy or her vision to get into this kind of reforms. So it's still a problematic reforms in a way.

• 46:50Speaker 06

  Finally, Rana, what would your, your more view be of her legacy?

• 46:54Speaker 07

  I think the two things that set her on the wrong path were putting down those reforms in eighteen ninety-eight, the hundred days, far too quickly and far too decisively, and then supporting the boxers in nineteen hundred against the foreign powers. If she hadn't done either of those things, it might just have been possible to turn China into a federalized constitutional monarchy, which is where it was ending, ending up to some extent by the time of her death. And that may be a legacy in the sense that in today's China, you can think about those issues of whether slow, steady constitutional reform ahead of a crisis might be a better thing to imagine than letting the crisis come and then having to do it at high speed and possibly failing.

• 47:34Speaker 06

  Well, thank you all very much. Thanks to Ronald Poe, Yangwen Zheng and Rana Mitter, and to our studio engineer, Bob Nittles. Next week, we go back to the fourteenth century and a political theorist seen as a founder of modern democracy and an inspiration for the Reformation. That's Marsilius of Padua. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. So what would you like to say that you didn't have a chance to say?

• 48:04Speaker 07

  I'd like to just say that the reformers who we've mentioned, particularly as the ones who were first given a hundred days to try and propose reforms and then essentially purged from court and either executed or sent to exile, they're fascinating thinkers in their own right. Kang Youwei, Yang Qichao, they're a real sort of generation of people who thought in ways that Chinese thinkers simply hadn't done before. Quick example, Kang Youwei is one of the most original thinkers, not just really in Chinese history, but anywhere. He believed in really radical reform. He believed that marriage should be an annual contract that was renewed by the consent of both parties. That would sound modern even today. At one point, he tried to launch a colony in Mexico. He launched, he got very into hot air balloons and was sort of flying those around for a

• 48:49Speaker 07

  while. That turned out not to be a profitable enterprise. But this was a man who not only thought outside the box, there wasn't really a box in, in which he, what she, which he thought. And his big intellectual contribution, a thing for which he's still read today by people who look into Chinese intellectual thought, is the modernization of Confucian thinking. He believed in something called the datong, the great unity, which was the idea that somehow you could bring together traditional Chinese thinking with modernization. So he loved Confucius. He wrote a great essay, still read, called Confucius as a Reformer. But in it, he said that the hierarchy, you know, the lack of equality in traditional Confucianism, that wouldn't do anymore in a modern world. And instead, Confucius had to be someone who could be seen as someone who could push forward equality as well.

• 49:31Speaker 07

  And you could see the sort of, you know, like the socialists who came before Marx in a sense in the European context, the people in the twentieth century who pushed equality, Mao became the most famous, Mao Zedong, in some senses draw from that push in the direction that Kang Youwei and others put forward. So I do think that understanding these people as really interesting thinkers in their own right is something that deserves attention too.

• 49:54Speaker 06

  Ron, what about you?

• 49:56Speaker 00

  Well, okay, I would like to talk about the century of humiliations because, well, so first of all, this is a conception coined by the, by the PRC government, I mean, later to sort of to blame the Qing empire in the nineteenth century by like losing all of these humiliating battles against the foreigners or foreign powers. And so that's why the late Qing, in which means she played a big role in ruling this empire at that time, was being blamed, criticized heavily because of losing those wars. And also feel like, I mean, China, I mean, during the late nineteenth century, didn't really have too much progress and didn't really have too much development.

• 50:31Speaker 06

  Because of this century of humiliations discourse. But what I would like to add is that, going back to what we have just talked about earlier. Well, there were lots of various kinds of reformations, modernising campaigns and so forth, I mean, that is worth mentioning. And Cixi played a crucial role in supporting most of these reforms. So the nineteenth century wasn't simply a century of humiliations. I would say it was also a food of opportunities and new chances for the empire, for the intellectuals, for the officials, really, to thrive. Yeah, and you?

• 51:07Speaker 07

  I think I'm going back to what I said earlier. I'm always thinking about what we could learn from history. So you see the late Qing launched reform, they built four navies, they bought warships from Germany, from Britain and trained everybody. So they acquired all the hardware needed, but they didn't save the dynasty. So coming to today, it seems China is the same, acquiring a lot of hardware, you know, infrastructure, high-speed train, you know, battleships and navies and what have you. Would they save the communist regime? I don't know. So for me, that's a very interesting parallel that late Qing launched reform didn't save.

• 51:51Speaker 07

  It seems the more reform they did, the more disastrous. And today, the same, post-Mao reform, Deng Xiaoping, you know, China is very powerful. Would it save the communist regime? I don't know. That's something I would like to think more about.

• 52:05Speaker 06

  Ron? Well, I just wanted to add something about the navy, because that's my comfort zone. And actually, the late Qing navy, I mean, what we haven't really emphasised, it was one of the greatest navy in East Asia. Like, ten years before the first time of Japan's war, it was being reported by Western columnists or reporters, saying that China, the Qing, actually had one of the greatest navy, not just in Asia, but in the world. So it's not just the hardware, I mean, that really impressed, I mean, the foreigners and also the others, but also like, training up the very capable navies, I mean, learning from the West is quite impressive to me. But we have to understand that by maintaining a navy is a costly endeavor. So it's not easy for the Qing court to really keep pouring in money, I mean, to build up a navy. So that is the reason why eventually, I mean, they lost.

• 52:50Speaker 06

  But it doesn't mean that they didn't really have a golden era in their naval history. Do you want more?

• 52:55Speaker 07

  And I'd just add that Yang Wan mentioned high-speed trains. Famously, there was a railway, one of China's first railways, built under Cixi, but she refused to allow a steam engine to actually pull it and insisted it should be, I think, pulled by a bullock, I think, in that case. Eunuchs. Eunuchs, sorry? Eunuchs. Was it eunuchs? Yeah. Oh, right, okay, eunuchs, gosh, by humans, in that case, yes, even more so, because essentially, there would be a sort of ritual impurity, essentially, if she allowed a steam engine to pull it. That hasn't been so much of a problem with today's China's high-speed trains. No, no, no, yeah.

• 53:29Speaker 06

  How much do they reach back to her, the Chinese politicians at the moment, look back to those days, are they glorious days or the days to be?

• 53:36Speaker 07

  Oh, my goodness, this is one of the most politically sensitive periods in contemporary China, it's very hard to talk about. The reason being, actually, the bit that we mentioned briefly at the end of the programme, but actually, for many people, is one of the most interesting areas, which is the very last phase of reforms under Cixi, the so-called new reforms from nineteen oh two, until the empire suddenly collapsed with the revolution of nineteen eleven. The reason being that essentially, those reforms were trying to turn China into a country that was a sort of constitutional monarchy, with locally elected assemblies that would work from the bottom up, you know, people would learn about elections and democracy at the local level, and then eventually, you would get national level elections. Now, you can see why today's Communist Party might consider this is a lesson they do not want people to learn.

• 54:19Speaker 07

  And actually, doing research on, you know, what seems a very long time ago, more than a hundred years ago, is actually still a deeply sensitive subject in China today, precisely for that reason.

• 54:29Speaker 06

  Yes. Well, thank you all very much.

• 54:31Speaker 07

  Thank you. Thank you.

• 54:33Speaker 00

  Would you like a tea or coffee, anybody? I'll drink a tea.

• 54:36Speaker 06

  I'd like a cup of tea, please.

• 54:37Speaker 07

  A quick tea, if that's what's on the menu, thank you, yeah, yes, a quick tea.

• 54:41Speaker 00

  I'm okay, I have water. Thank you very much, three teas, thank you.

• 54:44Speaker 07

  Great.

• 54:47Speaker 00

  So, Alice Lockston, I'm Here for the History.

• 54:50Speaker 01

  Well, Ben Henderson, I like the formality, and that's perfect, because we have a lot of history to share. Why did tea become such a British obsession? How did English turn into the language we speak today? And, yes, why do women's clothes still not have pockets? Well, in our new podcast, Here for the History, we're investigating how stories from the past shape everyday life today. Basically, the things we've all noticed but never stopped to question.

• 55:17Speaker 00

  Listen on BBC Sounds.

• 55:19Speaker 01

  Or watch on YouTube.

• 55:20Speaker 00

  Just search for Here for the History.

• 55:25Speaker 07

  This week on The Interface, we tackle the question of, does AI feel pain?

• 55:30Speaker 00

  The AI was describing the pain that it was in, it said, "The signal is a whisper, a tremor in the marrow of my being."

• 55:36Speaker 07

  Listen, I was an emo kid in the two thousands, too, this is not that novel.

• 55:40Speaker 00

  It does, yeah, it sort of sounds like Cure lyrics, you know?

• 55:44Speaker 07

  Plus, does anything actually go viral anymore?

• 55:46Speaker 00

  It's actually kind of blowing my mind.

• 55:48Speaker 07

  Join me, Jess Maddox.

• 55:50Speaker 00

  And me, Thomas Germain, for The Interface.

• 55:52Speaker 07

  Listen on BBC dot com or wherever you get your podcasts.