5/26/2023 0 Comments Empress dowager cixi by jung changShe governed first through her only son, the Emperor Tongzhi, and after his early death through two adopted children. Every visitor to the Summer Palace is shown the beautiful lakeside pavilion in the shape of an elegant marble pleasure boat and told how Cixi spent funds destined for the imperial navy on such extravagant fripperies - which ultimately led to Japan’s victory over China in 1895 and the loss of Taiwan.īetween 1860, when an Anglo-French expeditionary force sacked the Summer Palace in the Second Opium War, and her death in 1908, this half-literate, eighth-rank concubine somehow ruled China from behind a screen. In present-day China her rule is blamed for half a century of foreign bullying, humiliation and decline. More recently, it has suited communist historians to concur with Flashman that she was ‘a compound of five Deadly Sins - greed, gluttony, lust, pride and anger - with ruthlessness, cruelty and treachery thrown in’. While all seems lost, as foreign troops burn the Summer Palace in Peking, she is to be found, thinly disguised, in the pages of Flashman and the Dragon, locked in our hero’s rugged embrace. For susceptible Englishmen of a certain inclination - like Sir Edmund Backhouse or George Macdonald Fraser - the Empress Dowager Cixi was the ultimate oriental sex kitten, an insatiable, manipulating dominatrix who brought the decadent Manchu empire to its knees.
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