Empress Dowager Cixi
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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. This is In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you'll find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, the Empress Dowager Sushi, 1835-1908, 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 modernize fast enough. Later generations blamed many of the failures on Suu Kyi, 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 Suu Kyi are Yang Wenzhen, Professor of Chinese History at the University of Manchester, Ronald Poe, Associate Professor in the Department of International History at London School of Economics and Visiting Professor at Leiden University, and Rana Mitter, the S.D. Lee Professor of U.S.-Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Brana, what's the state of China in 1830s when Suu Kyi was born? 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... Why was that? Well, prior...

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. 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 and

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.

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

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, 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. The Qing dynasty had ruled China for almost two centuries by then. Had it been stable until then, did the opium war destabilize it in a profound way?

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.

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. Thank you very much.

Yang Wen, into this comes Cixi. 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.

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. Manchu means coming from the north? Yeah, 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 couldn't possibly dream of doing that. And so she was chosen to be one of the consorts for the emperor. Does consort mean concubine? Don't know. How do you translate that? Concubine means you have children. Consort means you're in a friendly relationship with them, I think.

I should think. They have children, yes. And she started very low. Most of all, she has a son. She has a son, yes. There are eight ranks, the consorts, and she started at number six. So that's very low. But she climbed up later on. She had a son with the emperor, the only son. So she started to climb as soon as she got there. What drove her? What were her qualities that made her succeed from the beginning? She was so political.

She is interested in power. She is interested in human relationship. 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 a 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. According to some stories in China, you read and she knew how to read and write and she knew how to sing Chinese songs. And then she knew how to attract. You

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. Thank you very much. An awful lot's going on in China's history about the period we're talking about. 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 1842, the First Opium War ends. Then in 1850, you have the outbreak of the Taiping Rebellion, which many people have called the world's most bloody civil war. Thank you very much.

Ron Poe, can you tell us what impact that had on the imperial court? The Taiping Rebellion was a massive civil war in southern China that lasted for 14 years altogether. So that's between 1850 and 1864.

It is definitely one of the most drastic and dreadful crises that the Qing Empire had to counter and deal with at that time, because it exposed the vulnerabilities of the Qing Empire in many ways, including its military and political structures, which symbolized 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 20 million and 30 million. Wow. Yeah. And actually, indeed, it was quite scary, the number. And actually, some historians in mainland China, they even claimed that the numbers should reach something closer to 100 million people.

But not everybody died in the battles because the rebellions also 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 this particular rebellion, so the Qing Empire has 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, was no longer capable of suppressing, I

And the other armies, which is called the Bannermen, 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 fighting against these Taipings. So the Qing had no choice but to decentralize its military powers, I mean, to local general regional leaders. Rana.

You also then have the Second Opium War, which ends in 1860 with the burning of the Summer Palace by British troops in revenge for the killing of hostages kept by the Chinese. Again, another very traumatic turning point.

And then that triggers actually a period of reform from 1861, really until the 1890s, 1895. 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.

Yang Wen, how did her son come to power? Yeah, 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 1861, naturally the throne went to the boy. That's how she came to the political stage.

Ron Poe, there were these eight regents. What did they stand for and how did she attack them, as it were? The eight regents were the eight officials appointed by the Xianfeng Emperor a day before his death.

So these eight regions were given the power to draft imperial edicts and to come up with some decisions collectively, in which they were supposed to become the central power after the Xianfeng Emperor passed away.

But at the same time, actually, because Si Xi was also given the power to endorse the imperial edicts, so she was not very satisfied with such an arrangement. As a result, she decided to ally herself with the other empress, who was also given the power to endorse everything, and also a very important man, who was Prince Gong. So

So he allied with Cixi to try to really force those eight regions to commit suicide. And eventually they succeed. This is really a major turning point. It happens in 1861. So this is when Cixi is in her late 20s 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 something like 20, 30, 40 million people die.

And in overthrowing the eight regents and basically in this so-called Xinyouku, as it's known, getting rid of these people who are supposed to be a counterbalance to the two empresses, Cixi and Cixi is placing herself at the forefront of power and court. So even though she never becomes the emperor, the actual ruling power on the throne, at this point in 1861, she's well on the way to essentially becoming that dominant power that she remains behind the curtain for the next 30 years or so.

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

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 2,500 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 2,000 years 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 sits as a woman on the throne. 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 Tsu-shi was able to do this so successfully in the late 19th 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, Tsu-shi, was greater than it would have been if, say, the emperor had been 21 or 41 years old.

Yang Wen, what could she do that a man couldn't do? Were there advantages in her being a woman? Yes, definitely. Because, you know, when she approached officials, when she manipulated for her own ends or the benefit of the dynasty, it looked harmless, you know, as 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 Tonghe, you know, all the ranking officials, they all left memoirs and describing her as, you know, very nice. You know, she was called the old Buddha, sort of 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. She's always there. So she's still Buddha. So affectionately people call her. One thing I would like to add is, 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. Yeah.

Let's develop this a little more. Even by the 1860s, she was a skilled political operator, which has been graphically headlined. Empress Dowager is the 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 is not the empress. So her, his mother gets to be elevated to the statue of Empress Stalja. So you have two Empress Stalja. One is the real empress, old empress. The other is the biological mother. The real Empress Stalja 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 on 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. Brahma.

What was the basis of Tushy's power? How did she operate at court? 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 learned 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 recognized part of the court structure and also understanding how the family relationships between different parts of the royal family operated. So she learned the ropes, you know, the kind of a circuit board of the Qing court quickly and effectively.

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 Daja 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. Can we talk a bit more about this son and the relationship between her and her son in the court? As he was growing up, he realised he didn't really have power. By the age of 17 and a half, 18 years old, he was married. He had an empress and that was the time when...

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 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.

So Sushi was always watching him, who he slept with, and trying to stuff this girl she likes. What happened is he just said, OK, I'm not going with any of you, I'm going out, probably to the red light district or some brothels and contracted syphilis or whatever. Because when he died, you know, the official diagnosis is smallpox. He's got smallpox. But the real diagnosis...

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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Ron, there's this self-strengthening movement to modernize China. Can you tell us more about it?

The movement itself is to really to modernize China, to strengthen China. The reason is because, as Rana already mentioned, that 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 parlors.

it was really dreadful for everybody 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 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, that's truly humiliating. 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 burning of the summer parlours, 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. 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, Rana?

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 reform itself, to modernise itself extremely fast. And various of the samurai elites who were actually on the outside of the court in those 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 agenda. And they brought this together with the idea that actually Japan should be a constitutional monarchy. So as a result of this, Japan strengthened itself enough to be able to tell the outside powers that they could not colonize 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 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 the Westerners, and those were the lessons that they also wanted to learn to benefit China. Can I bring Toshihide back into the equation? Sure.

Japan and China were at war. What did she do there? Actually, Shi Xi, 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 action by saying that you were responsible 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 Sino-Japanese War, I would say that we also have to be careful that the Shishi at the very beginning, going back to that self-strengthening movement, she was very supportive of building the Navy. She was very supportive of constructing a modern Navy.

and not just the navy actually, but also supportive of other modernisation projects. So it was only during the years leading up to the war that she felt like, OK, maybe I should step a little bit distant from the scene, and so that's why I really need to build a palace and then to retire. So I would say that she 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.

Rana?

1895 is a turning point in this story when it comes to Cixi, because really in the 30 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, for setting up arsenals that would create new modern armaments on Chinese soil. 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 1894, that 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 humiliating treaty at the Japanese port of Shimonoseki, which, you know, essentially brought an end to the war in a fashion that meant that China had lost completely completely.

There was then a real moment of revelation and people at court who wanted China to become strong looked at Cixi and blamed her for what had happened, but they were less inclined to actually show that there hadn't been sufficient radical reform at court, which is not her fault individually, to actually modernise China fast enough.

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. 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. Were there attempts to overthrow her? Yes, there were. Because after the war...

Brano

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 19th 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 Zeng 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 European countries, so it's still substantial. But it meant that from a centralised system, there was much more of a move to the kind of local provincial areas in terms of military power.

And once that had begun, the process that by the 20th century would become known as warlordism, 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 powerhouse.

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 Cixi 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.

How did she react to that? She is very interesting because she knew that she needed to control these men as well. So she had something, you know, she can control them. 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. For managing people in her own interests. But the interests of the empire as she saw it, I mean, 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 1898,

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 Cixi, but then she turned against them very strongly and actually shut down these reforms.

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

So they were actually trying to advocate another path, for example, overthrow the Qing Empire. Actually, the failure of the Hundred Day Reforms was planting the seed of those revolutionaries in China to overthrow the Qing Empire later in 1912.

Did she see herself as a traditionalist or a reformer? For me, maybe it's a little bit different from Rana. For me, it's her power. For me, she's neither a reformer nor a conservative. 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 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. But she managed it very well. Yes, I would say so, Rana. Well, in 1898, during the Hundred Days Reform, which basically takes place 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...

is the foundation in 1898 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 of that. What did they mean by modern?

Well, teaching modern subjects such as languages, sciences that have been brought in through Western channels and so forth, rather than the old Confucian style of teaching, which was essentially the old classics that had been there for 2000 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 1898.

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 Yang Qichao, probably one of the other major modernist thinkers of this era.

this time. 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 mechanisms and instead become more egalitarian. And for a while she seemed actually quite keen on this, as indeed 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, that's when the screws turned and essentially she shut down the reforms and essentially sent out to have these reformers arrested or exiled.

Yang Wenyu, do you want to follow that? It reminds me there's a similarity between the late Qing and communist regime today because the late Qing also undertook reform and it enabled them to live decades, few decades longer. And so is the regime today, right? 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. Rana?

In 1900, a couple of years later, you have the Boxer Rebellion, a peasant uprising, which Tzu Chi decides actually to throw in the weight of 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,

some defeat for China. Ron, can you tell listeners about the Boxer Rebellion and how she dealt with it? So, yeah, in the 1900s, there was lots of religious incidents. I mean, that's the tension between the Westerners.

Western merchants, Western missionaries in China, and the Han Chinese in China have been brewing. And there was some burning of the churches, killing of some of these Westerners in China, and a wave of anti-foreigner sentiments happening in China during that period of time. At the very beginning, actually, Siu Kyi didn't really trust these boxes.

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 clenching their fists

could be used to try and push back against this poverty and desperation. So 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 Siqi, her role with the Boxers was also quite complex. Because as I said, at the very beginning, she didn't really trust these people. But when the tensions between the Qing court and those foreign powers began to grow, and then Siqi really wanted to make use of these Boxers to buy her time, at least to inflict some kind of damage to the foreign communities or the foreign powers in China.

So she began very supportive of these Boxers against the foreigners. And after that, of course, I mean, we know that after the Boxer rebellions, the Qing court was forced to sign another unequal treaties. One really important moment concerning Cixi 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 advise her against this. If we're looking for decisions that Tsu-Chi 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 20,000 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. And for that particular decision in its aftermath, she can, I think, legitimately be blamed. Yeah, that was her own decision.

And she fled Beijing in the capital when the Boxers arrived. The night before, she disguised herself as a country woman and she fled, of course, taking the emperor, you know, the puppet emperor with her. So, yeah, 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. Indeed, it was devastating. And Su Ximin was also like, at that time after the war, and then she blamed the Boxers.

by saying that you were the one who incites all these turbulence and troubles. It wasn't my fault. It was your guys. You guys are doing things wrongly. So going back to what Yang Wen was saying, she was a very skilled politician and she was always quite selfish in a sense. She really just wanted to side with something that she could benefit from. But you made a mistake there. I think

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 $333 million 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 1902 is that the boxers were forced to pay

which would then cover the last six years of her life until she died in 1908, was actually that she did support many of the reforms that she turned down just four years earlier in 1898. 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 local assemblies, abolishing the traditional examination system, which was finally killed off,

after a thousand years, in 1905, 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 modernisation, 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 1908, the system collapsed in the Southern Revolution in 1911. So it seems that she learned many of the lessons, but maybe learned them just a few years too late for them actually to be effective.

Yang Wen, how do you assess her now? 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 1861. The six-year-old boy emperor, I don't know. So we have to give credit to her for her coming. Maybe she answered her call.

you know, in times of crisis. But of course, she was there for herself as well, for the dynasty and for herself as well. So she's a complex character and she needs more study and research and we need to be a bit more fairer to her. Historians are always blaming her. Ron, what would you say her legacy was? I agree that we shouldn't really just blame her because as a political leader to lead such a declining country or empire,

and I think she already did what she could but at the same time I would insist that she's really a kind of politician I mean that is really in love with power I mean she really always wanted to obtain powers for herself whenever possible good

Going back, for example, like Rana was mentioning the new reforms, I mean, that was after the boxes. 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 substantial reform.

But the substance within these reforms was problematic because she was still trying to be picky and she tried to really pick those who were in favour of her policy or her vision to get into these kind of reforms. So it's still problematic reforms in a way. Finally, Rana, what would your worldview be of her legacy?

I think the two things that set her on the wrong path were putting down those reforms in 1898, the 100 days, far too quickly and far too decisively, and then supporting the boxers in 1900 against the foreign powers. If she hadn't done either of those things, it might just have been possible to turn China into a federalised constitutional monarchy, which is where it was 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.

Well, thank you all very much. Thanks to Ronald Poe, Yang Wen-Zeng and Rana Mitter. And to our studio engineer, Bob Nettles. Next week, we go back to the 14th century and a political theorist seen as a founder of modern democracy and an inspiration for the Reformation. That's Marsilius 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?

I'd like to just say that the reformers who we've mentioned, particularly as the ones who were first given 100 days to try and propose reformers 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 question.

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 it. He got very into hot air balloons and was sort of flying those around for a 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 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 modernisation 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 modernisation. 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 any more in a modern world. And instead, Confucius had to be someone who could be seen as someone who could push forward equality as well. And you could see the sort of, you know,

like socialists who came before Marx, in a sense, in the European context, the people in the 20th century who pushed equality, Mao became the most famous Mao Zedong, in some senses, draw from that push in the direction that Kanye Way 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.

Ron, what about you? 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 PRC government, I mean, later to sort of to blame the Qing Empire in the 19th century by losing all of these humiliating battles against the foreigners or foreign powers. And so that's why the late Qing, in which means he 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 19th century, didn't really have too much progress and didn't really have too much development because of these century of humiliations, this cause. But what I would like to add is that, I mean, going back to what we have just talked about earlier, well, there were lots of various kinds of reformations, reformations,

modernizing campaigns and so forth, I mean, that is worth mentioning. And Cixi played a crucial role in supporting most of these reforms. So the 19th century wasn't simply a century of humiliations. I would say it was also full of opportunities and new chances, I mean, for the empire, for the intellectuals, for the officials really to thrive.

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 launch 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 launch reform didn't save. It seems the more reform they did, the more disastrous it became. And today, the same, post-Mao reform, Deng Xiaoping, you know, China is very powerful. What did it save? The communist regime. I don't know. That's something I would like to think more about. Ron? Well, I just want 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. Right?

like 10 years before the first Sino-Japanese War, it was being reported by Western columnists or reporters saying that China, the Qing, actually held 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 the foreigners and also the others. But also training up the very capable navies, learning from the West, is quite impressive to me. But we have to understand that by maintaining a navy is a costly end of us.

So it's not easy for the Chiang Kuo to really keep pouring in money, I mean, to build up a navy. So that is the reason why eventually, I mean, they lost. But it doesn't mean that they didn't really have a golden era in their naval history. And I just add that Yang Wen 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. Unix. Sorry? Unix. Was it Unix? Oh, right, OK, Unix. 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, I think. No, no, no, yeah.

How much do they reach back to her, the Chinese politicians at the moment? Do they look back to those days? Are they glorious days? 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 Tzu Chi, the so-called new reforms from 1902 until the empire suddenly collapsed with the revolution of 1911.

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 could see why today's Communist Party might consider this as a lesson they do not want people to learn. And actually doing research on what seems a very long time ago, more than 100 years ago, is actually still a deeply sensitive subject in China today, precisely for that reason. Yes.

Well, thank you all very much. Thank you. Would you like a tea or coffee, anybody? Melvin, do you want tea? I'd like a cup of tea, please. A cup of tea, if that's what's going on. Thank you, yes, a cup of tea. I'm OK. Thank you very much. In Our Time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios audio production.

OK, he's coming in underneath you. He was underneath us and that's when he came and rammed into our left wing. A collision between a Chinese jet and an American spy plane. We flipped inverted and we're in an inverted dive with no nose, explosive decompression and severe problems. With relations between the West and China increasingly strained, what are the chances of things spinning out of control?

The Western world was asleep and it's had a rude awakening. I'm Gordon Carrera. In Shadow War, China and the West, from BBC Radio 4, I'll be exploring the friction in this most important of relationships and asking, has the West taken its eye off the ball? Well, unlike many of my colleagues, I don't talk about what's discussed around the Cabinet table. I'll be speaking to politicians, spies, dissidents and those caught up in the growing tension.

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