Her Dynasty (Published 2013) (2024)

For historians, there is no more powerful aphrodisiac than an exciting topic buoyed by a raft of unexploited sources, raising the prospect of a revisionist look at an important figure or even an entire era. There are few leaders in modern Chinese history more layered with prejudice begging to be stripped away than Cixi, the dowager empress who ruled China for almost half a century until her death in 1908. For decades, she was condescendingly referred to in the West as “the Old Buddha,” the “She Dragon,” the usurper of a throne “over whose disintegration she presided.”

Jung Chang, author of the acclaimed memoir “Wild Swans” and a co-author of the contentious biography “Mao: The Unknown Story,” has set out to reverse such negative verdicts. In her absorbing new book, she laments that Cixi has for so long been “deemed either tyrannical and vicious, or hopelessly incompetent — or both.” Far from depicting her subject as a sinister conservative who obstructed reforms, Chang portrays Cixi as smart, patriotic and open-minded. In her view, the empress was a proto-feminist who, despite the narrow-minded, misogynistic male elite that made up the imperial bureaucracy, “brought medieval China into the modern age.” Chang concludes that Cixi was an “amazing stateswoman,” a “towering” figure to whom “the last hundred years have been most unfair.”

While Chang’s admiration can approach hagiography, her extensive use of new Chinese sources makes a strong case for a reappraisal. Although there have been many histories, diaries and documentary collections of Cixi’s historical era published in Chinese, far fewer studies have appeared in English. Since none have made use of a full range of sources in both languages, there has been no truly authoritative account of Cixi’s rule. Her story is both important and evocative.

Brought to the Forbidden City in 1852 at age 16 as an imperial concubine, she was forced to flee Beijing in 1860 with the Xianfeng emperor as Western forces approached to loot and burn the magnificent Summer Palace. This desecration during the Second Opium War was designed, as the British commander, Lord Elgin, put it, to crush the “emperor’s pride as well as his feelings.” However, in Chang’s retelling, despite Cixi’s indignation at foreign treatment of China, she quickly discerned “the dead end” into which the country “had been rammed” by the emperor’s “all-consuming hatred” of foreigners and “the closed-door policy” of the previous century. By the time the emperor died in 1861, says Chang, Cixi had come to understand the urgent necessity of reform, of opening up to the outside world. Soon thereafter she launched a coup against the conservative Confucian regency, intent on taking power herself. Making China strong, she wrote, “is the only way to ensure that foreign countries will not start a conflict against us . . . or look down on us.” Over the following decades, she sought to guide China’s new efforts at what came to be known as “self-strengthening.”

Beset by revolt from within and incursion from without, the dynasty’s system of governance was gravely stressed during the second half of the 19th century. Moreover, traditional Confucian political culture held it unacceptable for a woman to rule, so Cixi was forced not only to sit behind a screen during imperial audiences but to govern indirectly in the name of young male heirs. She was, as one courtier derisively put it, like “a hen crowing in the morning, which is bound to herald a disastrous day.” Only able to pick her way forward gingerly, as if “through a minefield,” she was, nonetheless, able to put her understandable anger at Western arrogance aside and recognize, as she put it, the West’s “ability to make their countries rich and strong.” In Chang’s view, despite all her shortcomings and obstacles, Cixi became a strategically astute and successful reformer.